IMC paper for panel 374 Medieval Futura 1: Now, sponsored by the Medieval Studies Institute, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington and organised by Dr Andrea Whitacre.

India’s re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered a victory speech that presented himself as a selfless and humble Hindu ascetic. This vision goes far to promote a Hindu nationalist ‘new India.’

Introduction to “Digital Methods and Traditional Chinese Literary Studies,” a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture.

This article combines qualitative and quantitative methods to rethink the literary history of late medieval China (830–960 CE). It begins with an overview of exchange poetry in the Tang dynasty and its role in the construction of the poetic subject, namely, the poetic subject’s distributed textual body. A total of 10,869 poems exchanged between 2…[Read more]

Within the context of an increasingly dystopian sense of global crisis, how can the idea of Utopia help us galvanise political literary readings? This special session will present a roundtable discussion in which panelists consider how we can use utopian methods to understand different kinds of literary texts, reflecting upon the importance of the…[Read more]

The problem of the “yes,” of affirming an historical identity that is potentially harmful to oneself, troubles some of the imaginative leaps necessary to how readers desire to identify with texts. With that in mind, this article reads Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred as a story about memory, history, and embodiment as written both on and thr…[Read more]

From the mid-1960s onward, compilations of the speeches and trial addresses of South African opponents of apartheid focused attention on the apartheid regime despite intensified repression in the wake of the Rivonia Trial. Mary Benson’s novel, At the Still Point, transposes the political trial into fiction. Its “stenographic” codes of repre…[Read more]

We are inviting proposals for the forthcoming “Re-membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean” International Conference that will be held on March 26-27, 2020 in Toulouse, France (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès).
Abstracts (300 words) are due by September 15, 2019 to yasser elhariry (yasser.elhariry@dartmouth.edu), Isabelle Keller-Privat (isa.…[Read more]

What T. S. Eliot called the “mythic method,” even in its modern form, was not an invention of Modernism. A significant precursor is Thomas Hardy, whose Mayor of Casterbridge has long been appreciated for its mythological structure and wealth of allusion. Here I suggest a new addition to mythological interpretation of the novel: the Greco-Roman dei…[Read more]

This document contains brief statements about the approaches that the 7 roundtable panelists will take in responding to _The Testaments_, Margaret Atwood’s highly anticipated sequel to _The Handmaid’s Tale_.

What is the current status of the discipline of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature? How has the work published by 452ºF. Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature contributed to the field? These questions are the starting point for the reflections included in these critic’s notes, which have been conceived as a collective te…[Read more]

Full collection of four essays on J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” comprising “Lord of the Rings: the anti-adventure,” “Reader’s Guide to the Fellowship of the Ring,” “Reader’s Guide to the Two Towers,” and “The (True) Lord of the Ring.” Emphasis throughout is to suggest that it is not just wise but essential to encounter very, very…[Read more]

The critic, as guide, is here in the penultimate of a four-part series on “Lord of the Rings,” suggested to be, if not Sarumon himself (Sarumon’s voice is used), certainly someone who could readily imagine him as someone who could have been presented in the text as a flat-out ally, if he himself wasn’t relegated to being the reader’s guardian and…[Read more]

This essay serves as a guardian, as a true friend of the reader, encouraging them to recognize that if they identify with the hobbits in this book, to be wary of the text trains the reader to become someone who would mistake their actual proud moments of self-decision, self-realization… of bravery, of the genuine kind, for something evil or bad,…[Read more]

This essay serves as a guardian, as a true friend of the reader, encouraging them to recognize that if they identify with the hobbits in this book, to be wary of the text trains the reader to become someone who would mistake their actual proud moments of self-decision, self-realization… of bravery, of the genuine kind, for something evil or bad,…[Read more]

Argues that J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” is an adventure in reverse, an “argument” for “your” regression. Rather than play with your ability to maybe succeed in threatening environments, it confirms your worst suspicions about yourself, lending you in mood to cling to others in a master-slave relationship, so long as they’ll agree to…[Read more]

Argues that J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” is an adventure in reverse, an “argument” for “your” regression. Rather than play with your ability to maybe succeed in threatening environments, it confirms your worst suspicions about yourself, lending you in mood to cling to others in a master-slave relationship, so long as they’ll agree to…[Read more]

Delineates how much of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Fellowship of the Ring” is about preparing Frodo especially so that if caught out alone, he’d never dare venture a decent listen to anyone who might attempt to sway him to consider the due fate for the Ring, other than according to Gandalf’s specifications. Positions the text as one that bates the reader…[Read more]

Delineates how much of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Fellowship of the Ring” is about preparing Frodo especially so that if caught out alone, he’d never dare venture a decent listen to anyone who might attempt to sway him to consider the due fate for the Ring, other than according to Gandalf’s specifications. Positions the text as one that bates the reader…[Read more]