This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]

W. G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano are two contemporary authors who share similar themes and literary practices. They are both fastidiously or even obsessively historical in their narrative development. And they seem preoccupied with the sins of World War II. Critics have divided feelings about their accomplishments. Skeptics say their trauma…[Read more]

Call for Proposals

Media, Lingualisms, Translations: Technologies of Language and Power

Conference to be held November 13-14, 2020; hosted by the School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University, Tempe.

Keynote speakers: Jean-Noël Robert (Collège de France, Paris)
Lourdes Ortega (Georgetown University, W…[Read more]

Since the 1960s, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña has developed an internationally-recognized body of hybrid works that draw on poetry, painting, sculpture, installation, dance, song, and film. “Reading as Ritual Response” considers one of Vicuña’s lesser-known categories of work, the artist’s book, through which she harnesses the visual, m…[Read more]

Since the 1960s, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña has developed an internationally-recognized body of hybrid works that draw on poetry, painting, sculpture, installation, dance, song, and film. “Reading as Ritual Response” considers one of Vicuña’s lesser-known categories of work, the artist’s book, through which she harnesses the visual, m…[Read more]

For the “Extreme Texts” special issue of Jacket2, edited by Divya Victor (2019)

This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will concentrate our attention on works by Chicanos, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans. We will consider how these works represent and participate in the upheavals that characterize the…[Read more]

This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present. We begin with Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational texts, Borderlands / La Frontera, and her landmark feminist anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. We then consider the legacies and aft…[Read more]

“A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism.” This epigraph comes from the 1850 translation of The Communist Manifesto by Helen Macfarlane, and this special feature in The New Americanist assumes that a similarly frightful hobgoblin stalks through genre fiction, too. Fantasy as a genre is haunted…[Read more]

Hi ha concepte que semblen diàfans, però que poden tornar-se ambigus quan hi reflexionem amb atenció, com el de la violència. Si bé actualment aquest terme envaeix el nostre espai i sovint el llegim de manera unívoca, en el moment en què hi aprofundim hem de reconsiderar-ne el significat. Així mateix, la identitat, que ha estat el tema nuclear…[Read more]

In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[Read more]

This article discusses the confluence of the war on drugs and the war on terror with an analysis of the novels of Elmer Mendoza, (Balas de plata, Prueba de ácido, Nombre de perro, Besar al detective) Don Winslow (The Power of the Dog, The Cartel) and Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist)