In the first half of the 20th century, Nima developed an early form of modern Persian poetry with unequal lengths of lines and a different notion of rhyme. Nima developed a poetic form that was not symmetrical in its shape and music and was (partially) free from restrictions of rhyme and meter. At the same time Nima was theorizing a modern…[Read more]

Wallace Stevens and philosophy of language

Although literature and logic share a number of surprising symmetries and historical contacts, they have typically been seen to occupy separate disciplinary spheres. Declaring a subfield in literary studies-logic and literature-this introduction outlines various connections between literary formalism and formal logic. It surveys historical…[Read more]

Wallace Stevens and philosophy of language

Thomas Hardy and theory of time

What can one, seemingly insignificant figure–possibly punctuation mark, possibly ideogram, possibly something else entirely–demonstrate about Ezra Pound’s figurative practice? #, which draws power from associations with Mencius’s well-field system and the Chinese character ching, becomes an emblem for a recurring quodlibet in The Cantos: how for…[Read more]

Philosophy began the 1890s rooted firmly in the monistic absolutism of F.H. Bradley and J.M.E. McTaggart; it ended the decade deracinated into the pluralistic atomism espoused by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. If this intellectual sea change can be conceived as analytic and logical philosophies inventing their wheel, then T.S. Eliot re-invented…[Read more]

Are T. S. Eliot’s notes on The Waste Land a scholarly resource or a literary hoax? This oft-repeated question gets to the heart of the poem, which thrives on its allusions, whether seriously or cynically. However, scholars have largely passed over the notes’ (and the poem’s) numberings, despite their complexity and superabundance—a panoply of quan…[Read more]

This is a poem about fire.

This article invites the reading of Fernando Pessoa’s Fausto as a rhizomatic work, via three different critical lenses that lead to plurality: Traditions, Transcriptions, and Translations. Regarding different Faustian traditions, instead of seeing Pessoa’s Fausto merely as a competition with Goethe (as proposed by Eduardo Lourenço in his pref…[Read more]

In this book chapter, Dr. Davis examines the depiction of a dissimulated desire for material improvement (mejora) as it is expressed in the epic poetry of imperial Spain, particularly in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana. She shows that within the aristocratic context of the times, the desire for personal betterment or “mejora” is always contingent…[Read more]

The nautical motif of the ex-voto (votive offering) is a lyric genre that reflects poetically the possible experience of a shipwreck survivor. Paradoxically, many of the poets who evoke the perils of sea travel never left Spain or, at most, sailed only the waters of the Mediterranean. Their writing of the sea remained consistently codified in…[Read more]

In this early article, written in the wake of the publication of Alessandro Martinengo’s _La astrología en la obra de Quevedo_ (Madrid: Alhambra, 1983), Dr. Davis focuses on the astrological tropes in a Quevedo sonnet on the nativity of Christ to see whether this poetic text can shed additional light on the poet’s documented penchant for…[Read more]

Professor Davis’s early article on appropriations of the Indies by Spanish poets who remained in Spain invites us to contemplate a body of poetry that plays the idea of American treasures against the value of true, spiritual riches.

Several of Francisco de Quevedo’s hagiographic poems are puzzling because of their irreverent tone. Edward M. Wilson and Jose Manuel Blecua both noted that “la relacion entre las dos caras de un Quevedo es cuestión difícil y delicada para los modernos;” indeed, the writer’s particular blend of “las burlas con las veras” has attracted attention s…[Read more]

This essay analyzes the work of the poetic function as defined by Roman Jakobson in poems by Francisco de Quevedo that concern themselves with the trope of the rending of the rocks at the moment of Christ’s death on the cross, and in other poetic texts of Quevedo.

Questions of positionality permeate 21st-century poetics—and seem to come to a head around the intentional inclusion/exclusion of the reader in the speaker’s pronoun of choice, especially when the pronoun in question is “we.” This essay contrasts the fragmented lyric self of modernism with current approaches to a lyric “we” and puts three conte…[Read more]

Syllabus for English 2Z03: Nature, Literature, Culture: An Introduction to the Environmental Humanities at McMaster University in the 2022 winter semester. This course used a form of contract grading, and this document includes the Contract Grading FAQ provided to students ahead of/during the course.

The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplinary tradition of constructing autistic people as lacking the capacity for narration. To study neurodivergent literature, then, is to witness the refusal of these exclusionary narrative conventions, and to register the ideological presuppositions that…[Read more]