This is an analysis of Terayama Shūji’s 1981 film “Shanhai ijin shōkan,” a French co-production which was marketed in the Anglosphere as “China Doll” and in France as “Les Fruits de la passion,” invoking both Ōshima Nagisa’s 1978 “L’Empire de la passion” (the sequel to his notorious “Empire of the Senses” / “L’Empire des sens,” 1976) as well as Ro…[Read more]

Readings of literary texts are always shaped by a reader’s particular location and knowledge, but those locations are themselves defined by their histories. Romeo and Juliet has inspired new sets of allegorical vocabularies of history in locations without confrontations with the English heritage in colonial contexts. Why is the reading of a c…[Read more]

Analisi dell’unica opera teatrale di P. V. Tondelli come punto d’inflessione nel suo percorso ideologico e narrativo.

Abstract: This paper investigates the shifting definitions of the term gāthā (Ch. ji) over an 800-year period, from the earliest sūtratranslations into Chinese until the mid-tenth century. Although the term originally referred to the verse sections of scriptures, gāthās soon began to circulate separately, used in ritual, contemplative, and peda…[Read more]

Abstract
The Sudanese-born author Leila Aboulela describes the position of the non-western Anglophone writer as a translator by default, moving ‘back and forth’ between languages and cultures. This essay argues that Aboulela’s novel The Translator (1999) calls into question conceptualizations of translation that grow out of western relig…[Read more]

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

This is an essay on the relation of images and text. It is part of a larger research project online at writingwithimages.com. See that site for the context; the the project’s purpose is to theorize the possibilities of fiction and poetry that are presented alongside images.

This is an essay on the relation of images and text. It is part of a larger research project online at writingwithimages.com. See that site for the context; the the project’s purpose is to theorize the possibilities of fiction and poetry that are presented alongside images.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

What happens if the homo sacer kills before he can be killed? What if the dispossessed repossess what was taken from them? What if some agent declares a state of exception to the state of exception? Starting from the observation that Agamben and Butler/Athanasiou characterize bare life and the dispossessed, respectively, in terms of radical…[Read more]

This course, under the broad heading of literature and science, takes on the subject of climate change fiction (cli-fi). It was first taught at Antioch College in winter of 2017. The course included field trips to the OSU climate research center, a local nature preserve, and the College’s farm.

Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism” and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shap…[Read more]

Since the early twentieth century, translators and critics of classical Chinese poetry have tended to focus on imagery and suggestion, balking at rhythm. It is commonly assumed that modern English and classical Chinese are too different, phonemically, for any of the aural qualities of one to translate into the other. My essay aims to overcome…[Read more]

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith’s first novel
White Teeth. The status of Smith’s fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of O…[Read more]