Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed t…[Read more]

Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton, my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Milton’s poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.

This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn’t to separate their t…[Read more]

از رویکردهای تازه در حوزۀ نقد ادبی رویکرد بوم­نقد است که به بررسی رابطۀ میان انسان و طبیعت در ادبیات می­ پردازد. هرچند تعداد قابل توجهی از آثار نظری و کاربردی در حوزۀ بوم‌نقد منتشر شده ­است، اما تاکنون توجه چندانی به پژوهش بوم­نقد تطبیقی نشده­ است. پژوهش پیش­رو تلاشی است برای گشودن باب چنین پژوهش ­هایی به زبان فارسی در فضای دانشگاهی ایران. شا…[Read more]

Nimā Yushij (1897-1960), the first major modern Persian poet, developed a poetic form later called New Poetry, Free Poetry or Nimāic Poetry to remove the restrictions of traditional rhyme and meter. Although he was not the only or even the first trying to modernize Persian poetry, he was the one on whom was bestowed the title “the father of mod…[Read more]

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]

بخشی از مطالعات ادبی بینارشته‌ای شامل بررسی ارتباط میان ادبیات و تصویر می‌شود. در این زمینه ارتباط میان ادبیات و سینما شناخته‌شده‌ترین حوزۀ پژوهشی است که تعداد چشمگیری اثر پژوهشی، اعم از رساله و مقاله، در این حوزه نگاشته شده‌ است. در همین زمینه می‌توان به ارتباط میان ادبیات و نقاشی اشاره کرد که در سال‌های اخیر شاهد تعداد انگشت‌شماری اثر تحقیق…[Read more]

If Fernando Pessoa’s Portuguese works contain a coterie of heteronyms, his English poetry also displays an array of fictitious authors: besides Pessoa himself, one finds Charles Robert Anon, Alexander Search and—with his poems compiled here for the first time in print—Frederick Wyatt. After Alexander Search’s presence, which dominated the English…[Read more]

Though Fernando Pessoa is not widely known as a political poet, we may be familiar with the political commentary explicit in some of his works. In four political sonnets dating from 1905 (but only fully published in 1995), the poet criticizes the mockery of Russia by British journalists, calls the colonization of Ireland and the Transvaal “a s…[Read more]

O livro Fernando Pessoa—The Poet With Many Faces, de autoria de Hubert D. Jennings, é a primeira biografia pessoana em Inglês. Originalmente escrito na década de 1970, o livro deveria ter sido impresso em 1974, mas a Revolução dos Cravos interrompeu os planos editoriais. O dactiloscrito, encontrado numa garagem em Joanesburgo, na África do Sul,…[Read more]

This essay argues that the tension in Coetzee’s reading of Robinson Crusoe springs from the exposure of the Christian secret in both the colonial enterprises of the characters and the authorial presences of Defoe and Coetzee. My argument draws on Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which outlines how Christianity tacitly incorporates (but doe…[Read more]

A period of six months (Dec. 2017 to Jun. 2018) saw the launch of three digital platforms dedicated to the works of Fernando Pessoa, raising the number of such projects to seven published in a decade. Considering this virtual proliferation as a milestone for Pessoan studies, this article aims to reconstruct, at least as a sketch, the history of…[Read more]

Book Review Literary Translation in Modern Iran: A Sociological Study by Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014, ISBN 978 90 272 5854 0 (hbk), 236 pp

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]

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)