This unit (Text, intro, and notes in Spanish) contains a brief introduction to the Spanish masterpiece Celestina, or The Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, and a fragment from a dialogue in Act VII adapted for modern readers with notes, and a short bibliography. Celestina deals with love, the decline of nobility, prostitution, witchcraft, money,…[Read more]

This bilingual unit (Spanish/English text and translation, with intro and notes in English) contains a brief introduction to the Spanish masterpiece Celestina, or The Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, and a fragment from a dialogue in Act VII adapted for modern readers with notes, and a short bibliography. Celestina deals with love, the decline…[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]

This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the last two decades. We will concentrate our attention on how contemporary art works represent and participate in the upheavals of the twenty-first century—9/11, global economic and ecological crisis, mass migration and mass deportation, political and social mobilization, s…[Read more]

Since the 1980s, there has been much discussion of the question of the literary canon. Our colleages in English have been particularly outspoken on the question (Charles Altieri 1990; Jan Gorak 1991 and 2000; John Guillory 1993; Gregory Jay 1997) and in recent years, Hispanists such as José María Pozuelo Yvancos and María Rosa Adrada Sánchez (20…[Read more]

ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH: To what extent the relationship between astrology and the genealogy of authority and power present in Calderon’s comedias can help us study other Spanish Golden Age plays with similar themes? To what extent can the presence of these genealogical discourses shed light on the use of comedy as propaganda? In this essay, presented…[Read more]

ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH: To what extent the relationship between astrology and the genealogy of authority and power present in Calderon’s comedias can help us study other Spanish Golden Age plays with similar themes? To what extent can the presence of these genealogical discourses shed light on the use of comedy as propaganda? In this essay, presented…[Read more]

Introduction to a special issue on Renaissance post-humanism and its afterlives.

“Shamanistic Shakespeare: Korea’s Colonization of Hamlet” offers a timely reminder about the dangers of imposing a reformulated national myth on international Shakespeare productions. Focusing on a London performance of Korea’s Yohangza Theatre Company’s shamanized Hamlet, this case study invites far broader consideration of the readability of glo…[Read more]

Many screen and stage adaptations of the classics are informed by a philosophical investment in literature’s reparative merit, a preconceived notion that performing the canon can make one a better person. Inspirational narratives, in particular, have instrumentalized the canon to serve socially reparative purposes. Social recuperation of disabled…[Read more]

Global studies enable us to examine deceivingly harmonious images of Shakespeare. This chapter focuses on the modern period and introduces readers to a number of key concepts in Shakespeare and global studies, namely censorship and redaction, genre, gender, race, and politics of reception. Performing Shakespeare not only creates channels between…[Read more]

Shakespeare scholarship has long been interested in the temporal dynamics of The Winter’s Tale, and has often turned to melancholic or traumatic time frames to explain the thematic persistence of lost time in Shakespeare’s romance. In this chapter, I argue that dance provides a key interpretive framework for understanding the play’s interest in bo…[Read more]

In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson called for the poet who would sing the burgeoning nation of the United States of America. The answer to his request far exceeded all his expectations in the form of a ground-breaking volume of poems where Walt Whitman sang not only a nation, but the people who inhabited it as the people incarnated the values, str…[Read more]

Previous studies suggest that narrative fiction promotes social justice by increasing empathy, but critics have argued that the partiality of empathy severely limits its effectiveness as an engine of social justice, and that what needs to be developed is universal compassion rather than empathy. We created Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy (CCP) to…[Read more]