A consideration of classical and medieval oyster lore, a study of oysters as the “minimal animal.” Hand-corrected proof for Steve Mentz, ed. OCEANIC NEW YORK (Punctum 2015) – https://punctumbooks.com/titles/oceanic-new-york/

Although “fabulous” animals tend to be thought of as, say, unicorns, for early modern and medieval natural history, as well as the developed attention to gender and reproduction in twenty-first century science, the “fabulous” animal might be the one next door, like, say, squirrels.

I’m taking the word “synagogue” seriously, and read Erkenwald’s judge as symbolically “Jewish,” a figure of the sclerotic quality of the law, a foil for Christianity’s uncertain relationship to its own law. I’ll probably publish this before my career’s over, but clearly I’m in no hurry….

Here’s a key paragraph:
“This chapter will be an exploration of the heritage function of Vikings in America. It will look at their presumptive whiteness, from the early nineteenth century, through the real mania for all things Viking in the mid to late nineteenth century, and on to present day fascinations with the Norse in popular music,…[Read more]

My response to “New Materialisms and the End of Critique,” MLA 2015, Session 454. http://newmaterialisms.mla.hcommons-staging.org/2015/01/07/hello-world/

A reflection on the state of the archive in the state of post-theory.

Read 8 January 2016 in Austin, TX, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, session number 218, “Quantity in English Verse: Linguistic and Neuroscience-Based Challenges to the Accentual Paradigm.” This short historiographical paper was the half-time show in our roundtable—an interlude between the session’s more substantive linguis…[Read more]

Read 8 January 2016 in Austin, TX, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, session number 218, “Quantity in English Verse: Linguistic and Neuroscience-Based Challenges to the Accentual Paradigm.” This short historiographical paper was the half-time show in our roundtable—an interlude between the session’s more substantive linguis…[Read more]

This article argues for an overlapping notion of indigeneity in Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and Aidan Higgins’ Langrishe, Go Down articulated using critical Aboriginal Studies while exploring the materialist emergence of identity. The key tension, then, is not between both authors’ progressive politics nor the real differences b…[Read more]

In twelfth‐century Germany, where mysticism was a common phenomenon, Hildegard of Bingen and her visions were readily accepted — making it all the more significant that, despite the generally receptive conditions, Hildegard went to such trouble to make sure her visions and her writings were endorsed by the Church. In contrast, Joan of Arc, liv…[Read more]

The article enacts the essay as the mainstay of scholarly discourse in a knowledgeable community. It deals with (con)textualized readings of poetry (or literature) mainly through the medium of translation as an important intercultural phenomenon involving poetics, episteme, borders.

Wikis have become enormously attractive to Internet users because they are open-access web pages or networks of web pages that can be modified by any interested editors, making them perpetual works-in-progress that evolve and change at the behest of their contributors. Wikipedia, the limitless fountain of collected, and sometimes inaccurate,…[Read more]

Definition of Palindromic Structure