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]

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]

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]

The introduction to a special issue of Studies in Documentary Film I co-edited with Sarah Hamblin on “Radical Documentary in the Globalized Age of New Media”

Susan B. Anthony declared in 1896 that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” The comparative study of ‘Whale Rider’ (2002) and ‘Wadjda’ (2012) demonstrates that this liberating effect of the basic tool of transportation is being reinforced in the new millennium. The analysis further situates two con…[Read more]

This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, the aut…[Read more]

This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, the aut…[Read more]

This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, the aut…[Read more]

Please see abstract.

The epilogue tackles the ramifications of these new modes of inscribing temporally and visually ambiguous articulations of Shakespeare and China into a global vernacular in theater (Lin Zhaohua’s Richard III) and cinema (Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet). A paradox of infatuation with Asian visuality and rejection of ethnic authenticity emerged in the…[Read more]

Named the Writer of the Millennium, Shakespeare has come full circle and become a cliché, embraced by marketers and contested by intellectuals. Similar narratives about China’s rise in global stature have been told with equal gusto, championed and denounced in turn by optimists and critics. If Shakespeare now has worldwide currency, how is the se…[Read more]

Lightening Talk: Brown Skin, White Masks: Predictive Technology, Colonial Histories, and Queer Sexuality Today

Thanks to Karl Marx’s references in his political treatises, Shakespeare held a significant place in a number of communist and other left-authoritarian countries, including China and the USSR. And although there were themes in Shakespeare that turned out to be inconvenient for communist ideology, other Shakespearean plays were put into service. I…[Read more]

This essay explores the gap between the abstract ideal of fairness and the bodily materiality of retribution. My aim is to suggest how some current cognitive science affords a helpful way of talking about the breaks between abstractions, or thoughts of fairness, and the judgments and punishments produced by actual legal systems. It is remarkably…[Read more]

This essay explores the gap between the abstract ideal of fairness and the bodily materiality of retribution. My aim is to suggest how some current cognitive science affords a helpful way of talking about the breaks between abstractions, or thoughts of fairness, and the judgments and punishments produced by actual legal systems. It is remarkably…[Read more]

The pastoral genre provides cognitive literary historians a clear example of how genre cooperates with and enacts the most basic cognitive tasks of the imagination, namely the ability to toggle between concrete sense data and abstractions. This essay discusses the predictive processing hypothesis and suggest that it offers a usefully revisionary…[Read more]

In her introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Lisa Zunshine, scholar in the field and its best historian, describes cognitive literary critics as working “not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms in literary and cultural studies” (2015). Scholars from m…[Read more]

In her introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Lisa Zunshine, scholar in the field and its best historian, describes cognitive literary critics as working “not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms in literary and cultural studies” (2015). Scholars from m…[Read more]

Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick