Kafka’s Romanticism/Platonism is hidden underneath the covers. In this article I show how better translations can help the reader take the covers off the bed. Whether it be K.’s meeting with Buergel in the Castle or with the Josef K.’s meeting with the Priest in The Trial,
essentially the message resonates. A preview of ESSENTIAL KAFKA.

“Becoming-animal” is a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia which at times can designate a movement towards denigration. With a “becoming,” a threshold is, invariably, crossed and the boundaries that have existed between the animal and the human become blurred. Moreover…[Read more]

Dietrich, like Madonna, has been called gender‐bending and androgynous, but Dietrich’s on‐ and off‐screen fluidity of gender identity, as reflected in her adoption of the “double drag,” upsets the traditional dichotomy encoded more generally as that of male or female and more particularly as that of the butch or femme.

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.

An examination of crime and criminality in colonial and postcolonial India through life-writing and the examples of Thugs and Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen.

Designed as a short introduction to academic literary studies of affect, Reading Affect in Literary Studies is a one-credit graduate seminar, offered in Spring 2014, that was framed by the question of how we might rethink our practice as scholars of literature to take our scholarship to publics beyond the academy. Readings included work by Rita…[Read more]

Johannesburg, Chicago of South Africa
Chicago, Johannesburg by the Lake

The Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Columbia University Libraries / Information Services’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) have been working together on a prototyped user interface that connects a library-quality repository system (Humanities Commons Open Repository Exchange, or CORE, modeled on Columbia’s Academic Com…[Read more]

.Using the concept of “third culture” from social theory, this article examines Charles Kingsley’s use of displacement in his children’s book The Water Babies (1863). In trying to portray the site of moral formation, Kingsley displaces his central character Tom – the new, interstitial “third culture” subject. Through Tom’s displacement, Kingsle…[Read more]

This article examines Allen Say’s use of cultural displacement in his books Tree of Cranes and Grandfather’s Journey. Allen Say is an award-winning, Japanese-American, picture book author and illustrator.

The essay reads Ralph Waldo Emerson’s argument for a “nation of friends,” in “Politics,” as Emerson’s response to his lament, also in “Politics,” that the “power of love, as the basis of the State, has never been tried.” By a careful reading of that essay, which includes locating “Politics” within the debate in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan be…[Read more]