Explores how Max Vigne, from Andrea Barrett’s “Servants of the Map,” makes use of the dangerous Himalayan mountain environment as almost as Winnicottian “play space,” in which to recover from being requited to a life of obligation, rather than real-self discovery, after his mother’s death.

Explores how Max Vigne, from Andrea Barrett’s “Servants of the Map,” makes use of the dangerous Himalayan mountain environment as almost as Winnicottian “play space,” in which to recover from being requited to a life of obligation, rather than real-self discovery, after his mother’s death.

Explores the invisible man, in Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” as borrowing upon associations of patriarchal maleness, in the sense Ann Douglas in her “Terrible Honesty” argues 20s modern’s did, to secure freedom from feelings of entrapment by maternal figures, whose near-proximity to him is expressed in the text as often incestuous, gross;…[Read more]

Explores the invisible man, in Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” as borrowing upon associations of patriarchal maleness, in the sense Ann Douglas in her “Terrible Honesty” argues 20s modern’s did, to secure freedom from feelings of entrapment by maternal figures, whose near-proximity to him is expressed in the text as often incestuous, gross;…[Read more]

This is the Introduction to my new book, _Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History_.

Sinclair Ross’s “As For Me and My House” as a (nefarious) safe-space whereby readers can subsume themselves within a locale that promises the sense of being taken care of, that they experienced within the maternal home but on one condition: ready willingness to defer; acquiesce to “mother’s” leadership. Written just before a culture pivoted from…[Read more]

A review of Stanley Kunitz’s poetry, emphasizing how he used his poetry to both explore and manage his relationship with his dominating mother. Argues that none of Kunitz’s elegies work as conventional elegies, or as we traditionally understand or expect them to work, but more as working their way to the direction Peter Sacks advocates, as…[Read more]

Explores Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” as a space-world where anxious Victorians might place the perhaps exciting but also anxiety-producing New to subsume its affect of disequilibrium within the sturdy, assured and predictable.

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

In this article, through a reading of Mark Blacklock’s 2015 novel, I’m Jack, alongside the history of erasure poetry, I suggest that an apt literary-critical metaphor for reading redaction in contemporary literature comes from the term “metadata.” This article schematizes the ways in which redaction can work in literary contexts and points to the…[Read more]

Exemplaria review essay by Sarah Elliott Novacich of recent books by Simon Gaunt, Jonathan Hsy, and Shirin Khanmohamadi on medieval contact zones.

A talk given at the ANT workshop at the University of Southern Denmark in 2017. I develop some of these ideas in chapter 4 of my current book

Argues that the way in which Marlow is presented, ensures that Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is vulnerable as a text that ostensibly helps justify the maintenance of separate spheres between men and women; argues that Marlow’s successful agency is more about his being craftily evasive, a man who doesn’t impose but dodges.

Explores how Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” reads exactly as the sort of clinging back to a projected mother-figure, after freedom began to spell feelings of abandonment that psychically were proving increasingly intolerable, that object relations therapists finds in patients. Delineates how much of the story amounts to a tussle between…[Read more]

This study focuses on the cultural history of illegitimacy and its representation in literature, with an emphasis on the gender of fictional bastards and foundlings.

“Race” offers a compelling study of ideas related to race throughout history. Its breadth of coverage, both geographically and temporally, provides readers with an expansive, global understanding of the term from the classical period onwards: Intersections of Race and Gender // Race and Social Theory Identity // Ethnicity, and Immigration //…[Read more]

What is the relevance of Bruno Latour’s work for literary studies?

How might ANT help us rethink questions of comparison and translation?