Examiner/examined, analyst/analysand, subject/object, sane/mad, science/art: the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature appears to conform to this binary logic, with the first term in each set clearly privileged over the second. The realm of the literary is populated with an impressive assortment of mad characters and mad authors:…[Read more]

Today, Lady Lovelace is recognized as the first computer programmer – for an algorithm she co-authored with inventor Charles Babbage in 1843. She has also become, per biographer Betty Toole, a “modern myth,” whose very ambiguity and otherness encourage readers’ self-invention around gender and tech, human-machine interactions, and female sexuali…[Read more]

In this free workshop, children and preteens (age 8-12) creatively explore and expand their sense of self by thinking and writing about their life – past, present, and future. Group activities, games, solitary writing, and illustrating provide for a fun and productive setting. Students will receive individual attention and gradually realize how…[Read more]

Have cognitive scientists misread autism? What happens if, instead of simply accepting such research, literary critics turned to the actual prose and poetry written by autistic authors, such as Tito Mukhopadhyay and Donna Williams? Literary theory may never be the same once it comes to terms with neurodiversity.

This essay focuses on the autobiographical strategies deployed by Ambrose Bierce in response to shifting conceptions of the literary representation of everyday life. I place Bierce at the transition point between nineteenth and twentieth-century realism, between an understanding of typical experience as comfortably generic and a growing sense that…[Read more]

This comparative study in the evolution of subjectivity in European literature during the Renaissance ascribes it to the impact of the Reformation on the public representation of authorial identity, differing from Stephen Greenblatt’s later application of Foucault to six Tudor authors.

Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Driving Miss Daisy (1986) is examined as a site of memory including: Uhry’s own memories upon which the characters and the play itself are based; the role of memory stories, settings and objects in the unfolding of the relationship be-tween its main characters, Daisy Wertham and her chauffeur, Hoke Col…[Read more]

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.

Abstract:

Assuming that the American self (and culture) was founded upon Puritan values, the aim of this paper is to discuss the importance of identificatory processes in helping to enforce conformity towards prevailing religious mores, as stated above, of a puritanical nature.
Underlying our decision to focus the discussion on the novel…[Read more]

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]