This is a short introductory essay for _The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies_, published in 2015. The areas covered by _The Handbook_ include cognitive historicism, cognitive narratology, cognitive queer theory, neuroaesthetics, cognitive postcolonial studies, studies in emotions and empathy, decision theory, cognitive disability…[Read more]

“The Secret Life of Fiction” uses cognitive literary theory to critique the failure of “The Common Core Standards Initiative” to recognize fiction as a catalyst of complex thinking in students.

This essay compares two mid-twentieth century poets of the Americas, Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos, in view of how their work circa 1960 intersects despite the differences in their poetics. It introduces the notion of the obversal, or the identity among poems through a common history.

In this article I examine the way Collins, in her young adult novel Mockingjay, connects historical context of an urban firebombing like those frequently seen during World War II, with the fictional presentation of a firebombing reminiscent of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to present the horrors of war to a new generation. I then show how she m…[Read more]

This conference paper was an invited plenary lecture for the 11th annual meeting of ICEG in January 2014. It builds upon numerous articles, essays and books the author has published on the grammar, epistemology and socio-historical aspects of metaphor and metaphorical discourse. This paper provides a model for understanding metaphor as a needed…[Read more]

This conference paper was an invited plenary lecture for the 11th annual meeting of ICEG in January 2014. It builds upon numerous articles, essays and books the author has published on the grammar, epistemology and socio-historical aspects of metaphor and metaphorical discourse. This paper provides a model for understanding metaphor as a needed…[Read more]

This conference paper was an invited plenary lecture for the 11th annual meeting of ICEG in January 2014. It builds upon numerous articles, essays and books the author has published on the grammar, epistemology and socio-historical aspects of metaphor and metaphorical discourse. This paper provides a model for understanding metaphor as a needed…[Read more]

Book review of Joanna Freer, Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, £60. Pp 165; 978-1-107-07605-1.)

Archives & Networks of Modernism developed without any single authorial focus to address or collapse the plurality of Modernist and Late Modernist networks and archives. The collection instead adopts an international perspective, in particular where each network or archive intersects or interrupts the other. In this, it draws from the established…[Read more]

Archives & Networks of Modernism developed without any single authorial focus to address or collapse the plurality of Modernist and Late Modernist networks and archives. The collection instead adopts an international perspective, in particular where each network or archive intersects or interrupts the other. In this, it draws from the established…[Read more]

The British and Canadian authors Lawrence Durrell and M. G. Vassanji do not, at first thought, call out for a comparative study. Neither are typically regarded in criticism through their origins or ethnicity. The focus instead goes to their characters and subject matter, their cosmopolitan experiences. Confusions surrounding both authors have…[Read more]

his essay positions the use of machine learning within the digital humanities as part of a wider movement that nostalgically seeks to return literary criticism to the structuralist era, to a moment characterized by belief in systems, structure, and the transparency of language. It argues that the scientific criticism of the present attempts to…[Read more]

This piece provides a detailed engagement with Don DeLillo’s depiction of the 2003 Iraq war in his latest novel, Point Omega. Framed through both formal aesthetic signposting of the interrelations between modernist and postmodernist practice and also through explicit thematic comparison between the conflicts, I trace DeLillo’s treatment of Iraq in…[Read more]

In his article “Queering Masturbation in Lorde’s Life and Writing” Eric Sipyinyu Njeng discusses masturbation in Audre Lorde’s life and works to signal an important aspect of her oeuvre often neglected in scholarship. Lorde stands out among prominent queer queens by demonstrating theory corporeally thereby…[Read more]

This essay was one of the first to challenge the over-stress on close reading as the key to literary appreciation, by advocating a greater stress on literature’s broader context and its achievement in social, political, and religious terms.

This piece presents a tripartite analysis of the relationship between the philosophical works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the novels of Thomas Pynchon. This is broadly structured around three schools of Wittgenstein scholarship identified by Guy Kahane et al. as the Orthodox Tractatus, the New Wittgenstein, and several strands of the Orthodox…[Read more]

This piece explores the resonances between the depiction of the Cold War and the War Against Terror in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Don DeLillo’s Underworld.