Lecture/class notes on Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Authority. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

Lecture/class notes on Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

How to Revise a True War Story is the first book-length study of O’Brien’s archival papers at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. Drawing on extensive study of drafts and other prepublication materials, as well as the multiple published versions of O’Brien’s works, John K. Young tells the untold stories behind the production of such k…[Read more]

This article reconsiders Richard Wright’s Native Son by comparing divergences between the published novel and an earlier typeset manuscript. It argues that such revisions render protagonist Bigger Thomas an icon of global class conflict rather than a national figure of racial tension. By revealing the continuities among critical essays that…[Read more]

This article examines the poetry of Cuban writer Cristina Ayala emphasizing the political value of her use of a rhetoric of heroism, a discursive device that masks her demands for recognition of women’s rights and those of Afro-Cubans. The analysis of her poetry suggests that the symbolic manipulation of the “hero” and the representation of “colo…[Read more]

This essay proposes the concept of literary immanence as a new critical model for reading world literature from the perspective of the specific situation experienced by the subject as he or she encounters the world. The literary event is instantiated within three discursive domains: literary immanence, the literary situation into which the subject…[Read more]

This essay proposes the concept of literary immanence as a new critical model for reading world literature from the perspective of the specific situation experienced by the subject as he or she encounters the world. The literary event is instantiated within three discursive domains: literary immanence, the literary situation into which the subject…[Read more]

With thirty-seven named locations, the Digby Mary Magdalene is rightfully considered to require the most elaborate staging of the Middle English dramatic corpus. In this article, I re-examine the manuscript to find evidence of how the various locations in the play can be grouped into what I term staging complexes. Beginning with the division of…[Read more]

This article examines the performativity of novelistic discourse in order to propose a different set of terms for understanding the circulation of the novel around the world than those that are based on the referential form/content model.

Levinas’s treatment of persecution as the inaugural basis of ethical responsibility tacitly relies on the ethical subject’s availability for seduction through an invitation to profane the beloved that is the obverse of the face. Using Jean Laplanche’s conception of the enigmatic signifier, I interpret the face–beloved dyad as a pathological r…[Read more]

On performativity of Dickens as author in his prefaces

The animal characteristics of the monster in late Victorian gothic fiction make visible the biopolitical rationalisation of life in modern societies. Key moments in Bram Sto- ker’s Dracula and R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde provide evidence for the animality of late Victorian gothic monsters. In an extended reading of Ric…[Read more]

The extracodical stanzas of John Lydgate’s Testament and “Quis Dabit Meo Capiti Fontem Lacrimarum” in the Clopton chantry chapel of the Great Church of Holy Trinity, Long Melford, not only are two intriguing witnesses differing in presentation and language from the manuscript copies but also can be considered as part of a rhetorical program where…[Read more]

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we…[Read more]