This article shows how Rachna Mara’s collection of short stories Of Customs and Excise puts forth a cosmopolitan feminism that reveals the losses and gains of diaspora in an arena of partiality and relationality.

MLA Convention January 2016, Abstracts for Session 809

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is reflection of Pakistani masculinity in a metamorphosed state. A disturbingly masculine vocabulary frames the appearance and actions of the female characters. In contrast, the speech and thought of the male characters is minified in words of loss and regret. Their material ambitions and the r…[Read more]

The scraps and orts that survived Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment and execution by the Nazis played an influential role in theologies of the second half of the twentieth century, and that influence continues unabated in the twenty-first. Of particular interest has been his speculation on “religionless” Christianity in “a world come of age,” s…[Read more]

mind the gaps: fragments is a digitally printed limited edition of six fragments, four of which are poems that begin with my translations from early Greek thinking (works of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Sappho, and Empedocles). The fifth includes a poem based on my translation of a story included in Plato’s Phaedrus and a hybrid piece built around…[Read more]

This article offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Jean-Luc Godard’s video short Puissance de la parole (1988). It engages with key historical figures in film, visual art and music, positioning Godard’s video mashup as a violent intermedial space where past and future meet. Exploring techniques of fragmentation, decontextualization and rec…[Read more]

Editor’s Introduction to Pied Piper of Lovers. Durrell’s first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published in 1935, shortly after he left England to live abroad until his death in 1990. As an autobiographical Künstlerroman, it traces Walsh Clifton’s Anglo-Indian childhood and his struggles to negotiate a life between “mother” India and “father”…[Read more]

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.

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]

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]

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]

This article appraises the debt that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas owes to the novels of Russell Hoban, including, but not limited to, Riddley Walker. After clearly mapping a history of Hoban’s philosophical perspectives and Mitchell’s inter-textual genre-impersonation practice, the article assesses the degree to which Mitchell’s metatex…[Read more]

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is a novel that can be situated, aesthetically, within the traditions of utopian fiction and the North American encyclopaedic, postmodern novel. It is also, however, a text that is exemplary of a type of didacticism that cloaks its mechanism behind an overloaded structure. One of the explicit targets of this didacticism is…[Read more]

Although, in some ways, Sarah Waters’s Affinity looks akin to historiographic metafiction, Marie-Luise Kohlke has persuasively argued that the text is more accurately dubbed “new(meta)realism”, a mode that demonstrates the xhausted potential of the form. This article suggests that genre play and a meta-generic mode, dubbed taxonomography, might…[Read more]

This article argues for an overlapping notion of indigeneity in Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and Aidan Higgins’ Langrishe, Go Down articulated using critical Aboriginal Studies while exploring the materialist emergence of identity. The key tension, then, is not between both authors’ progressive politics nor the real differences b…[Read more]

This article argues for an overlapping notion of indigeneity in Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and Aidan Higgins’ Langrishe, Go Down articulated using critical Aboriginal Studies while exploring the materialist emergence of identity. The key tension, then, is not between both authors’ progressive politics nor the real differences b…[Read more]