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.

This piece effects a critical revision of the interactions between late Foucault and the works of Thomas Pynchon through the theme of Enlightenment, a relationship far more nuanced than granted by current appraisals. Examining resistance, revolution, and the critical attitude alongside a focus on the Foucauldian sphere of ethics, this work posits…[Read more]

Jennifer Egan’s acclaimed 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is a text populated by a disproportionately high number of, often unfulfilled, postgraduate researchers: “I’m in the PhD program at Berkeley”, proclaims Mindy; “Joe, who hailed from Kenya […] was getting his PhD in robotics at Columbia”; “Bix, who’s black, is spending his ni…[Read more]

Worldviews in Literature: An Anthology responds to UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova’s 2012 global initiatives for study of world literature for a “New Humanism” along with Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s directive for world literature “to discover what is universal across national literatures.” Worldviews includes fifteen authors fro…[Read more]

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon l…[Read more]

Kafka’s Romanticism/Platonism is hidden underneath the covers. In this article I show how better translations can help the reader take the covers off the bed. Whether it be K.’s meeting with Buergel in the Castle or with the Josef K.’s meeting with the Priest in The Trial,
essentially the message resonates. A preview of ESSENTIAL KAFKA.

Kafka’s Romanticism/Platonism is hidden underneath the covers. In this article I show how better translations can help the reader take the covers off the bed. Whether it be K.’s meeting with Buergel in the Castle or with the Josef K.’s meeting with the Priest in The Trial,
essentially the message resonates. A preview of ESSENTIAL KAFKA.

“Becoming-animal” is a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia which at times can designate a movement towards denigration. With a “becoming,” a threshold is, invariably, crossed and the boundaries that have existed between the animal and the human become blurred. Moreover…[Read more]

“Becoming-animal” is a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia which at times can designate a movement towards denigration. With a “becoming,” a threshold is, invariably, crossed and the boundaries that have existed between the animal and the human become blurred. Moreover…[Read more]

Although Flannery O’Connor’s fiction has been subjected to criticism of all types and although she is known for her interest in religious matters, no one prior to this has done an in-depth study on the presentation of conversion in her fiction. With William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience as a basis for both definition and struc…[Read more]

Dietrich, like Madonna, has been called gender‐bending and androgynous, but Dietrich’s on‐ and off‐screen fluidity of gender identity, as reflected in her adoption of the “double drag,” upsets the traditional dichotomy encoded more generally as that of male or female and more particularly as that of the butch or femme.

The article enacts the essay as the mainstay of scholarly discourse in a knowledgeable community. It deals with (con)textualized readings of poetry (or literature) mainly through the medium of translation as an important intercultural phenomenon involving poetics, episteme, borders.

The influx of Vietnamese refugees, ‘‘boat people,’’ and immigrants into the United States after April 1975 has led to the establishment of a significant Vietnamese-American community. There is a body of literature written for children and young adults that creates and delineates this new community within the topography of a welcoming and immigra…[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.

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]

Johannesburg, Chicago of South Africa
Chicago, Johannesburg by the Lake

n his theoretical writings, as well as in the subtext of The Waste Land, Eliot expresses the idea of the organic nature of culture and its unity despite its regional diversity. This unity is represented by some formal features of The Waste Land, such as its rhythm and structure. However, cultural unity, at times also represented by the textual, is…[Read more]

This article reads the smuggling of Aztec artifacts described in Lucha Corpi’s novel Black Widow’s Wardrobe in the context of new materialist philosophies of becoming.