An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]

This essay surveys Thoreau’s antislavery writings from across his career and demonstrates the ecological concerns central to Thoreau’s abolitionist commitment.

In a 1972 poem about Vancouver Island, Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco wonders, “Acaso fue el Aztlán de las mexicas / De allí partieron siete tribus.” Though Pacheco spent several years living in Vancouver during the late 1960s and early 1970s—and was published in a 1971 anthology of poetry “From Canada’s Unofficial Languages”—h…[Read more]

This article examines the panegyric across the literary traditions of West, South, and East Asia, concentrating on Arabo-Persian qaṣīda, the Sanskrit praśasti, and the Chinese fu. In radically different albeit analogous ways, each genre elaborated a political aesthetics of literary form. The West, South, and East Asian genres each cultivated a met…[Read more]

Building on the multivalent meanings of the Arabo- Persian tarjama (‘to interpret’, ‘to translate’, ‘to narrate’), this essay argues for the relevance of Qur’ānic inimitability (i’jāz) to contemporary translation theory. I examine how the translation of Arabic rhetorical theory (‘ilm al-balāgha) into Persian inaugurated new trends within the study…[Read more]

This is the typescript of the Introductory chapter of the book, THE INVENTION OF RACE IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES, published on March 8, 2018 by Cambridge UP (503 pp., 8 chapters, 10″ x 7″ format). The book discusses Jews, Muslims, Africans and blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in 7 chapters, including a critical…[Read more]

This discussion of Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kāvya Literature (2014), a magisterial contribution to South Asian literature edited by Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Gary Tubb, situates this work within broader trends within the discipline of comparative literature and cross-cultural poetics. I consider how this volume…[Read more]

Featuring work by: Will Alexander, Alexis Almeida, Maria Attanasio, Gennady Aygi, Omar Berrada, Carla Billitteri, Tanella Boni, Amal Dunqul, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Norman Fischer, Peter France, Todd Fredson, María José Giménez, Yāqūt Al-Ḥamawī, Ouyang Jianghe, Hajiwara Kyojiro, John High, Roberta Iannamico, Lucas Klein, David Larsen, Brian Lucas,…[Read more]

Aboriginal Song Poems (compiled by Robert Wood) André Breton (translated by Mark Polizzotti) René Char (translated by Stuart Kendall) Sergio Chejfec (translated by Margaret Carson) James Clifford Joseph Donahue Gyrðir Elíasson (translated by Meg Matich) Clayton Eshleman (interviewed by Irakli Qolbaia) Nazim Hikmet (translated by Murat Nem…[Read more]

Featuring work by: Eugénio de Andrade, Anonymous, A. James Arnold, Rito Ramón Aroche, Dawn-Michelle Baude, Susan Bernofsky, Aloysius Bertrand, Paul Blackburn, Daniel Borzutzky, André Breton, Garrett Caples, Valerie Mejer Caso, RosalÍa de Castro, Paul Celan, Aimé Césaire, René Char, Beatritz de Dia, Kristin Dykstra, Paul Éluard, Clayton Eshlema…[Read more]

Work by: Etel Adnan – Demosthenes Agrafiotis – Will Alexander – Rachel Tzvia Back – Dan Bellm – Aleksandr Blok – Pura López Colomé – Colin Dayan – René Depestre – Rachel Blau DuPlessis – Marcella Durand – Sarah Tuss Efrik – Elke Erb – Peter France – Johannes Göransson – David Hadbawnik – Larry Kearney – Alexis Levitin – Brian Lucas – Michèle Méta…[Read more]

This essay examines how translation theory can globalize contemporary literary comparison. Whereas Persian studies has historically been isolated from the latest developments within literary theory, world literature has similarly been isolated from the latest developments within the study of non-European literatures. The methodology of hard…[Read more]

Course syllabus for Eng 260: Introduction to Women Writers focused on the theme of food fiction. Taught at Central Oregon Community College as a general education course. We are on the quarter system which limits the number of readings. The course will require that students complete a collaborative digital project.

This article examines Sphinx, the debut novel of the French novelist Anne Garréta, which was recently published in English translation in 2015. The reception of Sphinx in both French and English has focused primarily on Garréta’s virtuosic removal of gender from a love story, passing over a caricatural and crude rendering of racial difference tha…[Read more]

A contribution to a forum on Martin Delany, Blake; Or the Huts of America, ed. Jerome Mcgann.

The aim of this article is to study the complete poetry of Luis de Góngora using a contrastive analysis. To this end, the poems, which do not pose any attribution problem, published in digital format by the Observatoire de la vie littéraire (OBVIL) have been selected (with the exception of theatre) and divided into three parts on the basis of a c…[Read more]

Text of a talk I gave on March 1 at the Translation Symposium held in conjunction with the awards ceremony of the 3rd International JLPP International Translation Competition at Gakushi Kaikan, Tokyo.

This essay attempts a philological, meaning a both technically and socially attentive historical study of an individual computer programming language, JavaScript. From its introduction, JavaScript’s reception by software developers, and its importance in web development as we now understand it, was structured by a continuous negotiation of e…[Read more]