Since his first works came to critical attention, Ernest Hemingway has occupied a space in the critical and cultural imagination as a definitively ‘masculine’ writer. His novels and stories focus on male narrators in difficult or extreme situations involving war, violence, and the natural world, and his critical heritage has focused on these ele…[Read more]

Syllabus, project assignments, and milestones for HON 313, “Reading Machines” (Fall 2017), a first-year interdisciplinary experience course at NC State University. Reading Machines invites students into a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit ideas. The course…[Read more]

Hinging on the concept of transvestism, this article traces a trajectory that goes from Alfonsina Storni’s re-appropriation of the women’s page in the guise of a male persona, through Alejo Carpentier’s contributions to a fashion column disguised as Jacqueline, to Clarice Lispector’s unsettling use of the page addressed specifically to women i…[Read more]

This essay reads Ivan Efremov’s “Andromeda Nebula” (1957), Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris” (1961), and Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s “Andymon” (1982) in order to explore the relationship between biological evolution and dialectical materialism, as it was negotiated through the trope of the alien in the context of the cultural politics of Eastern E…[Read more]

This essay examines how translingual poetry by immigrant Romanian writers who live in or travel to the United States requires a transnational community framing rather than a national one and raises new questions about cultural and linguistic identity formation that reflect on both national and world literature issues. This analysis of the…[Read more]

“Unter Männern” weaves together three threads of, first, historically relevant memory recited by its chosen protagonists; second, some personal history on the part of the primary filmmaker (i.e., director Ringo Rösener); and, third, between and among them, filmic artifacts or evidence of life in the GDR. This documentary presents the a…[Read more]

This collection of scholarly essays offers a new understanding of local and global myths that have been constructed around Shakespeare in theatre, cinema, and television from the nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on a definition of myth as a powerful ideological narrative, Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance examines…[Read more]

An examination of the cyborg potential of wearable technology as located in dress-body-technology assemblages and a call for public humanities work, such as Fashioning Circuits, that extends the Quantified Self to think instead about the Quantified Other or the Quantified Self-in-kinship.

This chapter introduces the volume on East German film. The chapter and the volume it introduces surveys a range of depictions of gender and sexuality in East German film and television, from stereotypical and ideologically compliant understandings of femininity and homosexuality to more ambivalent constructions of androgyny, gendered agency, and…[Read more]

The 31st bibliography for 828 volumes added to Washington University Libraries’ Contemporary German Literature Collection. All published in 2017, these acquisitions include novels, poetry, short story collections, essays, autobiographical works, and literary and cultural periodicals from publishers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This…[Read more]

This article details the contributions of blind readers to the development, design, and marketing of the optophone, a text-to-tone transcription machine introduced in the early twentieth century. We combine archival research with prototyping to investigate the dimensions involved in past coding and decoding practices. If archives provide…[Read more]

This article focuses on three post-9/11 meta-poems – “My Wife Says Don’t Write About September 11th” by Ryan G. Van Cleave, “How to Write A Poem After September 11th” by Nikki Moustaki and “To the Words” by W. S. Merwin – to demonstrate the point that the current scholarly understanding of post-9/11 aesthetics as something functioning like…[Read more]