This is an essay on the relation of images and text. It is part of a larger research project online at writingwithimages.com. See that site for the context; the the project’s purpose is to theorize the possibilities of fiction and poetry that are presented alongside images.

This article examines how the Brothers Grimm are fictionalized in German and Anglo-American media. While some representations revere and romanticize the iconic brothers for preserving the fairy-tale tradition, other depictions challenge the conventional understanding of their work and cultural contribution. In these demythologizing depictions, the…[Read more]

Drawing on Henry Boyd’s 1785 translation of the “Inferno,” this note documents the nature and extent of Coleridge’s knowledge of the “Inferno” and demonstrates that Dante’s work probably did influence Coleridge during the composition of “Kubla Khan.”

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

Scholarship on the Sleeping Beauty tale has gone largely unappreciated. Underlying the story’s obvious themes and motifs—birth, death/sleep, rebirth—and complicating its gender dynamic is a preoccupation with orality and telling that gives the story a significant self-reflective dimension. This article examines how the tale reflects on story…[Read more]

Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism” and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shap…[Read more]

Since the early twentieth century, translators and critics of classical Chinese poetry have tended to focus on imagery and suggestion, balking at rhythm. It is commonly assumed that modern English and classical Chinese are too different, phonemically, for any of the aural qualities of one to translate into the other. My essay aims to overcome…[Read more]

A review of Andreas Huyssen’s “Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film” (2015)

A review of Andreas Huyssen’s “Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film” (2015)

This essay considers Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Through Ellison’s other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible Man, the essay links the political concerns of the novel with…[Read more]