Marie Darrieussecq’s Clèves (2011) shocked readers with the vulgarity of its language and spurred controversy over its status as a literary text. In this article, I show how the novel’s “bad” language is a foil for Darrieussecq’s larger project of rewriting the adolescent female body, removing it from the sexualized and objectified optic through…[Read more]

The article focuses on the restoration of the collections of paintings and drawings of E. E. Cummings in Brockport, New York. It is inferred that the Hildegarde Lasell Watson Collection has sustained a mass of damage over the last 25 years, and that efforts for its conservation have consistently been delayed. It discusses the contents and the…[Read more]

Digital reading is not just a matter of new media; it is a new cognitive activity that Proust’s writing seems to have anticipated. Our goal is to demonstrate that the “branching and responding text” that was announced by Ted Nelson in Litary Machines corresponds in its very logic and patterns to the new writing style that is to be observed in Pr…[Read more]

Between 1988 and 1994 American comic books engaged the politics, problematics, and crises of the AIDS epidemic by injecting the virus and its social, cultural, and epidemiological effects on gay men into the four-color fantasies of the superhero genre. As the comic-book industry was undergoing major internal changes that allowed for more mature,…[Read more]

This paper offers a brief consideration of the literary ballad as a register of what by the mid-’60s economists had diagnosed as “urban crisis” and in 1970 John Ashbery called “urban chaos.” I’m particularly interested in how poets used the ballad to see and see into the failures of the “spatio-temporal fix” of urban renewal. My general idea is…[Read more]

This essay demonstrates that Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake goes beyond conventional wisdom about immigrant experiences in so far as it explores how the South Asian diaspora participates in transnational connections, shaping and transforming the notion of American identity in the contemporary global era. Lahiri’s novel offers us a striking acc…[Read more]

A reflection on the state of the archive in the state of post-theory.

I used to share with my classes that ebooks are outselling books, and like the music industry, the book market is now digital. While the record business has shifted in profound ways with the rise of digital technology, the book press is still in flux. Digital book sales over the past couple of years have been fluctuating around book sales. As a…[Read more]

“The short story is better suited to the demands of modern life than the novel.” Simon Prosser, Publishing Director, Hamish Hamilton

Expository Writing is crafted to help students learn to write and think critically. In an effort to hone our critical minds and strengthen our writing, we will focus on the learned skills of summarizing, par…[Read more]

In this essay, I follow debates about forms and sites of memorialization in post- Soviet Belarus. Begun during perestroika, the public discussions about Khatyn’ and Kuropaty eventually evolved into persistent attempts to realign the Soviet past along new narrative axes. Most prominently, this discursive reformatting of the socialist experience w…[Read more]