Describes and provides examples of modules and assignments for a sophomore Brit Lit survey and an upper-division poetics class that responded to student demands for a more racially diverse canon. Includes a brief discussion of Lucius Henry Holsey, enslaved worker on the UGA campus, who claimed to have learned to read from Milton’s Paradise Lost…[Read more]

A literary analysis and summary of John Burnside’s poem “The Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652” (2,570 words)

A literary analysis and summary of John Burnside’s poem “The Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652” (2,570 words)

Get tips on using the MLA International Bibliography to teach scholarly concepts and analytical skills.

For more than a hundred years the Modern Language Association, creator of the MLA International Bibliography, has worked to strengthen the study and teaching of language and literature. As part of that mission, the MLA has developed an online…[Read more]

The MLA International Bibliography is an essential tool for research in all aspects of modern languages and literature, but did you know that the MLAIB can be brought into the classroom and used as an effective teaching tool as well? Learn how the most powerful research tool in the humanities is being used in the virtual classroom to engage…[Read more]

Scholars who have studied the contested meaning of “creole” in Louisiana have
typically maintained that the “Creole myth,” that is the strategic redefinition of
the term “creole” to refer to the white descendants of Louisiana’s original French
and Spanish settlers, emerged during or shortly after the Civil War. Drawing on
a newspaper art…[Read more]

Published in New Orleans in 1845 by a group of free men of color, Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes is now commonly recognized as the first collection of African American poetry. As a testament to and expression of the intellectual prowess of New Orleans’s francophone free Black community, Les Cenelles deserves to be read as a formally int…[Read more]

The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his ear…[Read more]

Keats’s poetic thoughts on the topic of human identity remain some of Romanticism’s most incisive reflections on the constitution of selfhood. This essay is about the ways Keats’s verse thinks through questions about human subjectivity and its horizons with an imaginative range. Keats famously asserts that the poetical character has “no i…[Read more]

The tunefulness of Proust and Senancour. From the silence of mountains to the silence of music

For Proust, great books are the “children of silence” (CSB, p. 309), and his novel endeavors to express what could not, in principle, be formulated: nature, sensations, in brief the physical and psychic existence as a whole. In his vision, lan…[Read more]

The tunefulness of Proust and Senancour. From the silence of mountains to the silence of music

For Proust, great books are the “children of silence” (CSB, p. 309), and his novel endeavors to express what could not, in principle, be formulated: nature, sensations, in brief the physical and psychic existence as a whole. In his vision, lan…[Read more]

Over the past year, artists, doctors, medical professionals, and international agencies such as the World Health Organisation have been using comics to communicate the risks of the SARS-CoV2 virus. The visual economy and a near-universal language of lines, balloons, and panels in comics makes them well suited to disseminate epidemic-related…[Read more]

In this paper, in a panel co-sponsored by the MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, I summarize some of the structural and practical problems that challenge contingent scholars when they try to publish their work in scholarly journals. I share the record of the online, multimedia,…[Read more]

Attention in the humanities has lately turned to the re-thinking of traditional modes of publishing. But is the academy prepared to assess work that deviates from the recognised forms and formats associated with ‘digging down and standing back’ (Felski 2015, p. 52)? This chapter investigates whether humanistic research, usually expressed in wor…[Read more]

It is well known that Walter Scott adapted the forms of sentimental fiction for his initial trilogy of novels on Scottish manners and that he drew on philosophical theories of sympathy when conceiving of his characters and placing them in historical relation to one another and to his readership. Scott’s adaptations of sentimentalism and of…[Read more]

Abstracts for the Two-Panel Series “More Is More: Rules and Riddles of Nineteenth-Century Vielschreiberei.” MLA Annual Convention, Washington, D.C., January 6–9, 2022.

This is a two-part publication that contains a facsimile of the original story “Vísceras de la ciudad” by Rosa Arciniega (including an introduction) and a 7,500-word academic critical analysis of the story. Of interest to specialists in urban literature, women’s literature, social literature, and popular culture.

The purpose of this essay is to better understand the motives of the real estate mogul and construction magnate -J.C.Nichols- responsible for the construction of the first non-centrally located shopping mall in the United States in Kansas City in the 1920s. Specifically, this study focuses on why and how Nichols resorted to a pastiche of…[Read more]