Two-thirds of the way through Faulkner, Mississippi, his extended meditation on the prose oeuvre of the American writer William Faulkner, Édouard Glissant remarks on Faulkner’s famous ‘amused refusal to “correct the contradictions”’ introduced into his texts through his constant revisiting of characters across novels not necessarily set in proper…[Read more]

On the Crisis of Creation is a short comic about the comic artists’ equivalent of a writer’s block.

This essay explores the challenge to the chivalric myth of the aviator in Willa Cather’s One of Ours and William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay. Revived during the First World War, this romantic myth cloaked the aviator in idealism and hid the actual body of the flyer in rhetoric. In this war of increasing mechanization, the air war was the last basti…[Read more]

This essay brings together two texts, a letter to the editor written in experimental prose by the Black avant-garde Beat poet, Bob Kaufman, and “The Unlocking,” a spoken-word poem written and performed by Ursula Rucker that appears at the end of The Roots’ critically acclaimed rap album, Do You Want More??!?. By using the aural to disrupt expec…[Read more]

For at least the last twenty years, scholarly attention has been drawn to the numerous depictions of cancer in comic books as well as oncology’s use of the comics medium (Rhode and Connor, 2012). However, little in the way of comprehensive analysis has been attempted, especially in terms of the various genres addressed. In this presentation, a ca…[Read more]

This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always extended beyond national boundaries and was forged from a globalist perspective. This outlook is not, as some critics have maintained, a late-stage development in Wright’s career, but rather the predominant theme that unites his oeuvre with a single con…[Read more]

This essay examines the relationship between modernist formal experimentation and rehabilitative futurism, the modern cultural fantasy of a hygienic future in which all illness and disability have been eradicated. Through a reading of Kenneth Burke’s early essay collection Counter-Statement (1931) and his first and only novel, Towards a Better…[Read more]

Explores Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X” as almost a Gen Xer’s “version of John Updike’s Couples”; that is, as, a place where, like Updike’s book, friends create a community isolated only to themselves. Though unlike Updike’s work, where — considering the time it was written in, the ’70s, where a generation succeeded in overtly contesting and…[Read more]

Explores how Max Vigne, from Andrea Barrett’s “Servants of the Map,” makes use of the dangerous Himalayan mountain environment as almost as Winnicottian “play space,” in which to recover from being requited to a life of obligation, rather than real-self discovery, after his mother’s death.

Explores the invisible man, in Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” as borrowing upon associations of patriarchal maleness, in the sense Ann Douglas in her “Terrible Honesty” argues 20s modern’s did, to secure freedom from feelings of entrapment by maternal figures, whose near-proximity to him is expressed in the text as often incestuous, gross;…[Read more]

A review of Stanley Kunitz’s poetry, emphasizing how he used his poetry to both explore and manage his relationship with his dominating mother. Argues that none of Kunitz’s elegies work as conventional elegies, or as we traditionally understand or expect them to work, but more as working their way to the direction Peter Sacks advocates, as…[Read more]

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

Full collection of essays written during my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature.