This memorial tribute for the late Ciaran Carson (1948-2019), Irish creative writer extraordinaire, was commissioned three years ago for inclusion in a special number of “Reading Ireland” which has not yet materialised. It is now archived in and by Humanities Common on the third anniversary of his funeral rites and burial in Belfast, Northern…[Read more]

This article examines the political role of illness in Émile Zola’s ‘La Faute de l’abbé Mouret’ (‘The Sin of Father Mouret’, 1875) in articulating the difference between a religious and a secular body. Published in the early French Third Republic (1870–1940), this novel shows the Zolian body as the nexus upon which religious and republi…[Read more]

In ‘Degeneration’ (1892), Max Nordau included Émile Zola in his theory that fin-de-siècle artists were a danger to society. According to Nordau, the ‘false science’ in Zola’s Naturalist novels would erode social progress in their alleged preoccupation with disease, sexual deviancy and amorality. This article proposes that degeneration is, how…[Read more]

Haussmann’s re-building of Paris in the 1850s and ’60s had created an ordered city. However, the bourgeoisie used the new urban configurations as a weapon against the lower classes. This article describes the spaces of the underground and the overground: the underground is the metaphorical and literal rubbish heap for those in the lower parts of…[Read more]

It is May 2020. I am watching Kae Tempest perform Hold Your Own online. Tempest’s vocal performances are always rich in meaningful detail; from the rising semi-sung sound that embodies all the dreams and potentials of a fallible humanity to the throaty fall that
edges and softens our collapse into foolishness and self-defeat. Slipping between s…[Read more]

A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, “Passage to England” was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain a…[Read more]

A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, “Passage to England” was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain a…[Read more]

No creo que haya mejor ocasión que este homenaje alcalaíno al maestro Alberto Blecua para vencer las reticencias y dudas del neófito que, en palabras de Márquez Villanueva, ha de pisar por vez primera los “senderos de alto riesgo” por los que camina el Libro de buen amor. Por motivo de mi admiración y reconocimiento al homenajeado, voy a dejarme…[Read more]

This digital book is a companion to Of Sunken Islands and Pestilence: Restoring the Voice of Edward Taylor Fletcher to Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature. It is intended as an aid to readers, in particular students and scholars, who wish to know more about Fletcher’s works. The ideas that drove Fletcher’s creative works are on display here,…[Read more]

In this article, I examine two recent memoirs of Zen students that speak openly about the aberrant behavior of their teachers. These memoirs are Natalie Goldberg’s The Great Failure (2004) and Shozan Jack Haubner’s Single White Monk (2017). Both of these authors consider the scandals surrounding their teachers as an opportunity for spiritual gro…[Read more]

Persian literature used to be visibly worldly when Persian was a lingua franca in a vast space from Balkan to China. With the British colonialism in the India and the rise of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Persian lost its status and became more national in various contexts. In Iran it only got worsened with sanctions,…[Read more]

This article explores the tradition of Bacha Posh in Afghan culture as depicted in Afghan-American Nadia Hashimiʼs debut novel The Pearl that Broke its Shell (2014). In this novel, Hashimi shows how Afghan girls are obliged to cross-dress and live dual lives as boys for several years to lay claim for their rights to education and freedom of…[Read more]

In The Night Watchman (2020), Louise Erdrich continues to blur the lines between history and fiction as she has done in several of her novels. Erdrich introduces the reader to several magical elements that appear to be entirely real: two ghosts, a dog that talks, and an unearthly powwow with Jesus as one of the dancers. The main objective of this…[Read more]

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomp…[Read more]

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I’m sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the “uncanny body politic,” the uncanny valley, “dystopian poetics,” what it means…[Read more]

Analizamos el contexto e ideología de la película de ciencia ficción ‘El Origen del Planeta de los Simios’ (2011), con especial atención sobre el juego intertextual de precuelas y secuelas, y sobre las inquietudes ideológicas manifiestas en lo relativo a las relaciones raciales y al evolucionismo.…[Read more]

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]