Charles Brockden Brown’s celebrated novel Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), set in the Forks of the Delaware region of Pennsylvania, has been related to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on the basis of a mistaken understanding that its action takes place during the summer of 1787. The correct date is 1785. The n…[Read more]

Charles Brockden Brown’s celebrated novel Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), set in the Forks of the Delaware region of Pennsylvania, has been related to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on the basis of a mistaken understanding that its action takes place during the summer of 1787. The correct date is 1785. The n…[Read more]

The essay takes a fresh look at Eliot’s ‘water-dripping song’ in The Waste Land. It seems impossible for the ornithologically minded Eliot not to have known that the hermit thrush’s song does not sound like dripping water. In fact, nowhere in ornithological writing — and certainly not in his source, Chapman’s Handbook of North American Birds —…[Read more]

After presenting an overview of scholarship on post-9/11 American poetry, my article focuses on a group of largely neglected post-9/11 poems, which deal with spectral consciousness and hallucinatory experiences. In exploring this issue, I have tried to establish a relationship between trauma-related intrusive memories and hallucination on the…[Read more]

The “Schoolhouse Gothic” represents teachers, students, and academic institutions using Gothic tropes such as the monster, the curse, and the trap. Joyce Carol Oates’s 2013 novel The Accursed both exemplifies and deviates from this tradition. Like other Schoolhouse Gothic works, The Accursed portrays the university as a place of mystified power…[Read more]

The Gothic metafiction of Stephen King and Bret Easton Ellis focuses on author-protagonists who fear what they create because their creations are re-creations, projections of their creator’s anxieties, some conventionally Gothic (the multiple/split self) and others specific to postmodern conceptions of subjectivity in general and authorship in p…[Read more]

To review the history of the Gothic as a counter-Enlightenment discourse, albeit an ambivalent one, is to see the suitability, if not the inevitability, of the Gothic treatment of education and educators. Presumably benign institutions, schools may seem more like unfeeling bureaucracies, brainwashing factories, militaristic zones, or lawless waste…[Read more]

To review the history of the Gothic as a counter-Enlightenment discourse is to see the suitability, if not the inevitability, of the Gothic treatment of education and educators. Schools and schoolteachers are keepers and transmitters of enlightenment. At the same time, schools and teachers are figures of power. They decide when children work, when…[Read more]

Literary Gothic emerged in the eighteenth century, the so-called Age of Reason, and takes as its subject the enemies of reason: superstition, madness, barbarism, taboo, etc. In the Gothic, these adversaries are engaged and often defeated. At the same time, however, the Gothic is a claustrophobic, paranoid literature, both profoundly skeptical of…[Read more]

The X-Files may be one of the most popular forms of historiographic metafiction, as Linda Hutcheon defines the term, ever produced. The show is, among other things, an extended meditation on the inescapability and elusiveness of history, both personal and public. At the center of the show is Fox Mulder’s personal history—his obsession with the mem…[Read more]

This essay examines the blend of male and female Gothic conventions in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain

from Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50:1 (2008), 51–68

In the documentary, Comic Book City, Portland, Oregon USA, I construct a representation of the city as a place for comics creation. In this paper, I distill key insights from my interviews with writers, artists, and publishers regarding the decision to live and work in Portland. My documentary research suggests that creators are attracted by…[Read more]

Digital technology is enabling a reconceptualization of film and cinema. The pliability of digital media opens up, particularly, the theory and practice of montage to revision. This pliability allows for cheap and easy copying and combining of images, and, relatedly, the transition from film frame to digital screen provides a less precious and…[Read more]

This is the Fall 2017 course syllabus for AML 2010: American Literature to 1865 to be taught at Florida SouthWestern State College.

Margaret Randall states that “as we re-search our histories … infrequently there is an exploration of an uncharted, complex terrain, and some new mapping happens” (8). Adopting Randall’s statement, this paper examines travelling poetry and anti-capitalism in the poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes and the song lyrics of Rage Against the Machine (RATM…[Read more]

While written assignments are typically growing in length in line with the ever-expanding volume of resources available to student writers, platforms like Twitter demand more succinct approaches to writing and offer a range of non-traditional stylistic options in its toolbar. Perhaps the twessay is the haiku of the essay genre: short but with a…[Read more]

Parables of Care: Instrumentality, Aesthetics and Utility in Devising a Comic for Dementia Caregivers. PDF file.

Presented at the 2017 Comics & Medicine Conference: Access Points Seattle. Public Library Central Branch, 15th – 17th June 2017. Seattle, USA.

This set of slides was modified slightly from its original version for online s…[Read more]