This course focuses on developing skills of close reading and literary analysis, both in class discussion and in assignments, through the study of major black writers. This section will be a study of global black literature—novels, drama, and poetry—written in English from the twentieth century to the present. We will consider how major aut…[Read more]

La Camelias de Amelia (written in Spanish) is a 2009 collection of short stories about Puerto Rico and its people. Its author, Zoé Jiménez Corretjer, forms part of the Puerto Rican writers called ‘La Generación de los 80’ (authors writing in Spanish from the island and not in English from US territory.)
This review only analyzes the work as a u…[Read more]

La Camelias de Amelia (written in Spanish) is a 2009 collection of short stories about Puerto Rico and its people. Its author, Zoé Jiménez Corretjer, forms part of the Puerto Rican writers called ‘La Generación de los 80’ (authors writing in Spanish from the island and not in English from US territory.)
This review only analyzes the work as a u…[Read more]

Students will become familiar with Modernist literature and the various artistic movements designated under the term “Modernism.” Students will learn to critically examine modernist materials by drawing on the critical perspectives most common in modernist studies: the New Criticism, Cultural Studies, and various forms of analysis. After com…[Read more]

This article focuses on the limits of liberal discourses such as multiculturalism in an increasing global world. I focus on multicultural London and juxtapose Black British writer, Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth to Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, to underline the multiple intersections between the status of colored immigrants, their des…[Read more]

This article focuses on the limits of liberal discourses such as multiculturalism in an increasing global world. I focus on multicultural London and juxtapose Black British writer, Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth to Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, to underline the multiple intersections between the status of colored immigrants, their des…[Read more]

This essay maps out a six-year literary transformation of Paris noir from 1957 to 1963 that overlaps with the Algerian war for independence from France (1954–1962). In this journey that transits from Parisian utopianism to postcolonial criticism, from Richard Wright and James Baldwin’s love songs to racially liberal Paris to William Gardner S…[Read more]

This essay maps out a six-year literary transformation of Paris noir from 1957 to 1963 that overlaps with the Algerian war for independence from France (1954–1962). In this journey that transits from Parisian utopianism to postcolonial criticism, from Richard Wright and James Baldwin’s love songs to racially liberal Paris to William Gardner S…[Read more]

Previous scholarship on source materials for Lawrence Durrell’s Gnostic themes in Monsieur are insufficient in light of his marginalia in Serge Hutin’s Les Gnostiques and his notebooks for the novel. We contend that archival evidence from the Bibliothèque Lawrence Durrell in Nanterre, France, necessitates a reevaluation of previous work in orde…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s three political tragedies―Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear―have numerously been presented or adapted on film. These three plays all involve the recurring trope of madness, which, as constructed by Shakespeare, provided a wider canvas on which to detail those materials that could not be otherwise expressed: sexual desire and exp…[Read more]

This essay describes and illustrates the activities associated with the University of California at Berkeley’s Shakespeare Program, over the last forty years, covering teaching innovations, numerous research publications, multiple productions and videos of Shakespeare’s plays, and creation of websites, Shakespeare’s Staging and Milton Revealed.

Virginia Woolf’s well known distaste for the generic and aesthetic instability of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) finds echoes in more recent responses, even as the novel remains an anchor of a lesbian literary canon. I demonstrate that Hall’s novel does indeed exhibit generic and psychological instability, as a Victo…[Read more]

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]

A description of a successful team-taught introductory literature/DH course on “Identity, Ethnicity, and the Digital Humanities” at Washington & Jefferson College.