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

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

Theorists of civil society often view civil society as a site for democratic education.
Civil society is supposed to assist democratic practice by offering people contexts in which
they practice promoting the common good. This article, following Nina Eliasoph ‘s intervention,
takes this to be a claim requiring ethnographic exploration. The…[Read more]

In this article, I explore how people use the culture concept in legislatures to understand the minorities they legislate for
and about. I focus on recent debates in the New Zealand parliament over whether the indigenous Ma¯ ori are a cultural group or a racial
group. A Westminster parliament system encourages these debates, in which political…[Read more]

This article suggests that linguistic anthropology offers useful
analytical tools to documentary studies because both fields wrestle with questions
that emerge from the circulation of indexical representations that are putatively
constructing truths. Linguistic anthropology is deeply concerned with the ways
that texts circulate, and how this…[Read more]

In 1989 New Zealand legislators revised their child welfare legislation, partially
in response to M¯aori and Pacific Island critiques that the previous state-centered
regime had failed to take into account their culturally distinctive techniques for being
a family and had failed to support culturally specific practices of decision making
and…[Read more]

In this essay, I discuss how Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory might be useful for anthropologists. After providing a summary of Luhmann’s theory, I address the quandaries anthropologists might face when deploying a theory that presumes systems without selves. I also recount how other anthropologists have made use of Luhmann’s systems theory to an…[Read more]

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]

Impact and evaluation of research in the humanities has been the subject of several recent publications (e.g. Benneworth et al. 2016, Ochsner et al. 2016, Severinson 2017). A common theme is the need for a re-evaluation of how the humanities are evaluated, as well as for research on the effects of evaluation practices on the humanities (Ochsner et…[Read more]

It is not a stretch of imagination to link seclusion of girls at puberty with the Palaeolithic cave art. The widely accepted view about cave art suggests that the cave artists had been shamans. This shamanic origin can imply that the religion emerged in the times when the cave artists were active. It has already been posited in the relevant…[Read more]

Explains why we should pay more attention to Hawthorne’s narrative of his discovery of the “mysterious package” in “The Custom House” and Scarlet Letter narrative-arc.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.