Although Flannery O’Connor’s fiction has been subjected to criticism of all types and although she is known for her interest in religious matters, no one prior to this has done an in-depth study on the presentation of conversion in her fiction. With William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience as a basis for both definition and struc…[Read more]

In twelfth‐century Germany, where mysticism was a common phenomenon, Hildegard of Bingen and her visions were readily accepted — making it all the more significant that, despite the generally receptive conditions, Hildegard went to such trouble to make sure her visions and her writings were endorsed by the Church. In contrast, Joan of Arc, liv…[Read more]

At the height of their popularity, performing animals appeared in over half of all big-time vaudeville bills and were highly significant to its business model. They were booked to draw children and their mothers to matinee performances and, as consistent sources of novelty, to create crucial word-of-mouth interest in the bill’s weekly line-up. V…[Read more]

The article enacts the essay as the mainstay of scholarly discourse in a knowledgeable community. It deals with (con)textualized readings of poetry (or literature) mainly through the medium of translation as an important intercultural phenomenon involving poetics, episteme, borders.

Abstract:

Assuming that the American self (and culture) was founded upon Puritan values, the aim of this paper is to discuss the importance of identificatory processes in helping to enforce conformity towards prevailing religious mores, as stated above, of a puritanical nature.
Underlying our decision to focus the discussion on the novel…[Read more]

Designed as a short introduction to academic literary studies of affect, Reading Affect in Literary Studies is a one-credit graduate seminar, offered in Spring 2014, that was framed by the question of how we might rethink our practice as scholars of literature to take our scholarship to publics beyond the academy. Readings included work by Rita…[Read more]

The essay reads Ralph Waldo Emerson’s argument for a “nation of friends,” in “Politics,” as Emerson’s response to his lament, also in “Politics,” that the “power of love, as the basis of the State, has never been tried.” By a careful reading of that essay, which includes locating “Politics” within the debate in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan be…[Read more]

Blind’s autonomous cosmopolitanism is in four distinct layers. The first layer is her unusual everyday family background in the transition from Jewish tradition to the life of European revolutionaries in the 1840s and exile in Britain. The second layer is Blind’s mental and moral development under Friederike’s care and educational guidance accor…[Read more]

This paper traces the origins of Chicana-centered figures and tropes found in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God to early 20th century cuentos recorded in the New Mexico Federal Writer’s Project.

In his seminar, Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida discusses how one of the essential qualities of the specter is his ability to appear incessantly. The inability to know when the specter may appear, however, not only enforces its haunting quality but also conveys a despairing sense of what Derrida refers to as empty Messianism from which emits…[Read more]