The following text was presented as part of the Presidential Panel at the American Comparative Literature Association, Utrecht (The Netherlands), July 8th 2017. The panel was composed of Joseph Slaughter (ACLA President, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University in the City of New York), Maria Aristodemou, Law, Birkbeck College,…[Read more]

The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called “golden age” of SF. In this first phase the advent of the posthuman is brought on by eugenics or sudden mutations caused by fallout from nuclear war. It consists of well-known books by most of the leading authors of the period: C…[Read more]

As the entire world now knows, Dr. David Dao is the passenger who was dragged off a United Airlines Flight on April 9th, 2017 by Chicago security police who broke his nose, gave him a concussion and smashed two of his teeth. Some media have treated this as a horror perpetrated by a single airline that bullies passengers, or by a business model…[Read more]

A review of Robert Leucht’s “Dynamiken politischer Imagination. Die deutschsprachige Utopie von Stifter bis Döblin in ihren internationalen Kontexten, 1848–1930” (2016) and Ulrich Bach’s “Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire” (2016)

“The thesis investigates the case of the modern Television drama series FlashForward and sets out to chart the employment of concepts of Collective Memory Studies in the narrative in order to reflect upon the ways of how social perceptions of the past and Collective Memory are remediated in the course of the narrative.
To achieve that goal, the…[Read more]

This critical commentary argues that the novels submitted (emphasis on Ammonite, The Blue Place, and Hild, with three others, Slow River, Stay, and Always briefly referenced), form a coherent body of work which centres and norms the experience of the Other, particularly queer women. Close reading of the novels demonstrates how specific word-choice…[Read more]

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.

Coloniality is a complex heritage encapsulating complex cultural challenges confronting the performance artist. Nigerian musical production appears to have been operating in a world without borders since the advent of colonialism. There have been non-indigenous forms brought into the cultural landscape which have challenged the performers. The…[Read more]

This is an essay on the relation of images and text. It is part of a larger research project online at writingwithimages.com. See that site for the context; the the project’s purpose is to theorize the possibilities of fiction and poetry that are presented alongside images.

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.

Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report narrates two interrelated stories. The micro
story concerns a family, a kidnapped son, the ensuing trauma, and the work of mourning that
follows. The macro story concerns criminal justice, social stability, and hermeneutics at the level
of the nation state. The problem for both stories is ontological a…[Read more]

This paper discusses Pacific Rim as a film deeply concerned with birth, in particular the horror of birth, and the process by which birth is assimilated. The film may then be seen as part of an unbroken commentary on nuclear
weapons insofar as it is our technological, capitalistic, and nuclear capability that allows
us to close the “breach” and…[Read more]

The historical novel Waking the Dead is now available at ResearchGate. This data file (there are 20) introduces Jane Addams

This paper examines Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake in relation to environmental justice. The best-selling first novel in Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy, Oryx and Crake was widely hailed for its nightmarish depiction of a post-apocalyptic, bioengineered future. The major themes of the novel mirror key themes of the environmental justice movement tod…[Read more]

This article raises questions about the aesthetics of scale as they appear relative to genetically modified organisms in science fiction and especially in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). Bacigalupi makes the unusual choice of representing GMOs largely through science fictional tropes of automatism rather than the grotesque. Because of t…[Read more]