The author argues that Juan Manuel’s willingness to embrace Andalusī narrative genres and materials, including a number of proverbs which he quotes in the original Arabic, seems on the surface to run counter to his official
narrative of Reconquest. However, this apparent contradiction is typical both of the colonial society in which Don Juan Ma…[Read more]

The author argues that Juan Manuel’s willingness to embrace Andalusī narrative genres and materials, including a number of proverbs which he quotes in the original Arabic, seems on the surface to run counter to his official
narrative of Reconquest. However, this apparent contradiction is typical both of the colonial society in which Don Juan Ma…[Read more]

In this article the author argues for the influence of the Hebrew and Arabic maqama on the Libro de buen amor (Juan Ruiz) and Spill (Jaume Roig) based on the narratological disposition of the narrator/protagonist.

In this article the author compares the exemplo of Don Yllan and the Dean de Santiago, #11 in Don Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor (ca. 1335) with an earlier Hebrew analogue found in the Hebrew Meshal Haqadmoni (ca. 1285) of fellow Castilian author Isaac ibn Sahula. A thorough analysis of the rhetorical and narrative style of both versions reveals that…[Read more]

The work of the Judeo-Spanish poet and exegete Abraham Ibn Ezra (d. 1167 C.E.) featuring the language of the Song is perhaps the best showcase of the interplay between sacred and secular in Hebrew Andalusī literature. When it comes to the Song, Ibn Ezra literally wrote the book on it, a commentary that gives equal treatment to its literal and…[Read more]

providing a context for the anecdotes and fables narrated by the characters in each text.
The way in which the performativity of each text is constructed reflects their respective
cultural and literary heritage, as well as the performative nature of Medieval Arabic
literature in general. The two texts represent a convergence of different oral…[Read more]

This essay explores insistently practical medieval texts—works whose explicit goal is to assist their readers to make something in the world beyond the page (a book, a culinary dish, an ointment, an object) and asks if they can be said to have a poetics. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice as well as Gérard Gene…[Read more]

This essay explores insistently practical medieval texts—works whose explicit goal is to assist their readers to make something in the world beyond the page (a book, a culinary dish, an ointment, an object) and asks if they can be said to have a poetics. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice as well as Gérard Gene…[Read more]

This essay explores insistently practical medieval texts—works whose explicit goal is to assist their readers to make something in the world beyond the page (a book, a culinary dish, an ointment, an object) and asks if they can be said to have a poetics. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice as well as Gérard Gene…[Read more]

This chapter explores the strange intimacies of dis/avowal that obtain between Holocaust studies and postcolonial theory, with particular reference to writing by Aimé Césaire and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. For all that the Jewish body remains, by and large, unmourned in the canonical texts of postcolonial theory, the Holocaust has, I seek to a…[Read more]

My paper concerns two radically distinct portrayals of genital injury. The first examples, drawn from legal and doctrinal narrative, describe the cultural norm of meaningful castration. The other, which provides my paper with its title, is from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. This set of one is an analogous injury that may mean nothing: n…[Read more]

This course examines the literary, cultural, and material life of written correspondence from the poetic epistle to the snarky tweet. And while we will read and analyze epistolary literature (both fiction and nonfiction) such as Ovid’s Heroides, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and
Alice Walker’s A Color Purple, we focus our efforts on “real” letters o…[Read more]

Kafka’s last short story: Josephine die Saengerin – as translated by Phillip Lundberg. Copyright Free translation as stated on the copyright page of Essential Kafka.