Since his first works came to critical attention, Ernest Hemingway has occupied a space in the critical and cultural imagination as a definitively ‘masculine’ writer. His novels and stories focus on male narrators in difficult or extreme situations involving war, violence, and the natural world, and his critical heritage has focused on these ele…[Read more]

Situates the composition of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source material, and pilot essays to its publication as an 84-page pamphlet—within the intellectual tendencies of the Reconstruction-era American social science movement to reveal Whitman’s text as an important case study in the nascent discipline. In his pro…[Read more]

This paper is a critical examination of two antithetical theories on the role of authorial intention in the criticism and interpretation of literature: the New Critics’ “intentional fallacy” and E. D. Hirsch’s historicist objectivism. A third way is put forward: a regulative objectivism which emerges as a a result of critical debate.

The link between asimovian universe and Sherlock Holmes

gender & Judaism in A Serious Man [Coen Bros, 2009], An American Dream [Norman Mailer, 1965] and the Pericope Adulterae.

This article focuses on three post-9/11 meta-poems – “My Wife Says Don’t Write About September 11th” by Ryan G. Van Cleave, “How to Write A Poem After September 11th” by Nikki Moustaki and “To the Words” by W. S. Merwin – to demonstrate the point that the current scholarly understanding of post-9/11 aesthetics as something functioning like…[Read more]

Though many studies of contemporary Buddhist literature exist, such studies often limit their purview to canonised, ‘high-brow’ authors. In this article, I read Janwillem van de Wetering’s The Japanese Corpse, a detective novel, for how it portrays Zen Buddhism. I show that The Japanese Corpse portrays Zen as non-dualist and amoral: good and bad a…[Read more]

‘Narrative Theory’ is an online introduction to classical structuralist narratological analysis. The fourth section deals with the modes of narrative, “showing” and “telling”, as theorized by Henry James and other theorists of the dramatic aesthetics in narrative. Outline: 1. Two concepts of narrative distance. 2. The theory of the novel before…[Read more]

This article compares the historiographic methods of two 19th century, California historians.. Mariano Vallejo, former Mexican military commander of Alta California, wrote his Recuerdos at the request of San Francisco-based, Anglo-American historian Hubert H. Bancroft. In his own memoir, Literary Industries (1915), Bancroft describes his…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

Call for Papers

The literary relation between Parvin E’tesami and Walt Whitman remains a largely unexplored field. This article analyzes the connection between “God’s Weaver” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to shed light on Parvin’s creative reception of Whitman. Creating a mixed-breed spider, combining characteristics from both
Whitman’s insect and the Persi…[Read more]

In a 1972 poem about Vancouver Island, Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco wonders, “Acaso fue el Aztlán de las mexicas / De allí partieron siete tribus.” Though Pacheco spent several years living in Vancouver during the late 1960s and early 1970s—and was published in a 1971 anthology of poetry “From Canada’s Unofficial Languages”—h…[Read more]

This paper offers a metafictional reading of William Faulkner’s novel AS I LAY DYING (1930), a reading which goes beyond the usual mimetic interpretation of this novel as an exploration of the characters’ psychology. Faulkner’s writing also explores and allegorizes itself, through the creation of paradoxical narrative forms which carry out an…[Read more]

Featuring work by: Will Alexander, Alexis Almeida, Maria Attanasio, Gennady Aygi, Omar Berrada, Carla Billitteri, Tanella Boni, Amal Dunqul, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Norman Fischer, Peter France, Todd Fredson, María José Giménez, Yāqūt Al-Ḥamawī, Ouyang Jianghe, Hajiwara Kyojiro, John High, Roberta Iannamico, Lucas Klein, David Larsen, Brian Lucas,…[Read more]

Aboriginal Song Poems (compiled by Robert Wood) André Breton (translated by Mark Polizzotti) René Char (translated by Stuart Kendall) Sergio Chejfec (translated by Margaret Carson) James Clifford Joseph Donahue Gyrðir Elíasson (translated by Meg Matich) Clayton Eshleman (interviewed by Irakli Qolbaia) Nazim Hikmet (translated by Murat Nem…[Read more]

Featuring work by: Eugénio de Andrade, Anonymous, A. James Arnold, Rito Ramón Aroche, Dawn-Michelle Baude, Susan Bernofsky, Aloysius Bertrand, Paul Blackburn, Daniel Borzutzky, André Breton, Garrett Caples, Valerie Mejer Caso, RosalÍa de Castro, Paul Celan, Aimé Césaire, René Char, Beatritz de Dia, Kristin Dykstra, Paul Éluard, Clayton Eshlema…[Read more]