The search for a methodology for reading world literature largely entails the development of new critical paradigms, but it has also occasioned a re-examination and rehabilitation of world literature’s historical formulations. This essay reclaims a forgotten milestone, the 1946 essay “La ‘letteratura mondiale'” by the eminent Italian philologist…[Read more]

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction
with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the
United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture,
including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare P…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that the post-war critical re-interpretation of Boccaccio’s oeuvre was central to the theory and practice of Italian Neorealism. What is more, I maintain that Neorealism significantly influenced Boccaccio studies, shaping critical approaches to Boccaccio for decades after 1945. Reading scholarly and critical studies of…[Read more]

In his seminal study, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, Eyal Weizman argues how the Israeli occupation has forced a new imagined space to emerge, which is at once confining to the Palestinians and increases their sense of marginalization and loss. Changing the landscape through imposing architecture construction is a way to…[Read more]

In his seminal study, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, Eyal Weizman argues how the Israeli occupation has forced a new imagined space to emerge, which is at once confining to the Palestinians and increases their sense of marginalization and loss. Changing the landscape through imposing architecture construction is a way to…[Read more]

Global Indigeneity
Considers theoretical and political questions raised by the model of “trans-indigeneity” paying attention to indigenous mythologies, histories of settler colonialism, and questions of comparison, translation, resistance, language, and appropriation. 300-word abstract and short bio.
Deadline for submissions: Friday, 20 Mar…[Read more]

Global Indigeneity
Considers theoretical and political questions raised by the model of “trans-indigeneity” paying attention to indigenous mythologies, histories of settler colonialism, and questions of comparison, translation, resistance, language, and appropriation. 300-word abstract and short bio.
Deadline for submissions: Friday, 20 Mar…[Read more]

In the fall of 1966, Ḥiwār magazine published al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s novel Mawsim al-hijrah ilā al-shamāl [ Season of Migration to the North ]. Arabic literary critics both hailed the novel in the Arabic press and mourned that it had been published by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom’s Ḥiwār, part of a global covert cultural front of the C…[Read more]

This paper interrogates the connection between entities that hover in the liminal state between life and death (such as vampires and spirits) and the manner in which these entities relate to Alaya Dawn Johnson’s conjurings of alternate political structures and hierarchies in her Spirit Binders series. Johnson’s alternate hierarchies are com…[Read more]

This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]

This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]

This is a pedagogical edition of a selection of Las excelencias de los hebreos (Amsterdam 1679), in .doc format with an English-language introduction and notes, with the original text in both the original Castilian and English translation.

Las excelencias de los hebreos (Amsterdam 1679) is a treatise describing the positive characteristics…[Read more]

Call for Proposals

Media, Lingualisms, Translations: Technologies of Language and Power

Conference to be held November 13-14, 2020; hosted by the School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University, Tempe.

Keynote speakers: Jean-Noël Robert (Collège de France, Paris)
Lourdes Ortega (Georgetown University, W…[Read more]

Review of Ellen D. Haskell, Mystical Resistance: Uncovering the Zohar’s Conversations with Christianity (Oxford UP 2016), originally published in Speculum 94.4 (2019), 1167–1168.