In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson called for the poet who would sing the burgeoning nation of the United States of America. The answer to his request far exceeded all his expectations in the form of a ground-breaking volume of poems where Walt Whitman sang not only a nation, but the people who inhabited it as the people incarnated the values, str…[Read more]

Previous studies suggest that narrative fiction promotes social justice by increasing empathy, but critics have argued that the partiality of empathy severely limits its effectiveness as an engine of social justice, and that what needs to be developed is universal compassion rather than empathy. We created Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy (CCP) to…[Read more]

The introduction to a special issue of Studies in Documentary Film I co-edited with Sarah Hamblin on “Radical Documentary in the Globalized Age of New Media”

Social media is a key contemporary site of activity for politics, entertainment, and relationships, but how can we study it? This course combines theory and practice; students will both read canonical and contemporary social media research from leading scholars and learn to engage with social media platforms to collect and analyze their own data.…[Read more]

Susan B. Anthony declared in 1896 that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” The comparative study of ‘Whale Rider’ (2002) and ‘Wadjda’ (2012) demonstrates that this liberating effect of the basic tool of transportation is being reinforced in the new millennium. The analysis further situates two con…[Read more]

Susan B. Anthony declared in 1896 that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” The comparative study of ‘Whale Rider’ (2002) and ‘Wadjda’ (2012) demonstrates that this liberating effect of the basic tool of transportation is being reinforced in the new millennium. The analysis further situates two con…[Read more]

The theme of waiting permeates two poems by the late Syrian poet Nizār Qabbānī. The verse in both poems ‘Waiting for Godot’, and ‘A television interview with an Arab Godot’, describes an arduous wait, at once distressing and unpredictable. In the first poem, the poet urges Godot to arrive, as the savior who will appear in the form of the Messia…[Read more]

At the heart of Gérard Gavarry’s writing are the questions of what power language holds, and what remains beyond the reach of expression. The two translations included here, excerpts from Allada (P.O.L, 1993) and Expérience d’Edward Lee, Versailles (P.O.L, 2009), share little with each other in terms of setting or structure, but explore simil…[Read more]

What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the…[Read more]

This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, the aut…[Read more]

This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, the aut…[Read more]

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill traces the history of naturalist fiction from its emergence in France in the 1860s through its spr…[Read more]

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill traces the history of naturalist fiction from its emergence in France in the 1860s through its spr…[Read more]

The epilogue tackles the ramifications of these new modes of inscribing temporally and visually ambiguous articulations of Shakespeare and China into a global vernacular in theater (Lin Zhaohua’s Richard III) and cinema (Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet). A paradox of infatuation with Asian visuality and rejection of ethnic authenticity emerged in the…[Read more]

Named the Writer of the Millennium, Shakespeare has come full circle and become a cliché, embraced by marketers and contested by intellectuals. Similar narratives about China’s rise in global stature have been told with equal gusto, championed and denounced in turn by optimists and critics. If Shakespeare now has worldwide currency, how is the se…[Read more]

Thanks to Karl Marx’s references in his political treatises, Shakespeare held a significant place in a number of communist and other left-authoritarian countries, including China and the USSR. And although there were themes in Shakespeare that turned out to be inconvenient for communist ideology, other Shakespearean plays were put into service. I…[Read more]

Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick

a bibliography-in-progress for cognitive literary, film, theater, and media studies