This article investigates Henry James’s digital afterlives by analyzing popular James-themed images and articles that have been shared on the Internet since 2000. Adapting Richard Dawkins’s theory of virality and Michael Anesko’s concept of James’s cultural capital, this article engages with viral content published on websites such as Bustle,…[Read more]

This course focuses on developing visual language literacy and theoretical frameworks through analyzing and creating a range of narrative media. We will examine a range of visual scholarly and creative works, starting with sequential art and moving into time-based and interactive media.

Students will:
1. Learn “close reading” strategies for…[Read more]

“Sensation Fiction and the Medical Context.” Cambridge Companion to Sensation, Andrew Mangham, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 182-195.

The book examines little known and forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism, transgender work and founding of the world’s first Institute of Sexual Science in 1919. Arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, shaped a collective sense…[Read more]

The book examines little known and forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism, transgender work and founding of the world’s first Institute of Sexual Science in 1919. Arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, shaped a collective sense…[Read more]

A contribution to the Editors’ Forum on Queer Form, edited by Kadji Amin, Roy Pérez, and Amber Musser, for ASAP/Journal.

This article examines how the Brothers Grimm are fictionalized in German and Anglo-American media. While some representations revere and romanticize the iconic brothers for preserving the fairy-tale tradition, other depictions challenge the conventional understanding of their work and cultural contribution. In these demythologizing depictions, the…[Read more]

Fairy tales are often described in proprietary terms. Because the myth of their origin among the anonymous folk is so strong, the general tendency in both popular and scholarly discourse is to conceive of fairy tales as either the common property of all humanity or the treasures of specific cultures, nations, or ethnic groups. Since the…[Read more]

Scholarship on the Sleeping Beauty tale has gone largely unappreciated. Underlying the story’s obvious themes and motifs—birth, death/sleep, rebirth—and complicating its gender dynamic is a preoccupation with orality and telling that gives the story a significant self-reflective dimension. This article examines how the tale reflects on story…[Read more]

Scholarship on the Sleeping Beauty tale has gone largely unappreciated. Underlying the story’s obvious themes and motifs—birth, death/sleep, rebirth—and complicating its gender dynamic is a preoccupation with orality and telling that gives the story a significant self-reflective dimension. This article examines how the tale reflects on story…[Read more]

Explores how children of war and adults reflecting on their violent wartime childhoods have had recourse to the space of fairy tales to interpret their traumatic physical environments and their emotional lives within them. To that end, the article (1) considers the nature of time and space in the classic fairy tale; (2) establishes how the…[Read more]

Explores how children of war and adults reflecting on their violent wartime childhoods have had recourse to the space of fairy tales to interpret their traumatic physical environments and their emotional lives within them. To that end, the article (1) considers the nature of time and space in the classic fairy tale; (2) establishes how the…[Read more]

The Grimms’ tale of “Brier Rose” (KHM 50) has self-reflexive characteristics of the Romantic literary fairy tale. In thematizing memory and alluding to the imagery used in the preface to the Grimm brothers’ collection of fairy tales, Wilhelm Grimm’s version of the story self-consciously reflects on its own origins and exhibits a self-awareness…[Read more]

This article focuses initially on a new strand of empirical research that deliberately utilizes folktales and fairy tales to make broader claims for the scientific method and to advocate for the application of evolutionary science to literature in general. After critiquing this work for is its unquestioning reliance on the problematic…[Read more]

A study of the use of proverbs in the film The Company of Wolves (dir. Neil Jordan; screenplay by Jordan and Angela Carter), based on Angela Carter’s adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood tales in her book The Bloody Chamber.

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith’s first novel
White Teeth. The status of Smith’s fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of O…[Read more]