Often described as an open-air prison, the citizens of the Gaza Strip have long resisted a subaltern existence. Conditions in Gaza, and specifically since the Second Intifada of 2000, have increasingly worsened. With the advent of Hamas in 2006-2007, a complete blockade was imposed on the Strip. A deafening silence by the world has resulted in…[Read more]

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” is known for its seductive writing despite its destructive subject matter. How does this novel accomplish such a juxtaposition? How does the novel keep the reader interested despite Humber blatantly attacking Dolores Haze? This essay explores critically explores the technical method which Nabokov uses in “Lolita.” The…[Read more]

Prior to the advent of the printing press, the page—the medieval manuscript page—was often complexly multimodal, containing elaborate scripts, rubrications, and illuminations; the medieval page was a multimedia experience for its community of readers, viewers, and listeners. Both writing and the page are, and always were, visual: rendered in mul…[Read more]

With the support of recent theorizing in evolutionary biology and anthropology, this essay refurbishes the term archetype for reuse, recognizing that it signals a painful cognitive failure. Examples are taken from The Terminator movies and pictures of the annunciation to Mary.

Iconotropism is a gargantuan overgeneralization hypothesizing that people are hungry for pictures and feed on them, metabolize them, turn them into nourishment. The study examples are Raphael’s Transfiguration and Titian’s Diana and Actaeon. It is a contribution to embodiment theory and cognitive cultural history.

This is an afterword to Movement in Literature: Exploring Kinesis Intelligence, ed. by Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters. (Palgrave 2018). It is intended to advance further work on kinesic intelligence by connection some of what has already been written about how the forms of fiction appeal to what human bodies know about action with what can be…[Read more]

The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke…[Read more]

This unit contains a brief introduction in Spanish, an edition of the original Castilian text with facing modernization and notes in Spanish, and a short bibliography.

This unit contains a selection of texts from the Sendebar (1253), one of the most famous and widespread collections of exemplary literature in the Middle Ages, with versions in…[Read more]

This unit contains a brief introduction in English, an edition of the original Castilian text with facing English translation and notes, and a short bibliography.

This unit contains a selection of texts from the Sendebar (1253), one of the most famous and widespread collections of exemplary literature in the Middle Ages, with versions in…[Read more]

This unit contains a brief introduction (Spanish), edition of the original Castilian text with facing modernization and notes in Spanish, and a short bibliography.

The text is the first modernization of the medieval Castilian of Ferrán Martínez’s speech at the royal court in Seville in 1388. Martínez was a canon at the Cathedral Chapter and th…[Read more]

This unit contains a brief introduction (English), edition of the original Castilian text with facing English translation and notes, and a short bibliography.

The text is the first English translation from the medieval Castilian of Ferrán Martínez’s speech at the royal court in Seville in 1388. Martínez was a canon at the Cathedral Chapter an…[Read more]

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]

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 essay explores the gap between the abstract ideal of fairness and the bodily materiality of retribution. My aim is to suggest how some current cognitive science affords a helpful way of talking about the breaks between abstractions, or thoughts of fairness, and the judgments and punishments produced by actual legal systems. It is remarkably…[Read more]

In her introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Lisa Zunshine, scholar in the field and its best historian, describes cognitive literary critics as working “not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms in literary and cultural studies” (2015). Scholars from m…[Read more]

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