In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomp…[Read more]

Dream Life of Waste: Archaeologies of the Soul in the Key of Capitalism

(Entries organized in chronological order by date of obsolescence)

In this essay we reinterpret Camus’s novel The Plague in light of the urgency of history, that with Covid 19 pandemia made us face a real pestilence, thus allowing us to read reality and fiction as even. Our rereading relativizes the traditional allegoric interpretation of critics, while at the same time it widens its perspectives. It is in fact i…[Read more]

This article takes up the insurrection in Washington DC, and the paranoid politics of QAnon. It analyzes the gamification of paranoia across QAnon and related paranoid publics, tracking such gamification as a political-economic demand generated by neoliberalism. Taking seriously Sigmund Freud’s insight that delusional formations are attempts at…[Read more]

Thisarticleaims at a better comprehension of the series of lectures that Joseph Czapski gave in the Soviet camp of Grazovietzbetween 1940 and 1941. The case of Czapski is well known, but his exceptional performance (of memory, and critical inquiry) deserves further investigation. Not surprisingly, the Polish painter…[Read more]

Der Aufsatz widmet sich dem Jean Paulschen Witz als einem grundlegenden Verfahren, das maßgeblich zur Poetizität seiner satirischen Prosa beiträgt. Der Gang der Argumentation führt vom Wort-Schatz als Ressource des Witzes (I.) über die Manöver des (unbildlichen) Witzes (II.), die sprachliche Selbstreferenz des Wortspiels (III.) und die Anagr…[Read more]

Mit dem Begriff des Plagiats findet Wilhelm Raabe in “Gutmanns Reisen” eine Chiffre für seine Praxis unhintergehbarer Intertextualität. Angesichts einer durch starke Vorgänger und eine stetig anwachsende ‘Literaturgeschichte’ fraglich gewordenen Kategorie des Neuen behauptet Raabe eine paradoxe Autorschaft originärer Sekundarität, die darin best…[Read more]

Mit dem Begriff des Plagiats findet Wilhelm Raabe in “Gutmanns Reisen” eine Chiffre für seine Praxis unhintergehbarer Intertextualität. Angesichts einer durch starke Vorgänger und eine stetig anwachsende ‘Literaturgeschichte’ fraglich gewordenen Kategorie des Neuen behauptet Raabe eine paradoxe Autorschaft originärer Sekundarität, die darin best…[Read more]

Raabe schreibt eine Prosa, die er an der Verdichtung der Versdichtung bemisst und die sich die Umwendung zum Modell nimmt. Ein Text, der diesen Umstand im Zeichen der Korrektur ‘dürftiger Prose’ inszeniert und den ich daher eine Programmschrift der Prosa nenne, liegt mit “Deutscher Mondschein” vor. Auf der Textbühne der Satire werden nicht nur d…[Read more]

Raabe schreibt eine Prosa, die er an der Verdichtung der Versdichtung bemisst und die sich die Umwendung zum Modell nimmt. Ein Text, der diesen Umstand im Zeichen der Korrektur ‘dürftiger Prose’ inszeniert und den ich daher eine Programmschrift der Prosa nenne, liegt mit “Deutscher Mondschein” vor. Auf der Textbühne der Satire werden nicht nur d…[Read more]

An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works.

This article argues that Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ (1860) draws together ageing and decay through the poem’s formal wrinkling: moments where metrical disruption, folding, slackness, or concealment correspond to the insights derived from the perspective of great age — chiming the poet’s keynotes of disappointment, mourning, and loss. I turn to ‘Ulysses…[Read more]

The significance of old age in Kipling’s work has gone largely unacknowledged by critics who attend to the many youthful protagonists who sail, hunt, and explore their way across the plots of his fiction. This essay argues that the relationship between grandparent and grandchild in Kipling’s Kim serves as a representational strategy—at the level…[Read more]

The rapid onset of dementia after an illness, the development of gray hair after a traumatic loss, the sudden appearance of a wrinkle in the brow of a spurned lover. The realist novel uses these conventions to accelerate the process of aging into a descriptive moment, writing the passage of years on the body all at once. Aging, Duration, and the…[Read more]

In 1939, Keidrych Rhys charged that Dylan Thomas’ “Prologue to an Adventure” was reprinted “in Delta (Paris) without acknowledgement… without permission”; however, Ralph Maud contrarily argues “Durrell, as editor of Delta, asked Thomas for contributions and published something by him in all three issues” (123). Thomas’ letters support the latter…[Read more]

In 1939, Keidrych Rhys charged that Dylan Thomas’ “Prologue to an Adventure” was reprinted “in Delta (Paris) without acknowledgement… without permission”; however, Ralph Maud contrarily argues “Durrell, as editor of Delta, asked Thomas for contributions and published something by him in all three issues” (123). Thomas’ letters support the latter…[Read more]

This essay/ article examines the provenance and the implications of a literary archive acquired by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of Queen’s University Belfast and now fully catalogued by Brian Caraher and Emma Hegarty under the auspices of the British Academy. The state-of-the-art. fully annotated, online catalogue establishes the…[Read more]

This essay/ article examines the provenance and the implications of a literary archive acquired by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of Queen’s University Belfast and now fully catalogued by Brian Caraher and Emma Hegarty under the auspices of the British Academy. The state-of-the-art. fully annotated, online catalogue establishes the…[Read more]