Marie Darrieussecq’s Clèves (2011) shocked readers with the vulgarity of its language and spurred controversy over its status as a literary text. In this article, I show how the novel’s “bad” language is a foil for Darrieussecq’s larger project of rewriting the adolescent female body, removing it from the sexualized and objectified optic through…[Read more]

Marie Darrieussecq’s Clèves (2011) shocked readers with the vulgarity of its language and spurred controversy over its status as a literary text. In this article, I show how the novel’s “bad” language is a foil for Darrieussecq’s larger project of rewriting the adolescent female body, removing it from the sexualized and objectified optic through…[Read more]

Syllabus for an advanced graduate course on realism and the Victorian novel taught at Temple University in Fall 2015.

John Milton is a hero to Millennials: C. S. Lewis based Perelandra on Paradise Lost; Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy mirrors the epic; Mark Morris’s best ballet is “L’Allegro and Il Penseroso”; digital artist Terrance Lindall created virtual images of Paradise Lost for the Oxford U. Press; Comus is the originator and lead Krewe for…[Read more]

This syllabus delineates the readings and assignments for an advanced undergraduate course on the history and theory of the novel taught in fall 2014 at the University of Georgia.

Unlike his earlier novels, J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, has not received the attention that it deserves from the critics. The novel, which is set in Russia not only draws on real aspects of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life but also on certain events in the Russian author’s novels, specifically The Devils. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is an aging a…[Read more]

How do we offer feedback to essays? Over time, the response as narrative has become problematic. Class sizes have increased, more classes are being taught, fewer professors are teaching composition. Time has become even more scarce as duties outside the classroom multiply for full-time faculty. In addition, technology has changed the way by…[Read more]

I used to share with my classes that ebooks are outselling books, and like the music industry, the book market is now digital. While the record business has shifted in profound ways with the rise of digital technology, the book press is still in flux. Digital book sales over the past couple of years have been fluctuating around book sales. As a…[Read more]

[from pp. 151-52:]

“Not only do we ourselves treat fictional characters as if they were capable of a broad variety of mental states (as real people are) to make sense of the story when we first read it; not only do we casually refer to these characters’ and the author’s mental states in our subsequent discussions with students; not only do we…[Read more]

Is There Tunisian Literature? Emergent Writing and Fractal Proliferation of Minor Voices.
The article presents the Tunisian literature from the non-local perspective of the global literary market and the circulation of translated literature. The minor status of the studied phenomenon becomes obvious even when the Tunisian literature is compared…[Read more]

This primer in “cognitive cultural studies” explores the cultural fantasy of perfect access to mind through body. It shows that different genres and media—movies, novels, classic Chinese operas, medieval ribald tales, musicals, paintings, documentaries, stand-up comedy, and photography—have different strategies for making us think that we have ju…[Read more]

Introduction to Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, which traces the emergence and coherence of the term “modernism”, and the field of modernist studies, from the late 1800s to the present.