This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

In his writing, Cultural theorist Stuart Hall has often argued that an image or a set of images has the capability of condensing a number of attributes into a single picture, producing a misleading representation of what other people and cultures are like. As a result, multiple stories evolve into the one story that is told repeatedly and usually…[Read more]

Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, acc…[Read more]

Revised (but still draft) version of the 2023 version of Technology, Literacy, & Culture: Narrative Play: Storytelling Games at Home & On Screen, a course that has students do in-depth analysis of tabletop roleplaying games through extended play, close reading of rule systems, and analysis of actual play.

This article provides an overview of the special issue. It argues that attention to literary forms plays an important role when it comes to issues of social justice and aging. Forms enable and disable what can be said; they shape the way we receive and process information; they conjure affects that can supplement or contradict the content that…[Read more]

Alarmist demography often situates older people as natural
disasters: images of the “gray flood” and “silver tsunami” imbue
senescence with the destructive force of climatic proportions. This
Element focuses on the demographic dread arising from the relative
shift in younger and older populations: not of a world lacking children,
but of one…[Read more]

Makes use of the opportunity of the release of “Oppenheimer” to explore how Gene Wolfe uses his texts as factories into which guilt is inserted, but emerge ameliorated. Narrative serving the primary purpose of restructuring subconscious memory.

the epic opposite is the tenth of a series of ten collections that draw on material from notebooks I kept between 2004 and 2013. I returned to that material in 2021 with Basho and haibun in mind, as well as the prosimetrum tradition that flourished in medieval Europe. Both play off a tension between poetry and prose, and, looking back, that is…[Read more]

solitude is another matter is the ninth of a series of ten collections that draw on material from notebooks I kept between 2004 and 2013. I returned to that material in 2021 with Basho and haibun in mind, as well as the prosimetrum tradition that flourished in medieval Europe. Both play off a tension between poetry and prose, and, looking back,…[Read more]

a composition of fractions is the eighth of a series of ten collections that draw on material from notebooks I kept between 2004 and 2013. I returned to that material in 2021 with Basho and haibun in mind, as well as the prosimetrum tradition that flourished in medieval Europe. Both play off a tension between poetry and prose, and, looking back,…[Read more]

The seventh of ten notebooks, drafted between June 2008 and March 2009. Some of the material has appeared previously in poetry collections I have published since 2006, but I have gone back to the original drafts to rethink and reconfigure what appears here.

The sixth of ten notebooks, drafted between June 2007 and June 2008. Some of the material has appeared previously in poetry collections I have published since 2006, but I have gone back to the original drafts to rethink and reconfigure what appears here. Many of the poems in part two are included in a dim sum of the day before, published by Ink…[Read more]

The fifth of ten notebooks, drafted between April 2006 and June 2007. Some of the material has appeared previously in poetry collections I have published since 2006, but I have gone back to the original drafts to rethink and reconfigure what appears here. While particular places are referenced in the text of some of the poems in this volume, only…[Read more]

The fourth of ten notebooks, drafted between February and August 2006. Some of the material has appeared previously in poetry collections I have published since 2006, but I have gone back to the original drafts to rethink and reconfigure what appears here. This fourth volume differs from the first three in that all of the compositions are clearly…[Read more]

The third of a series of collections that draw on material from notebooks I kept between 2004 and 2013. I returned to that material in 2021 with Basho and haibun in mind, as well as the prosimetrum tradition that flourished in medieval Europe. Both play off a tension between poetry and prose, and, looking back, that is what I found myself doing…[Read more]