The relationship between obsolescence and innovation in the digital age is a peculiar one, conveying not past and future but instead demonstrating their eternal simultaneity.

This rhetorical analysis of the phrase “The Rust Belt” asks the question Is The Rust Belt real or mythical? Does Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Subaltern’ caste now inhabit the (so-called) Rust Belt? Why can’t Rust Belt writers be heard?
“The Rust Belt” is not a title anyone living there would have chosen and yet we use it. Why? Also why should we depend…[Read more]

An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]

A Robert Brownian Dramatic Dialogue

Whatever your theory and whatever your fandom, you don’t have to abandon it to do affect theory. This is because affect theory isn’t about telling you which side to pick in an agonistic contest; it’s about finding out what a body can do as it moves with other bodies in entangled states, whether or not we notice them. Affect theory offers more…[Read more]

Abstract: This article evaluates the application of dominant institutional discourses, such as psychoanalysis, in the interpretation of literary fiction. I take up the case of Jean Rhys and her 1929 novel _Quartet_. Both author and novel have been analyzed through the concept of masochism, as creating masochistic characters or a masochistic…[Read more]

In this essay I argue that the portrait of Arruntius as a passive Stoic is injudicious, and then I develop a new reading of Jonson’s depiction of Arruntius based on the textual evidence from both the quarto and folio editions of the play. The essay proceeds in three sections. In the first section, I question the commonly held view regarding A…[Read more]

In the late sixteenth century, the common law experienced a phenomenal growth, both in the number of practitioners and jurisdictional power. A comparison of popular and professional literature on legal administration or judicature reveals the complex and ambivalent cultural response to the “rise” of the common law. Despite the usual praise for the…[Read more]

This essay draws on cognitive literary theory to offer new ways of reading Cao Xueqin’s classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢) aka The Story of the Stone.

Why We Read Fiction focuses on one of the most exciting areas of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as “Theory of Mind” and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s…[Read more]

Brian Winston greift die Debatte um die Nicht-Darstellbarkeit der Gewalt des Holocausts auf und weist darauf hin, dass vor jeder moralischen Überlegung zunächst einmal die fast vollständige Abwesenheit von audiovisuellen Zeugnissen konstatiert werden muss. Wie kann der Dokumentarfilm dennoch ein Bild des Grauens zeigen? In Referenz auf den Ve…[Read more]

English title: “Transmedia Storytelling in the narrative universe of ‘Game of Thrones'” — This essay’s aim is to briefly introduce the concept of Transmedia Storytelling and to provide a showcase analysis and review of the serial TV narrative of GAME OF THRONES in order to show how a television series’ narrative universe, driven by both producers…[Read more]

Review of German edited collection on Quality TV (see title)

Review of German edited collection on Quality TV (see title)

Syllabus of BA seminar “Historische Entwicklung US-amerikanischer Fernsehserien von 1950 bis heute” aka. “TV or not TV? Historical Development of US American Serial Television from the 1950s up to today” held during Winter semester 2013/14 at Universität Hamburg, Germany.

Syllabus of BA seminar “Historische Entwicklung US-amerikanischer Fernsehserien von 1950 bis heute” aka. “TV or not TV? Historical Development of US American Serial Television from the 1950s up to today” held during Winter semester 2013/14 at Universität Hamburg, Germany.

Syllabus of BA seminar “Historische Entwicklung US-amerikanischer Fernsehserien von 1950 bis heute” aka. “TV or not TV? Historical Development of US American Serial Television from the 1950s up to today” held during Winter semester 2013/14 at Universität Hamburg, Germany.

ENWR 1510 is a writing seminar designed to introduce students to the fundamentals of academic
prose. We cover a number of writing topics in class, including the crafting of arguments,
methods of brainstorming and revision, approaches to research, and the principles of good style.
Like other classes in academic writing at the University of…[Read more]

Document annotation is almost as old as writing. The designers of the World Wide Web envisioned a system that would allow people to publicly annotate any document. The advent of cloud computing has finally made this feasible: distributed annotation systems like Hypothes.is allow users to save annotations privately, or share them with the public.…[Read more]