A reflection on the state of the archive in the state of post-theory.

Examiner/examined, analyst/analysand, subject/object, sane/mad, science/art: the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature appears to conform to this binary logic, with the first term in each set clearly privileged over the second. The realm of the literary is populated with an impressive assortment of mad characters and mad authors:…[Read more]

This course, designed for a graduate program in education which focuses on leadership, explores works of literature that have had a significant cultural impact and shaped ways in which societies view social issues from the perspective of how leadership is enacted within the texts. For students from disciplines outside of literature studies, this…[Read more]

In this essay, I follow debates about forms and sites of memorialization in post- Soviet Belarus. Begun during perestroika, the public discussions about Khatyn’ and Kuropaty eventually evolved into persistent attempts to realign the Soviet past along new narrative axes. Most prominently, this discursive reformatting of the socialist experience w…[Read more]

A video essay about title sequences from films by Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher. An exploration of motion graphic design from analog to digital.

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]

Argues that the documentary Paper Clips exemplifies the ways in which Holocaust education can unwittingly foster competing victimization narratives between blacks and Jews, sanitize both European and U.S. history, and serve subtle
but pernicious forms of supersessionism.

Du paletot idéal de «Ma Bohème » à la robe de laine des anges de Mystique, les tissus se dématérialisent dans la poésie de Rimbaud. La portée du champ sémantique des étoffes et des vêtements dans l’œuvre du poète de Charleville structure, avec d’autres thèmes, l’esthétique de la Voyance. Le monde s’habille, en effet, d’âme, tandis que l’âme…[Read more]

If synesthesia is rare in “Le Spleen de Paris”, it is also differently constructed and shaped than in the Fleurs du Mal. This article aims to demonstrate that this evolution points out a shift in Baudelaire’s esthetics, that from Unity of Univers seems to move towards fragmentation of reality: actually, from Baudelaire to Proust.
Abstract in…[Read more]

Film review of Woman in Gold (2015) as a cinematic rendering of the material turn in Holocaust memory.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the chapter:

Ungleichzeitigkeit and global modernisms

Over the last twenty-five years, the modernist canon has been significantly revised as theoretical and empirical interventions have emphasised its transnational and globalised patterns of connection through a range of disciplinary…[Read more]

This article explores what Gershom Scholem has called Herbert Marcuse’s “unacknowledged ties to [his] Jewish heritage.” At the core of Marcuse’s vision of transformed, non-repressive social relations, I argue, is a struggle over time, which rests upon a distinctly Jewish approach to the twin questions of remembrance and redemption. One example…[Read more]