Abstract:

Assuming that the American self (and culture) was founded upon Puritan values, the aim of this paper is to discuss the importance of identificatory processes in helping to enforce conformity towards prevailing religious mores, as stated above, of a puritanical nature.
Underlying our decision to focus the discussion on the novel…[Read more]

Designed as a short introduction to academic literary studies of affect, Reading Affect in Literary Studies is a one-credit graduate seminar, offered in Spring 2014, that was framed by the question of how we might rethink our practice as scholars of literature to take our scholarship to publics beyond the academy. Readings included work by Rita…[Read more]

Johannesburg, Chicago of South Africa
Chicago, Johannesburg by the Lake

Like other forms of treachery, translation can be either concealed or exposed. Though most literary translators work in the dark and some embrace invisibility as an ideal, all translations can be situated along the continuum of illusionist-anti-illusionist or domesticating-foreignizing. A variety of paratexts lay bare the devices of translation.…[Read more]

This article reads the smuggling of Aztec artifacts described in Lucha Corpi’s novel Black Widow’s Wardrobe in the context of new materialist philosophies of becoming.

The essay reads Ralph Waldo Emerson’s argument for a “nation of friends,” in “Politics,” as Emerson’s response to his lament, also in “Politics,” that the “power of love, as the basis of the State, has never been tried.” By a careful reading of that essay, which includes locating “Politics” within the debate in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan be…[Read more]

Adam Smith closes the first chapter to Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘Of Sympathy’, with a harmless enough assertion: ‘We sympathize even with the dead’. Death is not a topic that much interests Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments. With the exception of a few miscellaneous thoughts in the text, the one paragraph Smith devotes to it is the extent of…[Read more]

The present essay will explore legal areas of Giambattista Vico’s thought from a rhetorical and literary perspective. In particular, the essay will focus on the idea of «person» as it is investigated in De uno and New Science. The euristic quality of the notion of fictio iuris will be identified as generative core of the imaginative universal the…[Read more]

Although the question of the role of empathy in our experience of fiction is currently an active one in psychology, most of the relevant research has been conducted on popular literature and film. This dissertation seeks to change that by using cognitive approaches to literature to examine how and why postmodern texts disrupt the reader or…[Read more]

The main topic of this article is the history of a rare and precious French magazine of the late Nineteenth century, in which a vivid and crucial discussion about arts and their inter-relation grew the more and more intense in the short space of four years (1892-1896). The “Livre d’Art” was first conceived as a simple booklet to be distr…[Read more]

The state of academic freedom today, the particular vulnerability of certain areas of study, and the special relevance of scholarship in the humanities to defenses of academic freedom.