This paper aims to define the concepts of “material thought” and “material time,” as they are theorized by Proust in the Preface of his Ruskin’s Amiens Bible translation, and as they are developed throughout the Recherche. In Proust’s oeuvre ‘material thought’ manifests itself mostly in linguistic and stylistic features, or in concrete images,…[Read more]

This paper aims to define the concepts of “material thought” and “material time,” as they are theorized by Proust in the Preface of his Ruskin’s Amiens Bible translation, and as they are developed throughout the Recherche. In Proust’s oeuvre ‘material thought’ manifests itself mostly in linguistic and stylistic features, or in concrete images,…[Read more]

Many varieties of French have changed over the years from expressing predicate
negation (Geurts 1998) with ne alone, to the embracing construction ne … pas, and then
to postverbal pas alone (Jespersen 1917). When the increase in the frequency of
ne … pas over time is plotted on a graph, it takes the S shape of the logistic function
(Kroch 198…[Read more]

Dany Laferrière’s first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre was a literary sensation when it was first released in Quebec in the mid-80s. The author/narrator plays with reader’s expectations, presenting both a stereotypical image of the black man (sex-obsessed, white-hating) and one that contradicts and upsets their expectations. Influen…[Read more]

Author Dany Laferrière, after a seven year hiatus from writing, produced the book Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008) [I am a Japanese Writer]. The title recalls statements he has frequently made in interviews about how much he hates being pigeon-holed by national or racial labels. The book itself is an examination of what (or who) defines s…[Read more]

When all men are either dead, exiled, thugs or zombies in a world ruled through violence and terror by a President-for-Life and his son, how is a young boy expected to come of age and forge his own identity? Le Goût des Jeunes Filles (On the Verge of Fever), a 2004 film about Fanfan, a 15-year-old boy, set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on the same…[Read more]

Lecture/class notes on George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

This article examines the poetry of Cuban writer Cristina Ayala emphasizing the political value of her use of a rhetoric of heroism, a discursive device that masks her demands for recognition of women’s rights and those of Afro-Cubans. The analysis of her poetry suggests that the symbolic manipulation of the “hero” and the representation of “colo…[Read more]

This article examines the performativity of novelistic discourse in order to propose a different set of terms for understanding the circulation of the novel around the world than those that are based on the referential form/content model.

This article examines the performativity of novelistic discourse in order to propose a different set of terms for understanding the circulation of the novel around the world than those that are based on the referential form/content model.

On performativity of Dickens as author in his prefaces

On performativity of Dickens as author in his prefaces

The animal characteristics of the monster in late Victorian gothic fiction make visible the biopolitical rationalisation of life in modern societies. Key moments in Bram Sto- ker’s Dracula and R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde provide evidence for the animality of late Victorian gothic monsters. In an extended reading of Ric…[Read more]

The animal characteristics of the monster in late Victorian gothic fiction make visible the biopolitical rationalisation of life in modern societies. Key moments in Bram Sto- ker’s Dracula and R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde provide evidence for the animality of late Victorian gothic monsters. In an extended reading of Ric…[Read more]

This essay argues that curiosity can work as irony’s shadow dialectic in modernist responses to imperialism and metropolitan culture, and suggests that curiosity deserves further exploration as a modernist device. Attentive to the settings and visual metaphors of space and structure that abet irony’s role, this essay finds that curiosity’s…[Read more]