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“The fact is that we create our own precursors“, writes Jorge Luis Borges in „Kafka and his Precursors“ where he reflects on the anachronistic dynamics which results from the interaction of writers with their predecessors.[1] For my own research, inspired by 20th century approaches to Shakespeare, the question: How does modernism relate to Shakespeare and […]
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The present position of the Roman Catholic Church is that an immortal soul is infused into the fetus at the moment of conception, but this has not always been its position. The dogma that “ensoulment” coincides with the fertilization of the egg by the sperm was adopted by the Catholic Church only starting in 1869. […]
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By the time I wrote Queering Medieval Latin Rhetoric: Silence, Subversion, and Sexual Heterodoxy, I’d spent thirty years loitering at the margins of medieval texts–squinting in the half-light, as it were, for signs of mutual recognition, like the sodomites of Dante’s Seventh Circle. But it’s the guesswork of cruising that’s most engaging. It took me […]
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When you think about Latin American literature, you might first recall the magical realist novels that hit the international literary markets in the mid-twentieth century. This region’s literature might also evoke the names of certain traditionally canonical authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar and Pablo Neruda. This heyday […]
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When the COVID-19 pandemic brought normal life to a halt in 2020, thousands of people around the globe began reading Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Virtual reading groups, forums, and op-eds peppered the web. While many people cited the enormous length of the novel as a reason to read it during lockdown (when else?), the […]
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My friend Heather Dubrow, critic and poet, turned to me and said: “The text as enemy.” She was commenting on a talk just given by a prominent literary scholar who championed literary criticism as a practice of unveiling prejudices, of revealing cultural bias, injustice and contradictions, and of cultivating distrust of language. Literature, in the […]
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Travel about twenty-five miles south from my house and eighty-seven years back in time and you’d have a shot at encountering one of the twentieth century’s most influential artists taking the picture shown above. In August 1936, Walker Evans traveled to Hale County, Alabama, with writer James Agee to document how poorly tenant-farming families were […]
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In my book The Old Enemies (CUP) I described 1845 as ‘a year of religious crises’. Later, when looking at broader trends that year, I was surprised by the sustained intensity of crises that also arose in three other areas of national life: Ireland, the ‘Condition of England’ and the railways. Deep concern about each […]
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