One of the main challenges when approaching Dickinson is navigating the gigantic body of criticism which is out there. My own work on Dickinson has taken me through the different stages where this is crucial – from being a student and postgraduate researcher, to an author and University lecturer. When thinking about writing about or… Read More »
Editing is the invisible art. When it’s done well, the reader doesn’t notice the editor’swork, though you can bet the reader will notice a lack of editing. Good editors workbehind the scenes, putting writers and their words at center stage. Great editors deliberatelyavoid the spotlight. (And like stagehands, they look good in black.) But all… Read More »
The premise of the present book is simple. Like the epic and the novel, science fiction is a literary form. By that we mean a historical narrative form, which is at the same time a narrative form of history—history understood, as in French or German, in the double meaning of story and history. The subject… Read More »
Look, look, he’s a marrano, lower than dust. Juan de Lucena, De Vita Beata [1] I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble, and finally a heap of ashes, but spirit will hover over the ashes. Ludwig Wittgenstein [2] This book is the first monograph wholly devoted to the… Read More »
To speak of Baudelaire is to speak of paradox and contradiction. It is to speak of a poet who is modern, amodern, and antimodern, one who vaunts transcendent correspondences and lets his poet’s halo remain trapped in the mud of the urban street. Baudelaire’s works defy any attempt characterize them except by way of a… Read More »
In 2014, prominent Québécois columnist Christian Rioux published a fearmongering opinion piece on the use of “Franglais” (or Frenglish) in one of Quebec’s most prominent newspapers, Le Devoir, and sparked a province-wide controversy. In his piece, Rioux deplores the degraded quality of the French language he supposedly observes in Quebec and, most importantly, points a… Read More »
SAFE ABORTION / PAIN-FREE / SAME-DAY / CALL NOW In contemporary South Africa, these words may be found plastered on any public objects ranging from lamp posts to litter bins. Promotional flyers by traditional healers make similar claims alongside promises to bring back lost lovers, enhance penis length and more. The supposedly painless abortion is… Read More »
This book originated out of my desire to reclaim climate change fiction (cli-fi) from the view that it is primarily concerned with future disasters and written in modes that go beyond realism to encompass the horrors of the looming apocalypse. Brilliant though novels of this kind can be, they seemed to me to run the… Read More »
Chasing Freedom through Romantic Love in Popular and Literary Fiction In post-1990s India, romantic love is increasingly a fungible commodity. It is an emotion that is separable from the self and subject to a process of self-evaluation and rational judgment. It is evaluated because it must fulfill a function, that of confirming a revenue generating… Read More »
Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture documents a profound shift in the meaning of individual freedom in India. This change has occurred largely since the 1990s, when the Indian economy was liberalized. The idea of individual freedom, once capacious enough to include notions of political sovereignty, individual agency, and social and… Read More »