Category Archives: Twentieth-Century Literature
Who was Alice Dunbar-Nelson?
While sitting in a classroom at Dillard University of New Orleans in the 1990’s, I met Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935). She, as we would say back then, “rocked my world.” Nearly one hundred years removed from the characters in her first collection, Violets and Other Tales, Dunbar-Nelson’s New Orleans was not a place that I knew.… Read More »
Reading James Joyce via Photography on Bloomsday
Guest post by Georgina Binnie-Wright Mentioning ‘Bloomsday’ to those unfamiliar with the work of James Joyce may provoke a quizzical reaction. Yet the date of Ulysses’ setting, on 16 June 1904, marks an opportunity to celebrate a text that has been heralded as signalling the birth of literary modernism. Celebrations will be heightened this year… Read More »
A living archive: Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities, Part 3
The Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog presents: a production on Manuel Portela’s Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities in three parts. Part 1, Part 2 Episode 3: Digital Humanities We’ll be able to create secondhand; we can imagine one poet writing in us in one way, while another poet will write in a different way. I,… Read More »
Beyond the bibliographic imagination: Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities, Part 2
The Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog presents: a production on Manuel Portela’s Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities in three parts. Part 1, Part 3 Episode 2: Literary Simulation Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I’ve written, and I find that it’s all worthless and should have been left unwritten.—Fernando Pessoa, Book of… Read More »
The distorted mirror: Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities, Part 1
The Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog presents: a production on Manuel Portela’s Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities in three parts. Episode 2, Episode 3 Dramatis personae:Difficult and Theoretical Author (A)Curious and Distracted Reader (R) Episode 1: This Book is for You And I offer you this book because I know it is beautiful and useless.—Fernando… Read More »
The war against animals: Dominic O’Key on Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature
Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, by Dominic O’Key, is out now Thank you for joining us today, Dominic. Tell us, how would you describe your book in just one sentence? Reading literature can help us think and rethink our relationships with animals; here’s how. Could you unpack this a bit and explain the main topics… Read More »
Opening a Window on a Literary Giant: On Writing Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation
This post was originally published at the LSE Review of Books and is reproduced here with permission. As Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka publishes his first novel in 48 years, Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola offer a window on the literary giant, reflecting on their new book, Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation. There are twice as many works on… Read More »
Response to Fabio Akcelrud Durão: “Responsible Reading of Theory”
Fabio Akcelrud Durão’s essay “Responsible Reading of Theory” engages with a number of large and fundamental questions regarding the identity, purpose, and future of theory. The answers that it offers are so rich and complex that a responsible reading of the entirety of that essay would require a monograph. For that reason, this response will focus on just the first paragraph of the first of the essay’s three sections and consider how that paragraph defines the relationship between theory and literature.
Response to “The Positive of the Negative: Joycean Post-Structuralism as Felskian Critique” by Robert Baines
Robert Baines starts his essay with a vivid analytical presentation of the last five decades of research in the field of Joyce Studies, emphasizing the context and stakes of the shift from (a) post-structuralist criticism to (b) a focus on “Joyce’s engagements with the history, politics, and culture of his age” (Baines xx), and later to (c) genetic criticism. Baines’ account of the last 50 years of criticism and his suggestions for extended forms of dialogue between supposedly divergent critical/ theoretical orientations can easily be transposed, mutatis mutandis, to Beckett studies.