| ARCADE

Blogs

by William Flesch | 07.18.2021

Geoffrey Nunberg (somewhere) makes the point that parentheses and quotations follow similar typographical, and, you could say syntactic rules: If you open a parentheses (with a lunula) you have to close it (with another, facing the opposite way). Likewise if you open a direct quotation (with raised, inverted commas (auf Englisch, zumindest), you have to close it (with reverted commas, but at the top of the line as well (das gilt auch für Deutsch für die „Gänsefüßchen”)).

"I wish to be cremated": On Writing My Un-Islamic Will

by Ali Shakir | 03.25.2021

It was raining heavily that May morning in 2019. I reluctantly walked into the law firm’s office in Auckland, greeted Joy, the receptionist and legal assistant, and took a seat, waiting for the lawyer to witness my will. I heard him talking to a client in French, which I’d studied many years ago at the Centre Culturel Francais in Baghdad, but could hardly communicate in anymore. I wondered what might have happened to our Profs there. … Damn it! I hate that my thoughts always end up taking me back to my days in Iraq.

I am Saint Wolf: Poetry Dwelling of Zurab Rtveliashvili

by Irakli Zurab Kakabadze | 08.02.2021

The Georgian poet and multimedia artist Zurab Rtveliashvili (1967-2021) represents how poetry's power to dwell confronts authoritarianism.

Can a Colonial Archive be an Anti-Colonial Archive? The Centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Library at UT-Austin

by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra | 07.19.2021

The Nettie Lee Benson Collection is a library that originated as part of the larger collections of the University of Texas at Austin since the 1890s. The Library began initially as a typical colonial archive, namely, Anglo Hispanists interested in things Iberian in the colonial Southwest (USA).

“Neither Arabic nor Persian literature has an originative poetics per se.”

by Alexander Key | 08.03.2020

Ma'na is not the same as “meaning” at all; it is its own story.

Poetry for a Time of Plague

by Steve Mentz | 07.06.2020

The most powerful depiction of illness in Elizabethan London was a lyric poem by the urban pamphleteer and stylistic experimentalist Thomas Nashe, who probably died of the plague around 1600.

Online Learning in the Time of Corona

by Mohammad Salama | 07.06.2020

I grew up in the aftermath of Nasser’s Egypt, where public education was made free for all.

The Future is Female?: Griselda, Top Girls, and Rethinking Feminist Subjectivity

by Holly Crocker | 10.22.2019

Sacrifice and care are attributes that are difficult to map onto commonplace understandings of subjectivity. Perhaps that is because subjectivity has long been thought in gendered ways that leave little place for the seemingly feminine.

When the Imperial Baroque State Is Not Sufficiently Baroque

by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra | 09.30.2019

It is difficult to envision the sheer quantity of pearls dredged up from the New World by sixteenth-century colonists. An average of a 1,000 pounds of pearl per year in tax revenue alone. The social, political, and ecological challenges of producing such richness is the subject of a fascinating book by historian Molly Warsh reviewed here.