• Colloquy

    Comparing Literatures: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Urdu

    by Alexander Key
    Comparative Literature has spent the last few decades expanding its focus beyond Europe and the Anglophone Americas. But has it succeeded? Departments around the world include scholars working on Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, and to a lesser extent Turkish, Urdu, and other non-European languages. But the desire for coverage remains a chimera, always tempting with the prospect of inclusion: "if only we had somebody who did…" What would success, even if we subscribed to such teleology, look like? more
  • Blog Post

    Poetry for a Time of Plague

    by Steve Mentz
    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. more
  • Colloquy

    Queer Environmentalities

    by Irena Yamboliev
    How can queer theory and ecocriticism inform each other? And why should they? Scholars working to bring these two fields together argue that each has undermined its central goals by keeping aloof... more
  • Essay

    Morrison’s Things: Between History and Memory

    by Kinohi Nishikawa
    Toni Morrison began to formulate her engagement with the black past early in her career, in a project for which she served as editor and makeshift curator of objects. In 1974 Random House brought out a book that Morrison had spent 18 months assembling with four collectors of black memorabilia: a 200-page, oversized compendium that conveys the story of African and African-descended people in the New World. more
  • Blog Post

    Returning to Order through Realism

    by Santiago Zabala
    Law and Order is the familiar rallying cry for a generation of contemporary right-wing politicians from Poland and Turkey to Brazil and the USA. In the context of such a political program, difference, change, and cultural others must be avoided as disruptions of the safety that order is supposed to represent. more

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“Neither Arabic nor Persian literature has an originative poetics per se.”
by Alexander Key
Ma'na is not the same as “meaning” at all; it is its own story.
Poetry for a Time of Plague
by Steve Mentz
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
I grew up in the aftermath of Nasser’s Egypt, where public education was made free for all. For me, learning has always been remote… It began with walks to the public libraries, and random flaneur...
The Future is Female?: Griselda, Top Girls, and Rethinking Feminist Subjectivity
by Holly Crocker
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
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.

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