This is a revised 2023 version of a course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018. It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

This paper aims to analyze the depiction of pedophilia in Humayun Ahmed’s film ‘Pleasure Boy Kômola.’ It concentrates on the social and psychological reasons for this rarely existing sexual practice or perversion and the oppressive consequences it causes on the subalterns in Bangladesh during the colonial period.

This article briefly explores the contemporary heterogeneous song-texts of Taskir Ali (popularly known as Baul Taskir) from Sunamgonj, in the district of Sylhet, Bangladesh. Bauls are nomadic communities in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, and they express their profound spiritual philosophy and thoughts through their songs and performance.…[Read more]

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, acc…[Read more]

Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, acc…[Read more]

Makes use of the opportunity of the release of “Oppenheimer” to explore how Gene Wolfe uses his texts as factories into which guilt is inserted, but emerge ameliorated. Narrative serving the primary purpose of restructuring subconscious memory.

Abstract of panel organized by the Sephardic Studies Discussion Group for the 2024 MLA Annual Convention.

Review of Consider David Foster Wallace.

This interview with esteemed literary critic J. Hillis Miller was conducted via Skype on July 17, 2013. Miller speaks about a number of issues important to his life and work. Providing a number of emblematic parables, Miller discusses his early career, his work on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and his famous essay “The Critic as H…[Read more]

This interview with literary critic Jonathan Arac was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh on May 19, 2015. Arac, a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective since 1979, speaks at length about his life and work. Addressing the impact of theory on his career, he discusses how he came to be associated with the New Americanists, his project…[Read more]

Excerpt from first paragraph: In the emerging field of David Foster Wallace studies, nothing has been more widely cited in terms of understanding Wallace’s literary project than two texts that appeared in the 1993 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction” and a lengthy interview with Larry McCaf…[Read more]

This essay historically situates David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a transitional text between the first and second nuclear ages. Written in the immediate wake of the Cold War, Infinite Jest complexly develops the nuclear trope’s fabulously textual persistence despite the relative disappearance of the discourse of Mutually Assured Des…[Read more]

The 2019 novel by the South African-Australian Nobel laureate, J M Coetzee, The Death of Jesus, is a third book in a sequence that includes Jesus in its title; like its predecessors it follows the lives of a recently constructed family in the dystopian Spanish-speaking towns of Novilla and Estrella. The surreal trilogy, which began with The…[Read more]