PUBLICATIONS
RUOYUN BAI
Ruoyun Bai, Professor of Media Studies, Comparative Media Studies, and Comparative Literature
My teaching and research revolve around media as institutional, textual, and cultural practices and as technologies of mediation. I am attentive not only to textual and visual representations, but also to the materiality of such representations, i.e. how texts and images are produced and circulated in historically specific political, economic, social, ideological, and technological contexts. My scholarship so far has focused on postsocialist China and its mediatized politics. I have co-edited two books: Television Drama in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) and Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2014). My monograph, Staging Corruption: Chinese Television and Politics, came out from the University of British Columbia Press in 2015. I have published articles in areas such as the political economy of Chinese television, the relationship of Chinese writers and intellectuals to the market and the state, and the Internet-based youth culture in China. Currently, I am moving on to explore the implications of a media framework for established disciplines such as comparative literature, cinema studies, and history. Informed by the burgeoning scholarship of media archaeology, comparative media studies, and digital humanities, I ask how the medium in which a text is embedded – be it the scroll, the codex, the book, the electronic, or the digital – matters to its production and consumption, with what kinds of political and cultural significance.
ERIC CAZDYN
Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies (also affiliated with the Cinema Studies and Literary Studies programs).
Research fields include: Critical and literary theory, aesthetics and politics, Japanese film and modern Japanese literature, globalization, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and medical culture. Recent articles have been published in Modern Language Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Social Text, Japan Forum, Alphabet City, Prefix, and the Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies. He has recently edited a volume of South Atlantic Quarterly on the philosophical and political problem of Disaster. Cazdyn is currently finishing a book manuscript on illness, time and contemporary politics (The New Chronic: Culture, Politics, Medicine), co-writing a manuscript entitled Something’s Missing: Politics and Culture in the New Century (to be published by Blackwell Press), and editing Trespasses: Selected Writings of Masao Miyoshi (Duke University Press, 2010). His book, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan, was published by Duke University Press in Fall, 2002.
BARBARA HAVERCROFT
Professor of Comparative Literature and French
Research Interests
Literary theory, in particular theories of life writing and memory (autobiography, diaries, testimonies, autofiction, etc.); literary semiotics (énonciation, narratology, intertextuality); theories of subjectivity, poststructuralism, postmodernism. Feminist theories; theories of gender; feminist criticism of autobiographical writing; theories of agency; feminism and postmodernism. Contemporary French, Québécois, and German prose fiction and autobiographical writings; the French nouveau roman. Also interested in autobiographical accounts (especially, but not exclusively, women’s) of trauma, illness, and mourning. Most recent SSHRC-funded research project : Subjectivity and Agency in Contemporary Women’s Autofiction.
Publications : Summary
Barbara Havercroft has published numerous articles (in journals such as Dalhousie French Studies, Québec Studies, Voix et images, Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry, Protée, Itinéraires et contacts des cultures, Tangence, and others) and book chapters (in Canada, Québec, France, Germany, Brazil, and Spain) on subjects such as contemporary autobiographical writings (especially on life writing by women authors), on the theories of énonciation, and on the literary encounter between feminism and postmodernism. The author of Oscillation and Subjectivity : Problems of Enunciation in the Novels of Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Johnson (forthcoming, University of Toronto Press), she is currently completing a book entitled Voix intimes : sujet, sexe et genre dans les écrits autobiographiques contemporains. The guest editor of a number of issues of learned journals, she is also the former Editor-in-Chief (1993-96) and Associate Editor (1990-93) of the journal Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry (RS/SI).
EVA-LYNN JAGOE
Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese
Eva-Lynn Jagoe is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese. Research fields include critical and literary theory, Latin American literature and film, theories of art and technology. Her book The End of the World: Writing Experiences of the Argentine South is forthcoming with Bucknell University Press. Recent articles have been published in volumes on film and on art,Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, Revista canadiense de estudios hispcos, and Cuadernos americanos.She is currently working on a project on electricity and modernity in Buenos Aires and Barcelona.
PIA KLEBER
Professor of Comparative Literature and Drama Study
Pia Kleber has been Professor and Director of the University College Drama Program at the University of Toronto since 1988. She has an M.A. in costume design from the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin, and a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. In 1999 she was awarded the Helen and Paul Phelan Chair in Drama.
Professor Kleber is the organizer of two major international theatre festivals and conferences: Why Theatre: Choices for the New Century (1995), and Brecht: 30 Years After (1986), both held at the University of Toronto. During these conferences she brought two famous German Theatre Companies to North America for the first time: the Berliner Ensemble (1986) and the Berlin Schaubühne (1995).
Her numerous publications include books on Bertolt Brecht: Exceptions and Rules. Brecht, Planchon and “The Good Person of Szechwan”; Re-Interpreting Brecht: His Influence on Contemporary Drama and Film. Her articles include “Theatrical Continuities in Giorgio Strehler’s The Tempest”, “The Directing Methodologies of Giorgio Strehler” and “Die Courage der Mütter. Am Beispiel von Bertolt Brecht”. Prof. Kleber’s articles have been published in five languages (English, French, German, Italian and Chinese).
Prof. Kleber’s focus for the past thirty years has been to bridge the gap between Europe (especially Germany) and Canada, and to unite the two cultures. For her efforts to strengthen German-Canadian relations she will be awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz by the German President this fall.
NEIL TEN KORTENAAR
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Teaching and Research Interests
African, especially Southern and West African literature; South Asian, especially Salman Rushdie; Caribbean literature; the nation-state in postcolonial literature; Postcolonial literature and the world on paper: images of literacy in African and Caribbean literature; Generational succession in African literature; the Immigrant Experience in Literature; Contemporary Literature by Muslims; Postcolonial Poetry
Recent Publications:
Neil ten Kortenaar has a book on Salman Rushdie, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004) and another on images of literacy in African and Caribbean fiction, Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy (Cambridge UP, 2011). He has published many articles on African and Caribbean authors in such journals as PMLA, Research in African Literatures, Contemporary Literature, and Comparative Literature. Many have been reprinted, for instance in the Norton Critical Edition of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC), Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook (Oxford UP). He wrote the chapter on “Multiculturalism and Globalization” in The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, edited by Eva-Marie Kroller and Coral Ann Howells (2009).
ANN KOMAROMI
Professor of Comparative Literature
Recent Publications and Projects: Komaromi’s numerous publications on Samizdat include articles analyzing the extra-Gutenberg mode of existence of the text (Poetics Today) and Jewish samizdat. Komaromi’s book Uncensored: The Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Samizdat, came out with Northwestern University Press, in 2015. Her electronic archive Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat was launched at the University of Toronto Libraries in 2015: it includes a database of Soviet Samizdat Periodicals, electronic editions of Samizdat literary and art journals, illustrated timelines of dissident movements, and interviews with activists. Her edition, with introduction and notes, of Yuli Kosharovsky’s history of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union, We Are Jews Again, came out from Syracuse University Press in 2017. A catalog of Soviet Samizdat periodicals, compiled together with G. Kuzovkin, Katalog periodiki Samizdata, 1956-1986 (A Catalog of Samizdat Periodicals, 1956-1986) was published by the International Memorial Society (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Memorial) in 2018.
I am also currently working on a co-authored book manuscript describing underground Jewish life in Leningrad with Dr. Michael Beizer of Hebrew University. In addition, I am engaged in a comparative study of the use of trash and discarded objects in art works and museum exhibits, including works by Robert Rauschenberg, Tadeusz Kantor, Ilya Kabakov, and exhibits in Holocaust museums.
JULIE D. LEBLANC
Professor of Comparative Literature and French
Full-Professor, Department of French/Centre for Comparative Literature.
Areas of Teaching and Research. Autobiographical narratives; Word and Image theories; Photography and Painting in Literary Texts; Manuscript studies/Genetic Criticism; Literary Theory; Women’s Autobiographical Narratives/Feminist Theories of Autobiography.
Books :
1. Genèses de soi: l’écriture du sujet féminin dans quelques journaux d’écrivaines.
Montréal:Editions du Remue-Ménage, 2008, 230 pages.
2. Énonciation et inscription du sujet: textes et avant-textes de Gilbert La Rocque. Toronto: Éditions du GREF, Collection “Theoria”, 2000, 300 pages.
3. Les Masques de Gilbert La Rocque. Édition critique. Collection Bibliothèque du Nouveau Monde. Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1998, 298 pages.
Book manuscript in progress:
5. Narrativité et iconicité: les rapports texte/image dans quelques textes littéraires.
B. Volumes edited :
1. Editor of a special issue of Texte. Revue de critique et de théorie littéraire.
“L’autobiographique I”, vol. 39/40, 2006, 294 pages.
2. Co-editor (with Brian Fitch and Andrew Oliver) of a special issue of Texte. Revue de
critique et de théorie littéraire “L’autobiographique II”, vol. 41/42, 2007, 280 pages.
3. Editor of a special issue of Voix et images. “Le Laboratoire de l’écriture: manuscrits et
variantes,” vol. 86, hiver 2004, 130 pages.
4. Editor (with Brian Fitch and Parth Bhatt) of a special issue of Texte. “L’énonciation: la
pensée dans le texte”, vol. 27/28, (2000-2001), 433 pages.
5. Editor of a special issue of Texte. “Narrativité et iconicité”, vol. 21-22, (1997/1998), 407
pages.
6. Editor (with Barbara Havercroft) of a special issue of Voix et images. “Effets
autobiographiques au féminin”, vol. XXII, no 1, (automne 1996), 180 pages.
7. Editor (with A. Halsall) of a special issue of Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry
RS/Sl “Rhétorique et sémiotique”, vol. 12, no 3, (automne 1994), 120 pages.
MARY NYQUIST
Professor of Comparative Literature, English, Literature and Critical Theory, and the Institute of Women and Gender Studies
Academic Books
Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
Co-Edited Books
– Milton and Questions of History: Essays Past and Present by Canadians, eds. Feisal Mohammad and Mary Nyquist (University of Toronto Press, 2012)
– Re-Membering Milton: New Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Margaret Ferguson and Mary Nyquist (Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1987)
Refereed Publications in Production
– “Equiano, Satanism, and Slavery,” Milton Now, ed. Erin Murphy and Catherine Gray (Palgrave, forthcoming, 2014) [15,000 words]
– “Friday as Meet Help: Milton and the Long Restoration, ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Coiro (Oxford, 2014 or 2015) [12,000]
‘Publications-in-Process
-“Ancient Liberties, New Slaveries,” Oxford Handbook to Law and Literature, 1500-1700, ed. Lorna Hutson and Bradin Cormack (Oxford, 2015)
– “The Liberty of Naming: Figurative Servitude, Slavery, and Service,” Slaveries Old and New: The Meaning of Freedom, ed. Julia O’Connell Davidson (Proceedings of the British Academy, 2015 or 16)
Refereed Academic Journal Publications
– “Hobbes, Slavery and Despotical Rule,” Representations, no. 106 (Summer, 2009), 1-33
– “The Plight of Buchanan’s Jephtha: Sacrifice, Sovereignty and Paternal Power,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 60.4 (Fall 2008), 331-354
– “Contemporary Ancestors of de Bry, Hobbes, and Milton,” University of Toronto Quarterly, Special Issue: Milton in America, Vol. 77.3, ed. Paul Stevens (Summer, 2008), 837-875
– ‘Profuse, Proud Cleopatra:’ ‘Barbarism’ and Female Rule in Early Modern English Republicanism,” in The Representation of Gender in the English Revolution, 1640-1660, ed. Sharon Achinstein, Women’s Studies, Vol. 24 (1994), 85-130.
– “The Father’s Word / Satan’s Wrath,” PMLA, 100.2 (1985), 187-202.
– “Reading the Fall: Discourse and Drama in Paradise Lost,” English Literary Renaissance, 14.2 (1984), 199-229
Refereed Chapters in Books
– “Sovereignty and Conquest,” The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes, ed. S. A. Lloyd (Bloomsbury Publishing: London, 2012), 313-19.
– “Slavery, Resistance and Nation in Milton and Locke,” Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England,” ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 356-397
– “Determining Influences: Mentorship and Resistance in the Anglo-American Realist Novel,” New Essays on Edith Wharton’s ‘House of Mirth,’ ed. Deborah Esch (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 63-129
– “Wanting Protection: ‘Fair Ladies’, Sensibility and Romance,” Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms, ed. Eileen Yeo (London and New York: Rivers Oram Press, 1997), 61-85.
– “Romance in the Forbidden Zone,” ReImagining Women: Representations of Women in Culture, ed. Shirley Neuman and Glennis Stephenson (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1993), 160-81.
– “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and Paradise Lost,” Re-membering Milton (Routledge, 1987), 99-127
– “Fallen Differences, Phallogocentric Discourses: Losing Paradise Lost to History,” Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 212-43
– “Gynesis, Genesis, Exegesis: The Formation of Milton’s Eve,” Witches, Cannibals, Divorce, ed. Marjorie Garber (Johns Hopkins, 1986), 147-208
– “Textual Overlapping and Dalilah’s Harlot-Lap,” in Renaissance Texts and Literary Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Johns Hopkins, 1986), 140-72
– “Musing on Susanna’s Music,” Lyric Poetry After the New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Cornell, 1985), 310-27
Selected Reprinted Articles or Chapters
– “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity,” Paradise Lost, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Jason Rosenblatt (2010)
– “Romance in the Forbidden Zone,” Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 198, eds. Tom Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau (Detroit: Gale, 2008), 278-288
– “Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity,” Gale’s Literary Criticism from 1400 to 1800, Vol. 97, ed. Tom Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau (Detroit: Gale, 2004 ), 250-51.
– “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity,” [rpt, abridged] Paradise Lost: New Casebook Series, ed. William Zunder (Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1999), 156-179
– “Textual Overlapping and Dalilah’s Harlot-Lap,” [rpt, abridged] Homer, ed. Katherine Callen King, Vol. 5, Classical Heritage, Gen. Ed. Ward W. Briggs, Jr., Vol. 5 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994), 48-70
– “Fallen Differences, Phallogocentric Discourses: Losing Paradise Lost to History, [rpt, abridged] Critical Essays on Milton, ed. Annabel Patterson (London and New York: Longmans, 1992), 165-84
Refereed Literary Publications
– “Uncle Sam’s Strike-Tease,” [rpt.] Cry Uncle, ed. Allan Briesmaster. Aeolus House (2013)
– “Without the Law,” Gendered Intersections: An Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, ed. Lesley Briggs and Pamela Downe (Firewood Publishing, 2005), 227
– “Uncle Sam’s Strike-Tease,” Special Issue of Resources for Feminist Research on “Women in a World of War and Militarization,” Vol. 30, Nos. 3 and 4, ed. Himani Bannerji and Shahrzad Mojab, (2003), 147
– “The Silent Treatment,” The Malahat Review (Winter, 2002), 52
– “Struck Dumb,” [rpt.] Violence Against Women: New Canadian Perspectives, eds. M. J. McKenna, Katherine M.. & June Larkin (Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education Inc., 2002), 273-76
– “The Work of Nature in the Age of Electronic” Queen St. Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter 2000), 26
– “Struck Dumb” in “Women and Education,” special issue of Canadian Woman Studies\les cahiers de la femme, Vol. 17, 4 (Winter, 1998), 69-71
– “Bruised” and “Unlicensed Literacy” in” Symbolic Violence and the Avant-Garde”, special issue of Tessera, Vol. 21 (Winter, 1996), 66, 67
– “Babytalk,” Contemporary Verse 2, Vol. 16, no. 3 (Winter, 1994), 14
– “Wet Toes,” Tessera, Vol. 17, (Winter, 1994), 90-91
JOHN PAUL RICCO
Professor of Comparative Literature, Art History and Visual Culture
Select Publications
Books
The Logic of the Lure (University of Chicago, 2003).
The Decision Between Us: art & ethics in the time of scenes (University of Chicago, 2014). Link http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo17577653.html
The Intimacy of the Outside (in progress).
The Collective Afterlife of Things (in progress).
Edited Journal Issues
Parallax, 35, volume 11, no. 2, April-June 2005. Conceptual theme: “Unbecoming.”
Journal of Visual Culture, volume 9, number 1, April 2010; special issue on Jean-Luc Nancy (co-edited with Louis Kaplan). http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/9/1.toc
Recent Essays
“The Commerce of Anonymity,” in Qui Parle (Duke University Press), volume 26, number 1, June 2017. http://quiparle.dukejournals.org/content/current
“Intimacy: Inseparable from Separation,” in Open Set: a journal of arts, humanities and culture, May 2017. http://www.open-set.com/ricco/essay-clusters/intimacy-inseparable-from-separation/
“The Art of the Consummate Cruise and the Essential Risk of the Common,” in Feedback (Open Humanities Press), February 2016. http://openhumanitiespress.org/feedback/sexualities/the-consummate-cruise-1/
New Preface to the republication of “Jacking-Off a Minor Architecture,” in Keep It Dirty, volume a. “Filth,” edited by Christian Hale (Punctum Books), Summer 2016. http://keepitdirty.org/a/jacking-off-a-minor-architecture/
“Showing Showing: Reading WJT Mitchell’s ‘Queer’ Metapictures,” in W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory: Living Pictures, edited by Kresimir Purgar, Routledge, 2016. https://www.routledge.com/WJT-Mitchells-Image-Theory-Living-Pictures/Purgar/p/book/9781138185562
“The Separated Gesture: Partaking in the Inoperative Praxis of the Already-Unmade,” in Nancy and the Political, edited by Sanja Dejanovic, Critical Connection Series, Edinburgh University Press (2015). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/nancy-and-the-political-9780748683178?cc=us&lang=en&
“Pornographic Faith: Two Sources of Naked Sense at the Limits of Belief and Humiliation,” in Porn Archives, edited by Tim Dean, Duke University Press (2014). https://www.dukeupress.edu/Porn-Archives/
“Drool: Liquid Fore-speech of the Fore-scene,” World Picture, thematic issue on “Abandon,” number 10, Spring 2015. http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_10/pdfs/Ricco_WP_10.pdf
“The Existence of the World is Always Unexpected”—Jean-Luc Nancy in conversation with John Paul Ricco, in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Open Humanities Press (2015). http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/art-in-the-anthropocene/
“Parasol, Setas, Parasite, Peasant,” in Could, Should, Would: J. Mayer H. Architect, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2015. http://www.hatjecantz.de/j-mayer-h-6551-1.html
“The Inoperative Praxis of the Already-Unmade,” in Transmission. Art, Labour, Work, (Artwords Press, 2014). http://www.anagrambooks.com/labour-work-action
JILL ROSS
Professor of Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies
Jill Ross has taught at the University of Notre Dame and at the University of Toronto in the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, History, Medieval Studies and Comparative Literature. Her research on the Castilian, Latin, Catalan and Hebrew literatures written in medieval Iberia focuses on constructions of the feminine and on medieval poetic theory. She has completed a book length study entitled Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Texts and is working on a study of medieval theories of metaphor in both Romance and Hebrew literatures. She has published on the Latin poet Prudentius and has lectured on the body in medieval literature.
ATSUKO SAKAKI
Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies
I have often inventoried my research interests as: gender relations (several book chapters); narrative performance (a book (Harvard, 1999)); cross-cultural polemics (a book (Hawai’i, 2006)); city and body (SSHRC funded, 2003-7); and the photographic narrative (SSHRC funded, 2008-current). Some might dismiss me as a (mere, or gravely disconcerting) schizophrenic. My intellectual trajectory is always motivated by the desire to critique the limitations built into the premises of my previous work, hence the jerky shifts in focus. Still, I see a degree of coherence in the subjects of inquiry: agency beyond identity; temporality beyond chronology; and spatiality beyond cartography. I am writing books on: literature that contests territoriality, by Abe Kôbô, Gotô Meisei, Hasegawa Shirô and Horie Toshiyuki, all avid readers of Franz Kafka as well as Russian, German and French authors; and literature of photographic rhetoric, by Tanizaki Jun’ichirô, Abe, Kanai Mieko (I wrote the Introduction to her latest) and Horie whose stories I plan to translate. I have translated another Kafka-esque writer, Kurahashi Yumiko (ME Sharpe, 1998). I was on the jury for the PMLA best essay prize (2005-8) and have reviewed many book and journal manuscripts, experience that I hope has enriched and stimulated my mind.
Books
1.Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006.
2. Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction. 272pp. Vol. 180 of Harvard East Asia Monograph. Cambridge, MA: The Asia Center Publications Program, Harvard University (distributed by Harvard University Press), 1999.
3.The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories by Kurahashi Yumiko. Edited, introduced, and translated by Atsuko Sakaki. 157pp. The First Volume of Japanese Women Writing. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998.
Edited volume
Translation/Transmediation. Guest editor for the special issue of Poetica 78 (December 2012).
Book Chapters
“Waves from Opposing Shores: Exchanges in a Classical Language in the Age of Nationalism” in Richard King and Cody Poulton and Katsuhiko Endo, eds., Sino-Japanese Transculturation: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the End of the Pacific War. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 33-43.
“Taming of the Strange: Arakida Rei Reads and Writes Stories of the Supernatural,” in P. F. Kornicki, Mata Patessio and G.G. Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject: Reading and Writing in Early Modern Japan. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, the University of Michigan, 2010. 151-70.
“‘There Is No Such Place As Home’: Gotō Meisei, or Identity as Alterity,” in Mark Williams and Rachael Hutchinson, eds., Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature: A Critical Approach. London, England: Routledge, 2007. 292-311.
“Kurahashi Yumiko’s Negotiations with the Fathers.” Chapter 11 of Rebecca Copeland and Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, eds. The Father/Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women. Honolulu, HI: U of Hawai‘i Press, 2001. 292-326. Peer reviewed.
“Kurahashi Yumiko.” Ed. Jay Rubin. Modern Japanese Writers. New York, NY: Scribners and Sons, 2000. 185-198. Solicited.
“(Re)Canonizing Kurahashi Yumiko: Toward Alternative perspectives for ‘Modern’ ‘Japanese’ ‘Literature’.” Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel, eds. Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan. Honolulu, HI: U of Hawai’i P, 1999. 153-176.
Articles (refereed):
“Photography as Corporeal Reproduction: Swapping Pregnancy for Photography in Kanai Mieko’s Tama-ya.” Poetica 78 (December 2012).
“The Face in the Shadow of the Camera: Corporeality of the Photographer in Kanai Mieko’s Narratives.” Mechademia 7 (Fall 2012).
“Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or Photography as Violence.” Japan Forum 22, no. 3-4 (2010): 381-404.
“Scratch the Surface, Film the Face: Obsession with the Depth and Seduction of the Surface in Abe Kōbō’s Face of Another.” Japan Forum 17, no. 3 (October 2005): 369-388.
“Kajin no kigū: The Meiji Political Novel and the Boundaries of Literature.” Monumenta Nipponica 55, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 83-108.
“Sliding Doors: Women of Letters in the Heterosocial Literary Field of Early Modern Japan.” The US-Japan Women’s Journal 17 (December 1999): 3-38.
“Japanese Perceptions of China: The Sinophilic Fiction of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō.” The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59, no. 1 (June 1999): 187-218.
JOHN ZILCOSKY
Professor of Comparative Literature and German
John Zilcosky’s research interests include modern European literature, psychoanalysis, trauma, the art of travel, and the history and philosophy of sports. Recent articles have appeared in New German Critique, American Imago, Cahiers de l’Herne, Modern Language Notes, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, Journal of Modern Literature, Interventions, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Psychoanalysis and History, and the new Modern Library edition of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Zilcosky’s book publications include Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (2003, winner of the MLA’s Scaglione Prize), Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey (2008), Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity (2016), The Allure of Sports in Western Culture (2019), and The Language of Trauma: War and Technology in Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka (2021). For a full list of publications, see http://german.utoronto.ca/john-zilcosky/
…
Professors Emeriti
REZA BARAHENI baraheni@yahoo.ca
Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature
Reza Baraheni published Les Saisons en enfer du jeune Ayyaz, a long novel with Pauvert, Fayard in Paris in the spring of 2000. Fayard is publishing another novel of his, Scheherazade et l’Auschwitz prive du Doctor Charifie in spring 2002. These are works translated from the original Persian into French. AGO published a long poem of his, “Exile Poem of the Gallery,” in its Making Meaning; Massey College published another long poem of his, “Death of a Greek Woman in Seattle” in Exile Writes Back; and Brick, a literary journal in Toronto, published in its fall, 2001 issue, “A Minor Mistake in the Evin Prison,” the story of one of Baraheni’s nights in the Evin Prison of Tehran in 1981-82. Baraheni wrote a theoretical piece on exilic poetry as introduction to On Wings over the Horizon, the poetry of Negar Hasan-zadeh, translated from Russian into English by Richard McKane and published by Anglo-Caspian Publishing Ltd. Alphabet City’s next issue is coming out in the spring of 2002 with a special section on Baraheni. The Tribune, an Azeri and Persian periodical published in Sweden did a special issue on Baraheni, and other special issues are scheduled in Persian, Kurdish and Turkish. Baraheni is writing The Archaelogy of Postmodernity, a treatise on blind reading of literary texts, for publication at the end of 2002. Parts of this book have been in the form of papers given at the University of Toronto, the University of London, Britain, and M.I.T., U.S.A.
Baraheni was elected as President of PEN Canada in June 2001. PEN Canada, with a membership of about 700 poets, novelists, dramatists, critics and journalists, is the Canadian section of the International PEN working for “unhampered expression of thought” both on national and international levels.
J. EDWARD CHAMBERLIN
email: ted.speakeasy@utoronto.ca
Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and English
E. Chamberlin, O.C., BA, PhD, FRSC, D.Litt.(hon), D.C.L. (hon) University Professor/English
Research Interests: World Literatures, Oral and Written Traditions, Indigenous Literatures, Stories and Storytelling
Selected Publications
Books
The Banker and the Blackfoot: A Memoir of My Grandfather in Chinook Country (Toronto: Knopf, 2016)
Or Words To That Effect: Orality and the Writing of Literary History, eds. Daniel F. Chamberlain and J. Edward Chamberlin (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2016)
Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations (New York, Toronto and Oxford (BlueBridge, Knopf and Signal, 2006; 2007)
If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground (Toronto and Manchester: Knopf and Carcanet (2003; 2006) . Special Issue on If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?Journal of Canadian Studies, eds. Ian MacRae and Linda Hutcheon (Fall, 2012)
Come Back To Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies(Chicago, Toronto and Kingston, Jamaica: University of Illinois Press, McClelland & Stewart, and Ian Randle Publishers, 1993; 1999)
Recent Articles
Chanting Down Babylon: Innocence and Experience in the Contemporary Humanities’, Educating the Imagination: Northrop Frye Past, Presentand Future, eds. Alan Bewell, Neil ten Kortenaar, and Germaine Warkentin (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015
‘Franz Boas and the Conditions of Literature’, The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual, ed. Regna Darnell, Michelle Hamilton,Robert L.A. Hancock,and Joshua Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015)
LUBOMIR DOLEZEL
Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature
Professor Lubomír Dolezel was born in the Czech part of former Czechoslovakia in 1922. He was educated at Charles University in Prague and received his PhD in Slavic Philology from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Many of his teachers and mentors were representatives of the so-called Prague school, an internationally recognized and influential centre of inter-war structuralist and semiotic thought. The spirit of the Prague school is evident in Dolezel’s PhD thesis On the Style of Modern Czech Literature (published in Czech in 1960) and inspires his later work. In the 1960s Dolezel worked concurrently as research fellow in the Institute of Czech Language of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and as assistant, and later associate, professor of the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University. He was engaged primarily in the application of mathematics (especially statistics), information theory and cybernetics to the study of language and literature. He founded and co-edited a series entitled “Prague Studies in Mathematical Linguistics”.
In 1965, he was invited as visiting professor to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where he stayed till 1968. He co-edited (with Richard Bailey) a collection of studies Statistics and Style (American Elsevier, 1969). After his return to Prague he was appointed research fellow of the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, but in the fall of 1968 he left his native land after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was invited to the University of Toronto as visiting professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, where he later became full professor. He established the study of Czech language and literature at the university. In 1982 he was cross-appointed to the Centre for Comparative Literature. His main research interest has been the theory of literature, with a focus on narrative (narratology). His theoretical position was strongly influenced by analytic philosophy, especially by the conceptual framework of possible worlds. On his retirement in 1988, the Centre organized an international conference “Fictions and Worlds”. The proceedings, under the title Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics were edited by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu and Walid Hamarneh and published by the University of Toronto Press (1996).
Professor Dolezel has read papers at many North American and European universities and international conferences. He was visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, University of Munich and Charles University. He published numerous papers on the history of poetics, narratology and fictional semantics. He is the author of Narrative Modes in Czech Literature (University of Toronto Press, 1973; Czech version, 1993), Occidental Poetics. Tradition and Progress (University of Nebraska Press, 1990; translated into Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Serbo-Croation, Rumanian and Czech) and Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998; translated into Italian, Spanish, Czech and Portuguese). Dolezel’s full bibliography can be found in Ceská literatura 45, 1997 and a bibliography of works in English appears in Style 1998 (Winter).
Professor Dolezel is currently working on a re-examination of the relationship between fictional and historical narrative in the framework of possible-worlds semantics. He has devoted to this topic his seminar “Fictional and Historical Worlds”, offered at the Centre for Comparative Literature
Selected bibliography since 1980
In print
“K.H. Mácha – a Hero of Structural Poetics.” In Mozejko Festschrift.
“Franz Kafka: The Trial and The Castle. Einaudi Encyclopedia of Literature (in Italian).
“If It Had Happened Otherwise: Counterfactual History and Historical Fiction.” Proceedings of the 2001 Stockholm Conference on Narratology.
2000
“Problèmes de mondes croisée: titres, mondes et identité personnelle dans la réécriture postmoderniste.” In Paratextes. Etudes aux bords du texte. Eds. Mireille Calle-Gruber and Elisabeth Zawisza. Paris: L’Harmattan. 97-116.
“Poststructuralism: A View from Charles Bridge.” Poetics Today 21: 634-651.
1999
“Fictional and Historical Narrative: Meeting the Postmodernist Challenge.” In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Ed. David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 247-273.
“Epistemology of the Prague School.” In Jan Mukarovský and the Prague School.. Eds. Vladimír Macura and Herta Schmid. Universität Potsdam-Ústav pro ceskou literaturu AV CR. 15-25.
1998
Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. The Johns Hopkins University Press (Italian trans., Bompiani, 1999; Spanish trans. Arco/Libros, 1999; Czech trans. Karolinum, 2003, Portuguese trans., in preparation).
“Possible Worlds of Fiction and History.” New Literary History 29: 785-809.
1997
“The Themata of Eco’s Semiotics of Literature.” In Reading Eco: An Anthology. Ed. Rocco Capozzi. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 111-120.
1996
“In Search of Implicit Meaning: From Rhetoric to Cognitive Text Theory.” Canadian Journal for Rhetorical Studies/La Revue Canadienne d’études rhétoriques 6: 63-72.
“Polyfunctional or Monofunctional Language?” In The Search for a New Alphabet: Literary Studies in a Changing World (In Honor of Douwe Fokkema). Eds. H. Hendrix et al. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 73-77.
“Mundos de Ficción: densidad, vaciós e inferencias.” In Mundos de Ficción 1. Universidad de Murcia. 13-26.
“Prazská skola v exilu” /Prague School in Exile/. In Svetová literárnevedná bohemistika 2, Prague: Ústav pro ceskou literaturu. 506-511.
1995
“Structuralism of the Prague School”. In Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 8 – From Formalism to Poststructuralism. Ed. Raman Selden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 33-57
“Roman Jakobson as a Student of Communication.” In Studies in Poetics: Commemorative Volume, Krystyna Pomorska (1928-1986). Ed. Elen Semeka-Pankratov. Columbus, OH: Slavic Publishers. 27-38 (Czech in Slovo a slovesnost 47, 1996: 162-169).
“Fictional Worlds: Density, Gaps, and Inference.” Style 25: 201-214.
“Fiction: From Possible Worlds to Automata.” Semiotica 104: 311-316.
“De la diversité des poétiques.” In Poétiques et imaginaires: Francopolyphonie littéraire des Amériques. Eds. Pierre Laurette and Hans-George Ruprecht. Paris: L’Harmattan. 135-147.
1993
Narativní zpusoby v ceské literature [Narrative Modes in Czech Literature]. Prague: Ceský spisovatel.
“The Fictional World of Dostoevskij’s The Idiot”. Russian Literature 33: 239-248.
“Semiotic Poetics of the Prague School”. In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms. Ed. I. R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 179-183.
“Prague School Structuralism”. In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. M. Groden and M. Kreiswirth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 592-595.
Review of Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation. Journal of Pragmatics 19: 585-601.
1992
“Zamyatin’s Worlds”. In Poetics of the Text: Essays to Celebrate Twenty Years of the Neo-Formalist Circle. Ed. Joe Andrew. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 91-103.
” Karel Capek – A Modern Storyteller”. In On Karel Capek. Eds. M. Makin and J. Toman. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications. 15-28.
“Possible Worlds: Philosophy and Applications”. Semiotica 90: 201-216.
1991
“Innovation as World Transformation”. In Slavic Drama: The Question of Innovation. Eds. A. Donskow and R. Sokoloski. Ottawa: University of Ottawa. 1-9.
1990
Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (Portuguese trans., Lisbon: Gulbenkian, 1990; Italian trans., Turin: Einaudi, 1990; Serbo-Croatian trans., Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1991; Spanish trans., Madrid: Sintesis, 1997; German trans., Dresden: Dresden University Press, 1998; Czech trans., Brno: Host, 2000).
“Fictional Reference: Mimesis and Possible Worlds”. In Toward a Theory of Comparative Literature. Selected Papers Presented in the Division of Theory of Literature at the XIth International Comparative Literature Congress. Ed. Mario J.Valdés. New York: Lang. 109-123.
“Aliens and Visitors in Literary Metalanguage.” Proceedings of the XIIth Congress of the International Comaprative Literature Association. Vol 5. Munich: Iudicium. 265-271.
“Nomothetic and Ideographic Knowledge in Poetics.” In Os Estuos Literarios (entre) Ciencia e Hermeneutica. Proceedings of the I Congress of the PCLA. Ed. Maria-Alzira Seixo. Lisbon: Associaçao Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada. 115-122.
“Roman Jakobson studioso della comunicazione.” In Roman Jakobson. Eds. P. Montani and M. Prampolini Rome: Editori Riuniti. 103-112.
1989
“Possible Worlds and Literary Fictions.” In Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences. Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 65. Ed. Sture Allén. Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 221-242.
“Mimesis and Contemporary Criticism.” Comparative Criticism, vol. 11: 253-261.
“Two Narratologies: Propp and Vodicka.” In Issues in Slavic Literary and Cultural Theory. Eds. Karl Eimermacher, et al. Bochum: Brockmeyer. 13-27.
“Occidental Poetics: A Research Tradition.” In Poetics East and West. Ed. Milena Dolezelová-Velingerová. Toronto: Toronto Semiotic Circle (monograph series) (Chinese trans. in Chinese Culture and Chinese Philosophy. Ed. Tang Yijie. Beijing, 1989. 366-78).
“Poetics”. In International Encyclopeadia of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
“Pour une thématique de la motivation.” Strumenti critici 60: 193-207.
1988
“Mimesis and Possible Worlds.” Poetics Today 9: 475-496.
“Literary Transduction: Prague School Approach”. In The Prague School and Its Legacy. Ed. Yishai Tobin. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins. 165-176.
“Thématique de la solitude: Robinson Crusoé et Des Esseintes.” Communications 47: 187-197.
Review of Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds. Style 22: 139-142 (co-author).
1987
“Nad poezií Bronislavy Volkové” /On Bronislava Volková’s Poetry/. Postscript to Bronislava Volková Vzduch bez podpatkù. Munich: PmD Publ. 71-75 (co-author).
1986
“Semiotics of Literary Communication.” Strumenti critici, n.s. 1: 5-48.
1985
“Literary Text, Its World and Its Style.” In Identity of the Literary Text. Eds. Mario J. Valdés and Owen Miller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 189-203.
“Un champ thématique: le triangle du double.” Poétique 64: 463-472.
“Pour une typologie des mondes fictionnels.” In Exigences et perspectives de la sémiotique. Recueil d’ hommage pour Algirdas Julien Greimas. Eds. Herman Parret and Hans-George Ruprecht. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins. Vol. 1, 7-23 (English in Tamkang Review 14: 261-276).
“La construction des mondes fictionnels à la Kafka.” Littérature 57: 80-92.
“K. M. Capek-Chod and Modernism.” In Karel Matej Capek-Chod: Proceedings of a Symposium. R.B. Pynsent, ed. London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies. 71-81.
1984
Language and Literary Theory: In Honor of Ladislav Matejka. Ann Arbor, MI.: Papers in Slavic Philology 5, 1985 (co-editor).
“The Road of History and the Detours of the Good Soldier.” In Language and Literary Theory: In Honor of Ladislav Matejka. Eds. B. Stolz et al. Ann Arbor, MI.: Papers in Slavic Philology 5, 241-49 (German trans. in Jaroslav Hasek. 1883- 1983. Ed. Walter Schamschula. Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1989. 166-179).
“Oral and Written Literature.” In The Peasant and the City in Eastern Europe. Eds.I.P. Winner and T.G. Winner. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. 253-256.
“Aristotelian Poetics as a Science of Literature.” In Semiosis: Semiotics and the History of Culture. In Honorem Georgii Lotman. Eds. Morris Halle et al. Ann Arbor, MI.: Michigan Slavic Contributions. 125-138.
“Kafka’s Fictional World.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ Revue Canadienne de littérature comparée 10: 61-83 (Serbo-Croation trans. in Knjizevna rec 12, No. 221).
“Narrative Structure and Narrative Style.” In Fictionality (Studia poetica 5). Ed. Z. Kanyó. Szeged. 271-297.
“Ein Schema der literarischen Kommunikation.” In Bühler-Studien. Ed. A. Eschbach. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Vol. 1, 206-223.
1983
“Intensional Function, Invisible Worlds and Franz Kafka.” Style 17, 2: 120-141.
“Proper Names, Definite Descriptions and the Intensional Structure of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’.” Poetics 12: 511-526.
1982
“Mukarovský and the Idea of Poetic Truth.” Russian Literature 12/13: 283-297.
“The Conceptual System of Prague School Poetics: Mukarovský and Vodicka.” In The Structure of the Literary Process: Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Felix Vodicka. Eds. P. Steiner, M. Cervenka and R. Vroon. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins. 109-126.
“A Note on Quantification in Text Theory.” In Text Processing: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 51. Ed. Sture Allén. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International. 539-552.
1981
“Circular Patterns: Hasek and the Good Soldier Svejk.” In Poetica Slavica: Studies in Honour of Zbigniew Folejewski.. Eds. J. D. Clayton and G. Schaarschmidt. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. 21-28.
“Radical Semantics: Franz Kafka and Richard Weiner.” In Forms and Functions. Eds. J. Esser and A. Hübler. Tübingen: Narr. 221-229.
Review of Jan Mukarovský, The Word and Verbal Art and Structure, Sign and Function.. Style 15: 61-64.
1980
“Truth and Authenticity in Narrative.” Poetics Today 1, 3: 7-25.
“Narrative Semantics and Motif Theory.” In Studia Poetica. Vol. 2. Ed. K. Csúri. Szeged. 32-43.
“Eco and His Model Reader.” Poetics Today 1, 4: 181-188.
“A Short Note on a Long Subject: Literary Style.” In Voz’mi na radost’: To Honour Jeanne van der Eng-Liedmeier. Amsterdam: Slavic Seminar. 1-7.
BRIAN T. FITCH
Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and French
Brian T. Fitch, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, received his B.A. from Durham University (U.K.) and his French Ph.D. from Strasbourg University and taught at the the Universities of Strasbourg and Manchester (U.K.) before coming to Toronto in 1965 and taking up the Gerald Larkin Chair of French at Trinity College in 1966. He was appointed University Professor in 1989. He has been Visiting Professor at the Universities of Oxford, Queensland, Tel Aviv, Montpellier and Trento. He was the Founding Editor of the journal Albert Camus (Paris) from 1968 to 1985 and is the founding co-editor of Texte, a journal of criticism and literary theory, since 1982. His book A l’ombre de la littérature: pour une théorie de la critique littéraire (Montréal, XYZ, 2000) was nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2000. He is an international authority on the works of Albert Camus and has published extensively in Beckett studies and the 20th Century French novel. Since 1990, he has been working in literary hermeneutics and is presently completing a book entitled La pensée, le langage et l’écrit: Humboldt, Valéry, Beckett. His present areas of research include genetic criticism and the relationship between language and thought. Among his other publications are:
Narrateur et narration dans “L’Etranger” d’Albert Camus (Paris, Minard, 1960, 48 p.; 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, 1968)
Les deux univers romanesques d’André Malraux (Paris, Minard, 1964)
Le sentiment d’étrangeté chez Malraux, Sartre, Camus et Simone de Beauvoir (Paris, Minard,1964; reprinted in the Collection “Reprint, érudition, poche”,1983)
Essai de bibliographie des études en langue française consacrées à Albert Camus (Paris, Minard, 1965; in collaboration with P.C. Hoy: 1969, 1972);
(Ed.) Configuration critique de Julien Green (Paris, Minard, 1966)
Dimensions et structures chez Bernanos: essai de méthode critique (Paris, Minard, 1969)
Un texte, ses lecteurs, leurs lectures: étude méthodo-logique de “L’Etranger” de Camus (Paris, Larousse, 1972)
Dimensions, structures et textualité dans la trilogie romanesque de Samuel Beckett (Paris, Minard, 1977)
(Ed.) Écrivains de la Modernité (Paris, Minard, 1981)
The Narcissistic Text: A Reading of Camus’ Fiction (Toronto (University of Toronto Press, 1982)
Monde à l’envers/Texte réversible: la fiction de Bataille (Paris, Minard, 1982)
Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1988)
Reflections in the Mind’s Eye: Reference and its Problematization in 20th-Century French Fiction (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991)
Lire les récits de Blanchot (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1992)
A Matter of Guilt: Camus’ “The Fall” (Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1995).
JOHN FLEMING
Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature
Research Interests
French novel (eighteenth to twentieth century);
nouveau roman; modernism; image and text; material culture/history of Canada.
Publications
On Marivaux, Diderot, Fromentin, Maupassant, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute. “Trompe-l’oeil, crypsis et techniques de représentation”; “Ceci n’est pas un conte/Ceci n’est pas une pipe”; Les meubles peints du Canada français 1700-1840 (1994); “The Anglo-American Influence on French Canadian Furniture after 1760”; “The Semiotics of Furniture Form: The French Tradition 1620-1840″; Nineteenth Century Collections: The Museum, the Parlour, the Text”; Print Paradigms in the Popular Imagery of France: 1630-1830″; Folk Furniture of Canada’s Doukhobors, Hutterites, Mennonites, Ukrainians. With Michael Rowan (2004).
LINDA HUTCHEON
Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and English
Research Interests: Theory and Practice of Adaptation; Literary History; Interdisciplarity
PUBLICATIONS:
Books: (sole author)
1. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980; paperback edition with new preface: London and New York: Methuen, 1984. (Awards: Outstanding Academic Book List of Choice; Best of Quill and Quire listing) (Japanese translation–Hosei University Press; Chapter 1 has been translated into Italian in Testi e contesti: il postmoderno in America, ed. Cristina Bacchilega (Roma: La Goliardica, 1986), pp. 19-44.; chapter reprinted in Narratology, ed. Onega and Landa [Longman, 1996])
2. Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: The Example of Charles Mauron. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
3.. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. Reprinted/republished with new introduction by University of Illinois Press, 2001. (Japanese translation–Hosei University Press, 1993) (Uma Teoria da Parodia–Portuguese translation–Lisbon: Edicoes, 1990) (Iranian translation underway, with new introduction) (Georgian translation underway, Homli Press) (Selections anthologized in Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin. Chicago: NorthwesternUniversity Press, l989; L’immagine riflessiva, special issue on parody, 1992.)
4. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. (Selections exerpted in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Patricia Waugh [London: Edward Arnold, 1992] and Metafiction, ed. Mark Currie [London: Longman, 1993]; Twentieth Century Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. K. Newton [London: Macmillan, forthcoming; Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999 forthcoming].) (Poética do Posmodernismo: Historia, Teoria, Ficçao–Portuguese translation–Rio de Janeiro: Imago Ed, 1991) (Serbian translation published by Svetovi, Yugoslavia, 1996) (Japanese translation underway; Romanian translation by Univers Publishing House underway.)(Chinese translation by Li Yang for Nanjing University Press underway, with new introduction). (Korean translation of two chapters in Contemporary World Literature, 1992.) (Final chapter translated into Chinese and published in the Chung-Wai Literary Monthly (Taiwan), special issue on postmodernism, 1996.) (Arabic translation 2010)
5. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988. (Translated into Chinese by Zhao Fa and Han Yunxue, Beibei: Chongquing Publishing House, 1993.) (Introduction translated into Korean, Contemporary World Literature [Fall 1991]: 46-63.) (Chapter 11, translated into Polish in FA-art.)
6. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, New Accents, 1989. (Japanese translation: Hosei University Press, 1992) (Chinese translations: for PR of China: Peking University Press, 1993; for Taiwan: Camel Press) (Korean translation: Hyundai-Meehak Press, Soeul, forthcoming) (Romanian translation: Univers Publishing House, Bucharest, forthcoming) (Korean translation of two chapters in Contemporary World Literature, 1992.) (Final chapter translated into
Chinese and published in the Chung-Wai Literary Monthly (Taiwan), special issue on postmodernism, 1996.)
7. Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991.
8. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. (Final chapter reprinted in New Contexts of Canadian Criticism [Peterborough: Broadview P, forthcoming]). (Portuguese translation: Belo Horizonte, Brasil: Editora UFMG, 2000) (Japanese translation: Tokyo: Sekaishiso Seminar, 2003.) (Chinese translation underway, with new introduction)
Books: (co-author)
1. (with Michael Hutcheon) Opera: Desire, Disease, Death. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996; paperback reissue, spring 1999.
2. (with Michael Hutcheon) Bodily Charm: Living Opera. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.
Books and Journal Special Issues: (edited and co-edited)
1. Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fiction and Interviews. Co-edited with M. Richmond. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990.
2. Double-Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Contemporary Canadian Art and Literature. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992.
3. A Postmodern Reader. Co-edited with Joseph Natoli. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
4. The Discovery / Invention of Knowledge. Co-edited with J.E. Chamberlin. Special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly 61.4 (Summer 1992).
5. Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler. Co-edited with George Bowering. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1992.
6. Cultural Studies in Canada. Co-edited with Faye Pickrem and Stephen Pender. Special Issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly 64.4 (Fall 1995).
7. Cultural Studies: Disciplinarity and Divergence. Co-edited with Faye Pickrem. Special Issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly 65.2 (Spring 1996).
8. PMLA: Millennium Issue, 115.7 (2000).
9. Rethinking Literary History. Co-edited with Mario J. Valdés. New York: Oxford UP, 2001 forthcoming.
10. Expanding Interdisciplinarity Through Opera. Co-edited with Caryl Clark. Special Issue of University of Toronto Quarterly 72.4 (2003).
11. Expanding Interdisciplinarity Through Opera. Co-edited with Caryl Clark. Special Issue of University of Toronto Quarterly 74.2 (2005)
12. Expanding Interdisciplinarity Through Opera. Co-edited with Caryl Clark. Special Issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, 75.3 (2006).
13. The Canadian Opera Company Ring Cycle. Co-edited with Michael Hutcheon and Caryl Clark. Special Issue of Opera Quarterly 23.2-3 (2007).
Long Essays or Lectures (published as separate books/booklets):
1. As Canadian as…Possible…Under the Circumstances. (The Robarts Lecture) Toronto: ECW Press, 1989.
2. Leonard Cohen and his Works (Prose). Toronto: ECW Press, 1989.
3. Leonard Cohen and his Works (Poetry). Toronto: ECW Press, 1992
4. The Politics of Representation in Canadian Art and Literature. Working Paper Series, Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York University, l988.
5. Irony and the Power of the Unsaid. The 1992 Pratt Lecture. English Department, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
6. Rethinking Literary History–Comparatively. American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, 1995. (with Mario J. Valdés) (reprinted in ACLA Bulletin, 1995-6)
7. Collaborative Historiography: A Comparative Literary History of Latin America. American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, 1996 (with Djelal Kadir and Mario J. Valdés)
Translations:
1. Félix Leclerc, Allegro. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974.
2. Madeleine Gagnon, extract from Lueur. In Les Stratégies du réel/The Story This Far, ed. Nicole Brossard. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980, 246-55.
EVA KUSHNER
Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature
Eva Kushner, O.C., F.R.S.C. (McGill, B.A. 1948, M.A. in Philosophy 1950, Ph.D. in French 1956) has taught mostly at Carleton, McGill and Toronto. President of Victoria University (federated with the University of Toronto) from 1987 to 1994, Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto (1994-95); professor emeritus (French and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto; has been Visiting professor at Victoria College (1998-2000) and Princeton University (Spring 2000). President (1979-82) of the International Comparative Literature Association, and (1996-99) of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures; representative for French studies (1997-2000) in the Renaissance Society of America. In 2001 appointed Mary Jackman and Mary Coyne Rowell Professor at Victoria College.
Main areas of specialization: theory of Comparative Literature and of literary history; French and English Canadian poetry; classical myths, especially Orpheus, in XXth century literature; XVIth cenury French poetry and poetics; the Renaissance dialogue. Early Modern subjectivity.
Director of the Renaissance sub-series of the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (published by Benjamins) and of the critical edition of the complete works of Pontus de Tyard (1521-1605) for Champion, Paris.
Eva Kushner – most relevant book-length publications.
L’avènement de l’esprit nouveau (1400-1480), vol. I of the Renaissance sub-series of the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, ed. T. Klaniczay, E. Kushner, A. Stegmann, (Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadò:1988).
L’Époque de la Renaissance IV: Crises et essors nouveaux. (1560-162)0. Eds.+Tibor Klaniczay, Eva Kushner, Paul. (Philadelphia and Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2000).
Théorie de la littérature: problèmes et perspectives, eds. M. Angenot, J. Bessière, D. Fokkema, E. Kushner, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, l989). Also appeared in Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese translations).
Histoire des poétiques, eds. Jean Bessière, Eva Kushner, Roland Mortier, Jean Weisgerber. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997. Chinese translation in 2002.
The Living Prism: Itineraries in Comparative Literature Montréal, McGill-Queen’s Press, 2001.
Pontus de Tyard et son oeuvre poétique (Paris: Champion, 2001).
BRIAN STOCK
Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature
Research Interest:
Literature and society in late antiquity; Augustine of Hippo; the history of reading from antiquity to the 16th century; 12th century culture and society; church history in the Middle Ages; selected topics in Renaissance philosophy.
Major Publications:
Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century (Princeton, 1972)
The Implications of Literacy (Princeton, 1983)
Augustine the Ready (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996)
After Augustine (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)
PETER W. NESSELROTH
Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature
Publications
Books
Lautréamont’s Imagery: A Stylistic Approach. Geneva: Droz, 1968,pp 130.
Problems of Textual Ananlysis/Problémes de l’analyse textuelle (co-editor with P.Léon, P.Robert and H. Mitterand) Paris: Didier, 1972, pp 270.
Psychanalyse et langages littéraires by J. Le Galliot (with the participation of S. Lecointre, R. Le Huenen, P.W. Nesselroth and P. Perron). Paris, Nathan 1977, pp. 256.
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS IN BOOKS:
“La Stylistique”, Points de vue, publication of the Department of Romance Languages at the City College of New York, 1962, pp. 15-17)
“The Stylistic Analysis of the Literary Image”; in Problèmes de l’analyse textuelle, pp. 121-131. Montréal/Paris/Bruxelles: Didier, 1971.
“Métaphore, principe de réalité et principe de plaisir” in Michel Philip, Lectures de Lautréamont. Paris: A Colin, 1971, pp.90-100.
“Lautréamont: le sens de la forme” Littérature, no. 17, février 1975, pp. 73-83.
“Form and Meaning in Le Paysan de Paris, Dada/Surrealism, No. 5, 1975, pp. 20-37.
“Poetic Language and the Revolution” (on Julia Kristeva),
L’ Esprit Créateur, 16.2 (1976), pp. 149-160.
“Lecture symbolique de La Chevelure de Baudelaire”, in Psychanalyse et langages littéraires, pp 80-87
“La Psychanalyse et le Problème de la lecture”, in Psychanalyse et langages littéraires, pp. 131-140.
“Le Poème en prose comme dégénérescence supérieure. Travaux du Cercle Méthodologique. No.1, 1980-81, pp 1-10.
“Lautréamont’s plagiarism; or the Poetization of Prose Texts” in R.L. Mitchell ed. Pretext Text Context. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980. pp 185-219.
Review article of Michael Riffaterre’s Semiotics of Poetry and La Production du texte in Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry. Vol. 1 no. 1, May 1981. 81-87.
“Des vi(d)es de Lautréamont” in Oeuvres et Critiques, Ix, 2, 1984. 77-87.
“Literary Identity and Contextual Difference” in The Identity of the Literary Text, O.J. Miller and M.J. Valdés, eds. University of Toronto Press, 1985. pp. 41-53.
Review article of Ora Avni’s “Tics, Tics et Tics: Figures,Syllogismes, Récit dans les Chants de Maldoror”, Poetics Today, 7.2 (1986),pp. 368-371.
“Lautréamont Envers et Contre Tout” in Lautréamont Postmoderne?,Actes du colloque
Lautréamont et le postmodernisme, Université de Montréal, 20 mars 1987. Textes réunis et présentés par W. Krysinsky. Université de Montréal (1989), pp. 54-68.
“Rhetoric and the Psychoanalytic Meaning of Literary Form” Toward a Theory of Comparative Literature New York: Peter Lang 1990. pp. 163- 172.
“Surrealist Poetics: Incestuous Insects” Poetics East and West. Ed. M. Dolezelova. Monograph of the Toronto Semiotic Circle, 4, 1990. 215-231
“The Source and the Effort: Derrida’s Derivations”, Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry, vol.10, no.1, spring 1991.117-126
“From De-automatisation to Undecidability: Jan Mukarovsky’s legacy” in Jan Mukarovsky and the Prague School/und die Prager Schule, Universität Postdam, 1999, 26-40
“Naming Names in Telling Tales” Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics, U of T Press, 1996, 133-143
“Suicider l’autre: la colonne de la Place Vendôme”, in Isidore Ducasse à Paris, ed. J-J Lefrère, AAPPFID, 1997, 165-177
“Ducasse Illisible” in Les lecteurs de Lautréamont, ed. J-J Lefrère, Du Lérot, 1998, 377-382
“Derrida on the Double” Proceedings of the First Conference on English Studies, Universidad de Almeria, 2001, on CD Rom (451-467)
“Le dé-règlement (rhétorique) de tous les sens” in Altérations, créations dans la langue: les langages dépravé, publications du Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures Modernes et Contemporaines, 2001, 155-166
“Je remplace” in Les “Poésies” d’Isidore Ducasse, ed. J-J Lefrère, Du Lérot, 2001, 125-143
VERONIKA AMBROS
Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature
Research interests:
Semiotics of theatre and drama; literary theory; modern Czech, German and Russian literatures.
Books
2009
Co-editor of the volume Structuralism(s) Today together with R. Le Huenen, Andres Simon Perez and Adil D’Sousa, Legas, Ottawa. 176-189
Chapters in Books:
2009
“America Relocated – Karel Čapek’s Robots between Prague, Berlin and New York.” In print. 20 pages. In Performance, Exile and ‘America’. Palgrave, 2009, 134-157
“2007
“Daleká cesta. Svědecká výpověď Alfréda Radoka” [Distant Journey. The witness testimony of A. Radok], in : Eva Stehlíková (ed.): ALFRÉD RADOK MEZI FILMEM A DIVADLEM [ALFRÉD RADOK Between Film and Theatre], Prague, AMU 20 pages
“Engaged’ Playwrights’. Czech Drama between Enlightenment and Gentle Revolution” In: J.J. King ed. Western Drama through the Ages. Westport, CT Greenwood Press, 142-153.
“Fuzzy Borderlines – Čapeks’ Robots, Insects, Women and Men” In: History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Editors) Virginia Commonwealth University / University of Amsterdam, 183-189
2006
“Prague: Magnetic Fields or Staging of the Avant-Garde”; In: History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Editors) Virginia Commonwealth University / University of Amsterdam, 176–182
2004
“The Great War as a Monstrous Carnival: Jaroslav Hašek’s Švejk ” In: History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Editors) Amsterdam, Bejnamins, 28-36
Papers in refereed Journals:
2008
“Prague’s Experimental Stage: Laboratory of Theatre and Semiotics,” in Semiotica, 2008, 168: 45-65
2006
Milenci z kiosku V. NEZVALA aneb NÁRODNÍ DIVADLO na vlnách avantgardy [V, Nezval’s Lovers from the Kiosk in 1932 or the National Theatre in Prague on the Waves of the Avant-garde], Česká literatura [Czech Literature – published by the Czech Academy of Sciences]], 228-239
2004
“Of Clowns, Scholars, Gestures, Objects and Other Signs: the Experimental Stage in the Prague School Semiotics of Drama and Theatre. For Lubomír Doležel “Od struktury k fikčnímu světu” Lubomíru Doleželovi, Aluze (special issue), Brno, 53-86 (non authorized translation from English)
Papers in Refereed Conference Proceedings
2009
“Golems and Robots: Intermediality, Hybridity and The Prague School” Structuralism(s) Today. Co-editor of the volume together with R. Le Huenen, Andres Simon Perez and Adil D’Sousa, Legas, Ottawa 176-189
2007
“ F. X. Šalda a veselohra: aneb jak Šalda přeskočil hradby”, [F.X.Šalda and comedy or how F.X.Šalda jumped over the ramparts] Na téma uměni a život Brno, Host 2007, 350-359,
2006
“Escaping the Land of Kitsch. The Poly-Vision of the Shoah in Daleká Cesta (Distant Journey)”, In: Zerstörer des Schweigens”. Formen künstlerischer Erinnerung an die nationalsozialistische Rassen- und Vernichtungspolitik in Osteuropa Frank Grüner / Urs Heftrich / Heinz-Dietrich Löwe eds. Köln : Böhlau, 337-355
“Proměny expresionistických prvků a postupů od Čapka po Havla [Transformations of expressionistic elements from Čapek to Havel] in Hledání expresionistických poetik, [Quest for expressionistic poetics] České Budějovice, Ústav Bohemistiky, 131-140.
2002
“Contemporary Czech Drama and Theatre in Transition” Bühne und Öffentlichkeit. Drama und Theater im Spät- und Postsozialismus. Norbert Franz and Herta Schmid eds.München, Otto Sagner, 114-123
ROLAND J. LE HUENEN
Professor of Comparative Literature and French
Roland J. Le Huenen was educated at the universities of Caen and Strasbourg. Since 1968, he has been on the faculty of the University of Toronto, where he is now Professor of French and Comparative Literature. He took office as Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature in 1998. He has lectured extensively throughout North America and Europe, has been Visiting Professor at the universities of Tel Aviv, Montreal and Paris 7 and has held the Distinguished Melodia Jones Professorship in French Literature at SUNY Buffalo from 1986 to 1994. He is one of the founding members of of the Groupe international de recherches balzaciennes (GIRB). He is the author of numerous articles and books on various topics, focusing especially on Balzac, the 19th Century French novel and travel literature. His books include : Balzac, sémiotique du personnage romanesque (1980), Récits, contes et légendes de Saint-Pierre et Miquelon (Prix France-Acadie 1986), a critical edition of Gobineau’s Voyage à Terre-Neuve (1989), Discourse on Voyages to the New World (ed. 1990), Le narratif hors de soi (ed. 1997) Itinéraires du XIXème siècle (co-ed.), vol. 1 and 2 (1996 and 2001). He was awarded the Order of Palmes Académiques by the French Government in 1995.
VICTOR LI
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Victor Li received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of British Columbia and his Ph.D. from the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature. His research interests include contemporary critical and literary theory, postcolonial literatures, globalization studies, theories of modernity, primitivism, and the intersection of anthropology and literature. He is the author of The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and of articles published in such journals as ARIEL, Boundary 2, Criticism, CR: The New Centennial Review, Cultural Critique, English Studies in Canada, Genre, and Parallax. He is currently a co-editor of The University of Toronto Quarterly.
Selected recent and forthcoming publications:
“Towards an Inoperative Civilization,” _ARIEL_ (forthcoming).
“The Untimely in Globalization’s Time: Don DeLillo’s _Cosmopolis_,”
_Globalizations_ (forthcoming).
“Primitivism and Postcolonial Literature,” in _The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature_. Vol 2. Ed. Ato Quayson. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011. Pp. 982-1005.
“Globalization’s Robinsonade: Cast Away and Neo-liberal Subject Formation,” Re-routing the Postcolonial, eds. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru and Sarah Lawson Welsh. Routledge 2010.
“Marshall Sahlins,” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory , ed. M. Keith Booker. In press.
“Necroidealism, or the Subaltern’s Sacrificial Death” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 11.3 (2009)
“A Necessary Vigilance: A Response to Torgovnick and Kuper,” Criticism 49.4 (2007). A response to reviews of The Neo-Primitivist Turn by Marianna Torgovnick and Adam Kuper.
“Elliptical Interruptions: Or, Why Derrida Prefers Mondialisation to Globalization,” CR: The New Centennial Review 7:2 (2007).
“Violence and Irony in Habermas’s Verständigung Thesis,” Phrasis: Studies in Language and Literature 47.1 (2006).
“Rationality and Loss: Habermas and the Recovery of the Premodern Other,” Parallax 11.3 (2005).
“Edward Said’s Untidiness,” Postcolonial Text 1.1 (2004).
“The Premodern Condition: Neo-primitivism in Baudrillard and Lyotard,” After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory, eds. Tilottama Rajan and Michael O’Driscoll (University of Toronto Press, 2002).
“Marshall Sahlins and the Apotheosis of Culture,” CR: The New Centennial Review 1.3 (2001).
“What’s in a name? Questioning Globalization,” Cultural Critique 45 (2000).
THOMAS LAHUSEN
Doctorat ès lettres, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Professor Lahusen is Canada Research Chair in History and Comparative Literature. His research interests focus on the multi-faceted experiences of “real socialism” and other forms of “totalitarian” culture during the twentieth century. He is the author of The Concept of the “New Man”: Forms of Address and Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia (1982), On Synthetism, Mathematics and Other Matters: Zamyatin’s Novel “We” (1994, With Edna Andrews and Elena Maksimova), and How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia (1997). His Publications also include about 50 articles, as well as the following co-edited collections: Late Soviet Culture: From Perestroika to Novostroika (1993), Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (1995), Socialist Realism without Shores (1997), and a number of special journal issues: “Views From the Postfuture: Soviet and East European Cinema” (Discourse, 1995), “Aube Rouge: Les Années Trente en Extrême-Orient soviétique” (Revue d’études slaves, 1999), “Harbin and Manchuria: Place, Space, and Identity” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 2001) and Harbin: “Histoire, Mémoire et Différence” (Revue d’études slaves, 2002).
He is presently working on a monograph dealing with the “Cinefication” of the USSR and several film documentaries.
UZOMA ESONWANNE
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
To date, three issues have dominated my scholarship: literary reference, the theory and poetics of repetition, and psychopathologies of colonial and racial subjection (what I’ve called “the crisis of the soul”). Of these, the first has taken up the bulk of my time and, thus, yielded publications on worldly experience and literary epistemology (Bâ, So Long a Letter) and the efficacy of African novels as narratives of testimony (Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat). Underlying the arguments I make in these projects has been a guiding premise: that, in the context of postcolonial African literatures language has felt, and borne, the burdens of myth, history, and prophecy, and that to do them justice criticism cannot ignore this fact. This premise also underpins my treatment of the theory and poetics of repetition in modern culture, subjective dimensions of human experience in African literature, and literary self–making in African and Diasporic letters. Although over the years I have occasionally undertaken projects indirectly or unrelated to these issues (my Christopher Okigbo is an example), I would like to believe that such digressions deepen my understanding of these complex issues and afford me a unique scholarly vantage point.
Updated: October 6, 2022
