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The Problematic of Force in M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Zong! #1”

Though Philip, like Derrida, treats language—specifically the financial and legal language associated with the court cases around the Zong massacre—as an entity that neutralises the violence of the Zong massacre, I nevertheless invoke Derrida, since his focus is on language as such as a metaphysics of presence that will always fail to capture force, which is, in some ways, a broader claim than Philip’s

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Reading with Clarity: Intertextual Defamiliarization of Fictitious Morality Systems in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin

Pushkin juxtaposes literary ideals in Eugene Onegin to defamiliarize the notion of a comprehensive ethical system. In doing so, Pushkin illuminates a space between broken ideals that is entirely sympathetic to heroes and villains alike. 

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The Sinthomal Literary Aggressivity of the Subaltern: Rethinking Chander’s Brown Romantics – Longform Excerpt

The theorisation laid out in “World Literature and World Legislation will be the focus of my argument, and perhaps the issues that I will take with this approach might be perceptible already—or perhaps not. In any case, a theoretical exposition—something of a detour—will be necessary to sufficiently ground my argument.

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The Systems Novel: Cybernetics, Systems Theory, Paranoia, and Conspiracy in Pynchon and DeLillo – Longform Excerpt

To read a text is to be engaged in a system. To make sense of a text, a reader must be able to connect a network of various points which form a whole greater than the sum of its parts to form meaning.

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Constant Inconstancy: Learning to Belong through John Clare’s Poetics of Attention – Longform Excerpt

John Clare celebrates the specificity of nature – a celebration which, in his extensive body of poetry, is lovingly confined to his village of Helpston and the surrounding Northamptonshire countryside.

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The Artistic Death as Emasculation: Gender in Everett’s Erasure Understood Through Bourdieu

Bourdieu’s theories regarding cultural production manifest themselves in Everett’s writing, as Monk considers his commercialization simultaneously as an artistic death and as something feminized, reproducing the pre-existing misogynistic ideals within the American literary field that invalidates the intelligence and talent of women authors.  

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Beyond “Impossible” Desire: Cross-Dressing as a Gateway for Lesbian Homoeroticism in Twelfth Night and The New Arcadia

While both Book II of The New Arcadia and Twelfth Night end in heterosexual unions, cross-dressing permits the exploration of lesbian homoerotic potential within the bounds of an overarching heterosexual narrative.

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Singing of Knights and Ladies: Flows of Virtue in Book One of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

Spenser, in Book One of The Faerie Queene, constructs the knight figure as an identity symbiotic with the lady figure, the latter being an otherness that intervenes to direct the path of knighthood towards virtue.

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