Read my new essay, “Woolf in the Background: Distance as Visual Philosophy, Then and Now,” a chapter in the now-released collection on Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse. In this essay, I establish Woolf’s perceptive technique of “toggling” between foregrounds and backgrounds in Orlando. This way of writing reinforces and illustrates Woolf’s greater ontology of depth and betweenness:
My essay “Ritual Architectures: Doorless and Makeshift Boundaries in Faulkner’s Slave Quarters” is now available in the Faulkner and Slavery collection in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series. The University Press of Mississippi released this work in June 2021:
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Hurston Fall Webinar Series
Join the Hurston Fall Webinar Series hosted by The University of Kansas. The starting webinar on October 1st hosts acclaimed biographer Valerie Boyd in her discussion of “The Afterlife of a Biography.” Free Registration and Open Admission.
Noon-1:30 p.m. Oct. 1
Many thanks to the hosting faculty for selecting me as a participant for the 2021 NEH Virtual Summer Institute, Hurston on the Horizon: Past, Present, and Future.
Check out the faculty and work of the Project of the History of Black Writing: https://hurston.ku.edu/
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Pushcart Nomination by MLS
I want to express my gratitude to Modern Language Studies for their continuing support. At the end of 2021, MLS nominated my translation of Janos Mailáth’s “Erszi die Spinnerin” from issue 49.2 for a Pushcart Prize. Many thanks!
A huge thank you to the AAUW for awarding me the American Fellowship for this academic year! I am now writing my new manuscript on the motion of the body as represented in the novel and its consequences for a modern philosophy of violence. The working title is Minor Fiction: Minor Choreographies in the Novel. Check out the AAUW website and the variety of funding they offer to women across disciplines since 1881. They have funded many famous researchers, academics, politicians, scientists, artists, and humanitarians such as Marie Curie, Coretta Scott King, Margaret Mead, Susan Sontag, and Eleanor Roosevelt. A special thanks to my personal sponsors, associated with Dr. Judith Resnik, who was an astronaut in the 1986 Challenger, and Dr. Marian C. Sheridan.
Find my new short story, “The Man Takes His Time,” in the summer 2020 issue of the Chicago Quarterly Review. You can also purchase a copy of volume 31 on Amazon.
Modern Language Studies, the journal for the Northeast Modern Language Association published my folk tale translation and commentary in their most recent issue (Volume 49, Number 2, Winter 2020.) This issue can now be purchased through the MLS website. “János Mailáth’s ‘Erzsi die Spinnerin’: Introduction and Translation” includes a critical commentary and first English translation of a tale from Hungarian historian and folklorist János Mailáth’s 1825 German language collection, Magyarische Sagen, Marchen und Erzahlungen. In the commentary, I establish the tale’s political and religious context, address its relation to Romantic literary culture and its perceived inauthenticity, contextualize it among fairy tale genres and particularly in relation to other spinner tales, and argue for its vitality to Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of infinite resignation given his direct discussion of the tale in Fear and Trembling. I also presented this original work at the 2019 Modern Language Association in Chicago on a panel for Hungarian literature.
“The Philosopher’s Truth in Fiction: An Interview with David Kleinberg-Levin” was also published in issue 21 of Chiasmi International. This interview with David Kleinberg-Levin, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, concerns his recent trilogy on the promise of happiness in literary language. Kleinberg-Levin discusses the relationship between and among philosophy, phenomenology, and literature. Among others, he addresses questions regarding literature’s ability to offer redemption, its response to suffering and justice, literary gesture, the ethics of narrative logic, and the surface of the text.
Find my new article, “The Tension of Intention: Merleau-Ponty Gestures Toward Kafka,” in a special issue (21) of Chiasmi International on Merleau-Ponty’s conception of literature and literary language. This article examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and “Investigations of a Dog” in his lecture on gesture and reconciliation, “Man See from the Outside.” Given the centrality of gesture in Kafka’s work, this essay considers the connections between the two figures and the likely influence of Kafka on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of gesture and intentionality. It compares their respective philosophies of gesture as they relate to meaning, reliability, silence, music, and intention. Finally, Kafka’s gestural motif of the springing body is suggested as a significant example of Merleau-Ponty’s “escaping intentions,” expressing a powerful will to intend toward others.