A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, “Passage to England” was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain a…[Read more]

Guha has reinstated the singularity of literature through his meticulous annotation, compilation and translation of the correspondence between two pacifists. This review reads Guha’s book closely to show how Guha’s cultural work is timely and urgent.

The art of creating or updating encyclopedic works takes a lot of collaborative effort and is dying. The book under review revives this dying art successfully. This handbook is refreshing in that it avoids jargon without losing rigour.

A disillusioning experience with Donald Keene coincided with an invitation from a haiku journal to write a feature article clarifying essential features of haiku that are not beyond the capacity of non-Japanese to create in Japanese and other languages.

This is an outline of how the Leys d’amors, a fourteenth-century troubadour treatise of huge influence on post-troubadour poetry, catalogued rhymes according to merit. It is used in my classes of 35399 Medieval Catalan Literature II, degree in Catalan Philology, at the Universitat de València (http://go.uv.es/ozQkp3H).

The editors have done a thorough job in updating the original book published more than half a century ago. This review shows the advantages of having such a reference at hand.

Selections from the author’s first volume of poetry, composed from 1970-1973 in Boston and the South Shore of Massachusetts; Nova Scotia and Western Ontario, Canada; Mountain View and Santa Clara, California; the Lama Foundation above Taos, New Mexico; and finally Lanikai, Kailua on Oahu island, Hawaii, where it was self-published in 1973. While…[Read more]

The author’s second volume of poetry, composed in Honolulu from 1973-1977, starting with a short story written in Boston in 1970, typeset by hand, “The Parable of the Lion and the Fish.” Mystical selections from the 1977 self-published book have titles like “A Prosem on the Meaning of Religion,” “Wake up God,” “Look Directly at Life,” “We Are the…[Read more]

Through an analysis of Tony Kushner’s 2001 play “Homebody/Kabul” and the Old English “Ruin” poem, this essay explores the tension, anxiety, and isolation inherent in the aesthetic and philosophical enterprises of measuring the distance that separates myth from real being (a project that takes place, I would argue, against Levinas, not just o…[Read more]

This is a reading of Spivak as an heir to Sri Avinavagupta and Sri Ramakrishna. We ignore the fact that Spivak is a Shakta in her corpus. This review corrects/revises our understanding of Spivak and reinstates her as she really deserves to be read: she is within the traditions of Tantra. Spivak, in her own writings and interviews, has long spoken…[Read more]

Walt Whitman, a world poet and the father of American free verse, has been received by diverse audiences from around the world. Literary and cultural scholars have studied Whitman’s interaction with social, political and literary movements of different countries. Despite his continuing presence in Iran, Whitman’s reception in this country has rem…[Read more]

This essay offers an autobiographical account of reading across literatures and languages. I compare the selves that I have developed in each of three languages—Russian, Persian, and Georgian—over the course of many years of reading. Refusing to make literary traditions coterminous with national identities, I reflect here on love through lan…[Read more]

If art, education, and research always – up to some extent – put us in contact with things yet to be known, yet to be thought, what to say about this anticipation of something taking place, especially if this something ought to take place through our work? In this talk, I approach this question through a series of vignettes – ethics, polit…[Read more]

A comic about the Notre-Dame cathedral 15 April 2019 fire, made by Ernesto Priego reusing images from various sources. References and Original Image Sources listed at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7999418

A comic by Ernesto Priego about Sylvia Plath’s last London address.

Gino Bonichi, better known as Scipione after the Roman general Scipio Africanus, was born in Macerata in 1904. He moved to Rome in 1909, where
he studied for a short period at the Academy of Fine Arts. Together with Mario Mafai and Antonietta Raphaël he was one of the founders of the so-called ‘Roman School’ or ‘Via Cavour School’, a group of…[Read more]

Jorgenrique Adoum (translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez), ʿĀ’ishah al-Bāʿūnīyah (translated by Th. Emil Homerin), Rachel Tzvia Back, Dan Bellm, Luis Enrique Belmonte (translated by Guillermo Parra), Daniel Borzutzky, George Economou, Sa rah Tuss Efrik (translated by Johannes Göransson), Paul Éluard (translated by Carlos L…[Read more]

María Montes, musicologist expert in Medieval Music, interviewed me on April 6th, 2019 on my experience designing and teaching a course on Medieval Iberian Literature and History using the HBO Show “Game of Thrones” as a thematic axis.

The early Church regarded dreams as potential messages from God, private revelations that appear as visions while the soul is undistracted by bodily sensations. Sleep, with its accompanying dreams, was also believed to be the temporary state of the disembodied soul as it awaits the resurrection of its body at the Last Judgment. Not only did…[Read more]

Early medieval literate culture, dominated by Christian monks and clerics, was focused on interpreting biblical texts and correlating them with a theological system devised in patristic times and late antiquity. Central to biblical exegesis was the fourfold method that distinguished the literal (or historical) sense of Old Testament narratives…[Read more]