Early, refereed review of Joseph O’Neill’s third, groundbreaking novel set in post-9/11 New York City: the review charts key plot developments, a transatlantic mapping of the characters (Netherlands, Trinidad, UK and US) and its structural similarities to F Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”. Originally published in the third issue of the…[Read more]

This paper describes the social and cultural climate of teaching the works of James Joyce — including his journalism and major works of fiction from “Dubliners” through “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” — over the years 1993 to 2016 when the author was the Chair of English Literature at Queen’s University Belfast. The author draws upon his…[Read more]

The Presence of Absence: Meditations on the Unsayable in Writing is about writers navigating the unspeakable through image, sound, and structure. Each chapter focuses on a specific text, exploring the ways that four writers look to visual and auditory materials and metaphors as passageways to understanding and expressing the ineffable qualities of…[Read more]

Two great contemporary writers of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lev
Tolstoy of Russia and Émile Zola of France, were haunted by the same problem, the individual’s
relation to God and the universe and the purpose of his relatively short life in it. Although Tolstoy
and Zola took different approaches to this problem in th…[Read more]

This essay reads H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) in the context of “wooshing” London—I take the word from the story—to see how the unsettling effect of this rapid urban mobility translates into the generic form of the novel. At the turn of the twentieth century, London was wooshing—that is to say, people and things in the city were moving by b…[Read more]

One of the most important factors literary critics often overlook in the work of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-
1910) is the fact that it was subject to the censorship of the tsarist government before it was allowed to be published
in Russia. This harassment lasted the entire period of Tolstoy’s writing life, and although neither he nor his f…[Read more]

The impact of colonialism and empire and then of transport, logistics, advertising, media, cinema, radio, tourism, and the internet extended the global reach of English. With 1.13 billion speakers, one in seven in the world now has some English competence. Within this global circulation of English, we have the global teaching of English language…[Read more]

Exploration on the linkages among the modes of discourse and presentation in Hgel, Marx and Peirce
with a view to inferring a common dialectical tendency in their inquiries.

This essay situates queer negativity within the modernist tradition. In The Well-Beloved (1897), Thomas Hardy satirizes the then-popular notion of racial memory for its racist, colonialist implications, inaugurating the modernist critique of romantic love as complicit with the self-delusions of the liberal-humanist subject. Despite the view shared…[Read more]

Abstract
In his email conversations with Arabella Kurtz in The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy, J.M. Coetzee entertains the notion of settling on fictions of ourselves, which we are able to inhabit more comfortably than what is perceived as our real life. In addition, he implies that in order to form fictions of…[Read more]

Speculative notes on the relation between Peirce’s pragmatist method and Hegel’s dialectics