Baldwin, the Diaspora, and the Critical Documentarian

James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Emergency of Literary Form

This essay is written as a tribute to James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop arguing that the poetry they wrote in 1970s shows how lyric can be used as a rhetorical form through which not just to criticize but to refuse conventional narratives of historical continuity and accountability. The essay attempts to reawaken fo...

Messalina – or

This article examines the construction and persistence of Valeria Messalina’s reputation from antiquity to the present, focusing on mechanisms of sexual slander, character assassination, and narrative framing. Beginning with ancient historiography (e.g., Tacitus, Juvenal, Suetonius), the study shows how female sexualit...

Adorno on Politics after Auschwitz

In the minds of many critical theorists, Theodor W. Adorno epitomizes the failure of critical theory to provide any concrete guidance for political practice. His name is almost synonymous with the retreat of the progressive intellectual from the creeping totalitarianism of contemporary mass democracy. This book endeavo...

Fisher Digital

Intertextuality, Ecocriticism, and Human Interaction with Nature in Wilhelm Schäfer’s Novella “Anckemanns Tristan” (1936). How to Engage with Literature by a Nazi Sympathizer in the Twenty-First Century

This essay makes an effort to rescue a completely forgotten novella from a German writer, Wilhelm Schäfer (d. 1952), who was, horribly dictu, a strong advocate for the Nazis at least until 1945. While fully acknowledging the highly problematic political background of the author, the analysis focuses on the intriguing a...

“Menard, on the other hand, writes” narrative matrices and discursive heroism in “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote ”

In the field of Borgesian literature, beyond certain brave and bellicose attitudes that have been interpreted as fully heroic, there exists another type of heroism, more unexpected and less overtly courageous, which wholly depends on discourse rather than on doing. This special kind of heroism may be understood, ac...