Category: Reading
Excess Emotion and Queer Subjectivity in Pericles
Pericles (1608), one of Shakespeare’s and co-author George Wilkins’s romances, dramatizes the tumultuous life of Pericles, the Prince of Tyre. Over five acts, it stages his acquisition of love, its tragic loss, and its ultimate rediscovery. Strikingly, the play opens with incest—Antiochus, the king of Antioch, instructs Pericles to solve a riddle whose answer reveals
“Unbury Your Gays”: Queer Phantoms in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gideon the Ninth
At its root, the “Bury Your Gays” trope is simple: in a work with an overt or implied same-sex couple, by the end of the story at least one of the lovers “must die or otherwise be destroyed” (Hulan 17). Today, it is often used in film for shock value, as seen with Tara’s death
A Patriotic Reflection of a Broken Image
The nature of quilting implies a coming together of disparate elements to create a pleasing and cohesive whole. Rachel Clark’s quilt, These Colors Should Run, utilizes these formal qualities to reimagine the American flag, conveying an unsettling and paradoxical image of a nation in disrepair. Clarke is a Professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information
Revelatory Liminality in the Metamorphoses’ Myrrha Episode
[Trigger warning: this post discusses a poetic episode featuring incest.] In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire, which she ultimately consummates . She does so
Teaching Race with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric
In the same year that Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s murders at the hands of the police sparked national protest, Claudia Rankine published her book Citizen: An American Lyric. Originally published in 2014, Citizen consists of poems, monologues, lyrical essays, artwork, and photographs, all of which explore microaggressions and their broader relationship to systemic racism.
Resurrection: Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground Then and Now
“The Man Who Lived Underground” was first published as a short story in Edwin Seaver’s Cross-Section: An American Anthology of New American Writing in 1944, and again posthumously in Wright’s 1961 short story collection Eight Men (Literary Classics 22). This version of the narrative begins with an unnamed protagonist already on the run from the
The Nurse’s Repertoire in Romeo and Juliet
What does it mean to know? “Epistemology” describes a way of knowing, and, as you might expect, many different epistemologies exist. One episteme that has come to define the Western world is heteropatriarchy, a power-knowledge system organized around white, masculine supremacy. In the seventeenth century, French philosopher René Descartes theorized that the mind is separate
Beyond Disciplinary Bounds: Engaging with Haunted Archives
“Archive,” as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “a place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept.” This definition not only locates them within a particular physical space, but also within the bounds of what is considered “important” and “historic”. This raises a few questions: who determines what is
Countercurrents: Book Review of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Christina Sharpe’s 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, published by Duke University Press, examines various representations of Black life including the literary, cinematic, visual, and everyday life experiences of Black people. She offers a cipher to navigate the unspeakable and unknowable realities of existing in the violent afterlives of transatlantic slavery. To
Cannibalizing Mothers: Pre-Oedipal Horror in Hannibal and Titus Andronicus
[Trigger Warning: brief discussions of sexual assault.] It’s been nearly ten years since Bryan Fuller’s TV show Hannibal (2013-2015) debuted. Since then, it has garnered a cult viewership and a devoted online fanbase, often referred to as “fannibals.” However, to their (and my) chagrin, the show was preemptively cancelled after Season 3. As a late-comer