Recent ucsd_literature items

The blood compact: international law and the state of exception in the 1896 Filipino revolution and the US takeover of the Philippines1

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The blood compact: international law and the state of exception in the 1896 Filipino revolution and the US takeover of the Philippines1

The gothic underside of U.S. imperialism

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The gothic underside of U.S. imperialism

Bastards of the Unfinished Revolution: Bolívar's Ismael and Rizal's Martí at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Bastards of the Unfinished Revolution: Bolívar's Ismael and Rizal's Martí at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Afterword: From Colonial History to Colonial Genealogies

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Afterword: From Colonial History to Colonial Genealogies

Idolatry and Apostasy in the 1633 Jesuit Annual Letter

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In this excerpt from the annual letter reporting on the state of the Jesuit order in the Philippines, Fr. Juan de Bueras, the Jesuit provincial, relates the difficulties that the Church was experiencing among the indigenous communities of the island of Mindoro. Hoping to convert the Magayanes people of the mountains to Christianity, the Jesuits found that they had to redirect their efforts to the supposedly Catholic communities of the coast, which had reverted to pre-Christian beliefs and practices. Bueras’s letter provides insight into the limitations of the Church’s effort to convert native Filipinos, and the nature of Filipino religious life in the early colonial context. John Blanco places the letter in the broader context of religious and secular colonialism, and broader questions about the supposed Hispanization of the Philippines.

The Prose of Pacification and "Spiritual Conquest" at the Origins of Philippine Literature in Spanish

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Prose of Pacification and "Spiritual Conquest" at the Origins of Philippine Literature in Spanish

Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines Under Early Spanish Rule. By Christina Lee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 216 pp. $74.00 hardcover.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines Under Early Spanish Rule. By Christina Lee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 216 pp. $74.00 hardcover.

Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism by Julia Vaingurt. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2025. 288 pp. $110.00. ISBN 978‐0‐8101‐4816‐1

Thu, 9 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism by Julia Vaingurt. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2025. 288 pp. $110.00. ISBN 978‐0‐8101‐4816‐1

Milton and the Invention of the Human in Paradise Lost

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Milton and the Invention of the Human in Paradise Lost

Avant-Garde Post-: Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Avant-Garde Post-: Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union

The classicist in the cave: Bolaño’s theory of reading in By Night in Chile

Thu, 5 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The classicist in the cave: Bolaño’s theory of reading in By Night in Chile

Variations on Violence in Greek and Akkadian Succession Myths

Thu, 5 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: In this article I explore a selection of texts from Greece and Mesopotamia that either recount or comment on the succession myth. I argue that representations of violence in those texts differ considerably within the same culture and time period. I explain these variations as social deixis, positing that ancient authors and interpreters of the succession myth used different representations of violence to present themselves as innovative figures. I argue that both mythmakers and myth-interpreters increased and decreased the intensity and number of violent features to mark a position in the competitive field of cosmological knowledge. Through the comparison of the sources, I show that there was as much competition and innovation in Greece as in Mesopotamia within the field of cosmology. The similarity of social contexts and practices may explain the cross-cultural transfer of knowledge between specialists of these two regions.

Sarah Perry’s Melmoth and the Implications of Gothic Form

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sarah Perry’s Melmoth and the Implications of Gothic Form

Editors’ Introduction: The Presence of the Medieval Past—Retellings and Social Value

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This issue consists of two special clusters: “Retellings of Medieval Literature in the Classroom,” edited by Eva von Contzen and Sophia Philomena Wolf, and “The Social Relevance of Medieval Studies,” edited by Gregory Sadlek.

Editors' Introduction: Teaching, Scholarship, and the Living Archive

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The topic for this issue’s primary cluster was inspired by The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (2021) by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan. The cluster presents four essays documenting the long-term influence of four medievalists: Aranye Fradenburg Joy, Clifford Flanigan, Joaquin Martínez Pizarro, and Derek Pearsall. This issue also includes of a recap of the longstanding undergraduate conference at Moravian University and short histories of three scholarly societies: the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, the John Gower Society, and the International Piers Plowman Society. We continue our two standard features with “How I teach…” contributions on Christina Fitzgerald’s edition of The York Corpus Christi Play (2018) and David Lawton’s edition of The Norton Chaucer (2019), and a “Conversations” response to the Medieval Studies and Secondary Education cluster in New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy...

Editors’ Introduction: Creative Community-Building in Times of Crisis

Sat, 8 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This issue includes a cluster on medieval studies and secondary education, contributions on pedagogy and teaching and learning centers, as well as contributions to two regular features: “How I Teach” and “Conversations.”

Conversation with Kirk Ambrose, Founding Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Colorado, Boulder

Sat, 8 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

An interview by Lisa Lampert-Weissig of Kirk Ambrose, a scholar of medieval art history. Ambrose has authored many articles and four books, The Nave Sculpture of Vézelay: The Art of Monastic Contemplation; Current Directions in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Sculpture Studies (co-edited with Robert Maxwell); The Marvelous and the Monstrous in the Sculpture of Twelfth- Century Europe; and Urnes Stave Church and its Global Romanesque Connections (co-edited with Margrete Systad Andås and Griffin Murray).

Editors’ Introduction: On Fragility, Institutions, and Reflecting

Thu, 3 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This issue includes a cluster of brief essays on editing scholarly journals, three essays on teaching, and two columns: How I Teach and Conversations.

Still Life with Leftovers: Nonna Slepakova's Poetics of Time

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Still Life with Leftovers: Nonna Slepakova's Poetics of Time

Babel in Context: A Study in Cultural Identity. By Efraim Sicher. Borderlines: Russian and East European Jewish Studies. Brighton, Mass.: Academic Studies Press, 2012.308 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Photographs. $80.00, hard bound.Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism. By Rebecca Jane Stanton. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012. xi, 205 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. $45.00, hard bound.

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Babel in Context: A Study in Cultural Identity. By Efraim Sicher. Borderlines: Russian and East European Jewish Studies. Brighton, Mass.: Academic Studies Press, 2012.308 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Photographs. $80.00, hard bound.Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism. By Rebecca Jane Stanton. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012. xi, 205 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. $45.00, hard bound.

Race as Praxis in the Philippines at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Fri, 5 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000
This article takes as its point of departure the disparity between the empirical poverty of race and its survival, even growth, as a way of understanding history and politics—or more specifically, history as politics and politics as history in the Philippines during the nineteenth century. What interested me primarily was how race as a form of praxis is too often and easily ascribed to a discredited science that came into vogue during the nineteenth century. While race rhetoric certainly drew its authority from scientific positivism, its spokespeople also invoked the fields of law, philosophy, and religion. Yet for most people, race was not a question to be resolved by scientific investigation, but a weapon in a war or conflict between unequal opponents. Notsurprisingly, questions around the existence or impossibility of a Filipino race were most fully debated and developed in a time of war—the 1896 Philippine Revolution, and the 1899 Philippine-American War, which began just...

A Mexican Princess in the Tagalog Sultan's court: Floripes of the Doce Pares and the Transpacific Efflorescence of Colonial Philippine Romance and Theater

Fri, 5 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000
A Mexican Princess in the Tagalog Sultan's court: Floripes of the Doce Pares and the Transpacific Efflorescence of Colonial Philippine Romance and Theater

Review: México y Filipinas: culturas y memorias sobre el Pacífico by Thomas Calvo y Paulina Machuca, eds.

Fri, 5 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Review: México y Filipinas: culturas y memorias sobre el Pacífico by Thomas Calvo y Paulina Machuca, eds.

The Transnational Wandering Jew and the Medieval English Nation

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000
The Transnational Wandering Jew and the Medieval English Nation

The Temporal Monstrosity of the Wandering Jew in ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000
The Temporal Monstrosity of the Wandering Jew in ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’

Chaucer’s Pardoner and the Jews

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Chaucer’s Pardoner and the Jews

What Did Annarella See? “Il bisogno di conoscere con ogni medium” and the Hermeneutics of the Gaze in Carlo Damasco’s “Un paio di occhiali”

Mon, 1 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000
"What did Annarella See?"analyzes Carlo Damasco's cinematic adaptation of Anna Maria Ortese's short story "Un paio di occhiali" and argues that the trope of the "insopportabilita' della realta'" constitutes the connective tissue between Ortese's story and Damasco's film. This trope generates different options of "being in the world" for Eugenia and Annarella, the respective protagonists of short story and film. it is upon this contextualized and historicized notion of "being in the world" that Damasco's adaptation generates a powerful reflection of Ortese's estranged and estranging gaze, and the revolutionalty, if veiled, knowledge it envisioned.

“People of bad disposition”: The Failed French Colony at Fort Caroline as a Site of Local Conflict within a Transimperial System

Sun, 1 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Focusing on European colonial rivalry in Florida during the 1560s, including the massacre of French Huguenots there by Spanish forces, the article argues that our understanding of these events and of the texts that record the brief life of Fort Caroline should be situated within a broader network of imperial rivalry and religious conflict that connects Florida to Europe. It looks closely at two first-hand accounts—by René Goulaine de Laudonnière and by Nicolas Challeux.

Babel' in Context: A Study in Cultural Identity

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000
Babel' in Context: A Study in Cultural Identity

From Jewish Jesus to Black Christ:

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000
This article examines shared metaphors in Yiddish poems about lynchings and pogroms in the 1930s. Leftist Yiddish poets in particular often equated lynching victims, as well as pogrom victims, with Jesus. The poet Berish Weinstein serves as a case study, for he used strikingly similar motifs in his poems about anti-Semitic and anti-Black violence. It is no coincidence that a rise in poems about race violence occurred during the most heated years of the Scottsboro trial, an event that became a symbol of American racism for the Communist Party. Yiddish writing about violence against African Americans reveals the commitment of many Jews in the 1930s to move from ethnic particularism toward leftist universalism. However, this examination of shared poetic motifs shows that in writing about racism in America, many Jews were also implicitly responding to the rise of Nazism in Europe.

Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000
Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism

LITTLE FAILURE A memoir

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000
LITTLE FAILURE A memoir