Stephen King’s Nightmares are Personal and Real
A Shakespeare scholar’s deep dive into Stephen King’s 1970s work illuminates the elemental nature of fear.
literary studies
Reading Pandemics: From Boccaccio to Indigenous Futurism
Join us -- at a safe distance -- on this journey through the canonical and radical as we look to literary representations of pandemics in the past to help us understand the politics and possibilities of the present COVID-19 pandemic.
Chronicling the Non-Event: Anton Chekhov and the Short Story
Chekhov is engaging with an underlying, rumbling, non-event that pervades life and yet is nearly always blithely ignored. His stories move us in their ability to excavate this subterranean, haunting static that informs all experience.
Stephen King: ‘America’s Dark Theologian’
Horror might not be a replacement for the absolutism of religion, but for Stephen King its proved to be both a lucrative and at times life-long examination of what exists behind locked doors.
‘Looking for The Stranger’: Sometimes the Truth Is as Strange as the Fiction
Aspiring writers with ambition to shape the philosophies of the future can benefit from Camus as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale.
‘The Hatred of Literature’ Will Deeply Satisfy Lovers of Literature
This is a deep dive into the history of literature and the murky threats it's faced that have only served to make it stronger.
‘The Art of Confession’ Ties Together Threads of Performance
Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.
Jean Giono’s Slim ‘Melville’ Belies the Depths Within
Giono's quirky tale about Herman Melville reminds us that fiction can help us better understand reality.
An Otherworldly Vision: ‘Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost’
William Poole manages to deliver a spectacularly structured, tightly written, and captivating addition to literary studies.