Apr 13
2013Two summers ago, my family and I decided to spend an afternoon at Lisbon’s Jardim Zoológico. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that our eldest daughter made the decision to go and wouldn’t relent until we took her there. She was six years old at the time, and even then she possessed the seemingly limitless rogatory stamina and precocious mastery of the rhetorical device the Greeks called diacope that have made her a nearly unbeatable eight year-old. Read more →
Dec 02
2012Next quarter I’m teaching a 200-level seminar (open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates) on Renaissance pastoral poetry and fiction. My plan isn’t to cover everything (impossible, in any case) but rather to move slightly beyond Iberian texts in terms of space and time. The focus is still primarily on Portuguese and Spanish texts from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but we’ll look a bit at Latin and Italian source texts, along with some later American versions of the pastoral mode. Read more →
Dec 01
2012The Stanford Closeness Project is now collaborating with Jonathan Harris’s new storytelling platform, Cowbird.com. Our project has three parts:
Oct 15
2012My next book focuses on a particular way of framing the question of rhythm. With origins in Pre-Socratic Greece, the notion of rhythm that interests me resurfaces in a conscious way more or less at the middle of the twentieth century (thanks largely to Émile Benveniste). Read more →
Oct 14
2012Focused as some of us are on medieval and early modern literature, the question of context comes up a great deal. Is our work sufficiently contextualized? Where and how do modern theories of language and meaning (our inevitable toolkit) fit into our work? Are we expected to bracket off ourselves (and our readers) from our work? Read more →
Dec 20
2011These informal comments are divided into two parts. In the first part, I’ll try to sum up the main points of Quijano’s argument in “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” In the second, I’ll attempt to add something to what Quijano says, focusing primarily on: 1) adding a bit of nuance to his strategically reductive (and certainly overly optimistic) assessment of Europe; and 2) briefly fleshing out his comments about the earliest moments of European colonial expansion into Europe, Asia, and the Americas. I’ll begin with a brief outline of Quijano’s argument. Read more →
Dec 12
2011There’s a tradition in the DLCL of asking new faculty members to give a short commencement speech to the division’s graduates. In 2008, at the end of my first year at Stanford, I was asked to speak for a few minutes. My instructions were: 1) to talk about the significance of an undergraduate degree in literature; 2) to include a few jokes; and 3) to keep it short. The following is what I came up with. Read more →
Dec 03
2011A recent issue of the PMLA contains a small collection of essays by the late Moroccan novelist, critic, and sociologist Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938-2009). In David Fieni’s brief introduction to these essays, he speaks at some length of Khatibi’s friendship with Jacques Derrida in the context of Khatibi’s and Derrida’s theories (sometimes shared, sometimes differing) regarding monolingualism, colonialism, and the possibility of a “poetics of hospitality.”
Nov 23
2011Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Ayer hemos recibido la excelente noticia de que hay una editorial mexicana interesada en publicar una edición española del estudio etnográfico que Mónica ahora está elaborando sobre su tierra natal, la encantada (y encantadora) isla de Monicaña. Ahora nos toca traducir al español más de 300 páginas escritas en moniqués, y Mónica también quiere añadir algunos capítulos de posible interés para sus lectores hispanohablantes. Read more →
Oct 16
2011I’ve managed to put together the syllabus for the graduate-level Humanities seminar I’m teaching next quarter through ILAC and the DLCL. I love this course, because in it we essentially read some of the greatest works of early modern literature and discuss them as a group. Shakespeare, Camões, More, Montaigne, Ronsard, Sor Juana, Petrarca, etc., all in ten weeks. It’s over too fast, but like skydiving, the trip is memorable. Read more →
