Research & Innovation

College Park, MD, April 1–2, 2017

Last summer I decided to assign Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in the graduate course I was getting ready to teach. The title notwithstanding (Chiang earns his living as a technical writer) the book is a science fiction novella set in a near future when artificial digital life forms—digients—are cultivated and commodified as human companions. Eventually, invoking a Citizens United–like legal precedent, individual digients incorporate themselves to claim the legal status of people. The book was a good fit for a course on the human and the nonhuman, especially in the semester when Arrival, a film based on another Chiang story, was due to hit theaters.

Measure for Measure charts the unpredictable flow of goods, services, bodies, and information. This essay considers how our understanding of early modern comic form as driven by the compensatory logic of payment in kind is connected to perceptions of the early modern economy as itself limited to a series of exchanges that establishes the equivalence of two values. While comic closure ensures restitution, the genre simultaneously refuses to adhere to its own reparative logic. Measure for Measure elaborates an alternative means of achieving satisfaction via participation in a sympathetic system. In the place of economic rationality, we are confronted with the unknowability of diffuse and productive forces that prime, incite, and orient (and disorient) people.

Reading the migration of the word “nothing” throughout the play as an index of what Sianne Ngai calls a “minor affect” allows us to bypass moments of highly charged emotion in order to focus on political affiliations constituted by natural, mimetic, sympathetic bonds driven by impersonal and unconscious processes. This exploration of competing models of political affect in the period thus prompts a reconsideration of the role played by non-empathetic and non-epiphanic experiences that lie below the threshold of consciousness in analyses of early modern structures of social and political power.

Unavailable for more than 70 years, this early but important work is published for the first time with Tolkien’s ‘Corrigan’ poems and other supporting material, including a prefatory note by Christopher Tolkien. Set ‘In Britain’s land beyond the seas’ during the Age of Chivalry, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun tells of a childless Breton Lord and Lady (the ‘Aotrou’ and ‘Itroun’ of the title) and the tragedy that befalls them when Aotrou seeks to remedy their situation with the aid of a magic potion obtained from a corrigan, or malevolent fairy. When the potion succeeds and Itroun bears twins, the corrigan returns seeking her fee, and Aotrou is forced to choose between betraying his marriage and losing his life. Coming from the darker side of J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, together with the two shorter ‘Corrigan’ poems that lead up to it and which are also included, was the outcome of a comparatively short but intense period in Tolkien's life when he was deeply engaged with Celtic, and particularly Breton, myth and legend. Originally written in 1930 and long out of print, this early but seminal work is an important addition to the non-Middle-earth portion of his canon and should be set alongside Tolkien’s other retellings of myth and legend, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, The Fall of Arthur and The Story of Kullervo. Like these works, it belongs to a small but important corpus of his ventures into ‘real-world’ mythologies, each of which in its own way would be a formative influence on his own legendarium.

To commemorate the bicentennial of the publication of Frankenstein, the Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA) proposes “Frankenreads,” a national/international series of public programs and educational curriculum that culminates in a public reading of Frankenstein on October 31, 2018.

The novel concerns a murder mystery surrounding Oliver Marks, a former actor at the fictional Dellecher Shakespeare conservatory and most of the novel takes place during his 4th and final year at the conservatory.

Each chapter offers a sustained engagement with narrative theory and critical race theory as applied to ethnic American literature, exploring the interpretive possibilities of this critical intersection. Taken as a whole, these chapters demonstrate some of the many ways that the formal study of narrative can help us better understand the racial/ethnic tensions of narrative fictions. Similarly, the essays advance the tools of narrative theory by redeploying or redesigning those tools to better account for and articulate the ways that race and ethnicity are formal components of narrative as well as thematic issues.

Balachandran Orihuela defines piracy expansively, from the familiar concept of nautical pirates and robbery in international waters to postrevolutionary counterfeiting, transnational slave escape, and the illegal trade of cotton across the Americas during the Civil War. Weaving together close readings of American, Chicano, and African American literature with political theory, the author shows that piracy, when represented through literature, has imagined more inclusive and democratic communities than were then possible in reality.