By Mario Aquilina What is happening to ‘literature’ in the digital age? Is it surviving, changing, under threat? How are we to think of works that are ‘born digital’ and hence shaped by modalities and affordances that are either absent…
By Brian Stanley Beyond the Binary of East and West However hard it tries, scholarship in world Christianity does not find it easy to escape the grip of the long-standing historical binary of East and West. The Christianities of Asia,…
By J.N.C Hill The start of the Arab Spring has raised numerous searching questions about the study of the Maghreb. Scholars of the region are grappling with an intriguing and largely unacknowledged paradox: that the theory that arguably did most…
By Gabriel Rockhill Theory is a particular type of practice, with its own set of rules, rituals and sanctions. To participate in its more institutionalised and prominent forms, it is necessary to engage with these norms and to negotiate one’s…
By Enda Duffy Professor of English, UC Santa Barbara Fredric Jameson may be the world’s most distinguished literary and cultural theorist living today. His influence since the 1980s on materialist, cultural and literary criticism, from the U.S. to China, has…
Elaine Morley The Occupation of Germany is a unique field for comparatists to explore given the fact that in this period five major world cultures – American, British, French, German and Soviet – were literally rubbing shoulders in Germany. I’ve…
“There are Muslims in China? I didn’t know that.” Yes, indeed, there are—possibly as many as 25-30 million souls—and they constitute a fascinating segment of two vital world entities, “China” and “Islam.” Almost half of them speak Chinese as their…
By Lynne Pearce Quite apart from its utility as a means of transport – or, indeed, its significance as a status-symbol – the twentieth-automobile has provided drivers and passengers with a personalised refuge and thought-space in which to touch base…
By Lynne Pearce Both in the news and among those academics whose work is concerned with transport futures there appears to be a widespread assumption that driverless cars are both inevitable and desirable. While there is, as yet, no coherent…
Here, Matt Ffytche introduces a special issue of Psychoanalysis and History, Afterlives of the Death Drive. The death drive has proved relevant to so many different intellectual contexts in part because of the extravagance, or allusiveness of Freud’s original gesture…