The poetry of nineteenth-century Brazilian writer Machado de Assis offers a fascinating case study of literary and cultural circulation between Latin America and Europe. While all nine of his novels and many short stories have now been translated into English, more than a century after his death only a handful of his roughly 200 poems have been translated into English. Through Roberto Schwarz’s framework of “misplaced ideas,” this paper examines the role Machado played in importing external cultural elements into Brazil (...) through his poetry, criticism, translations, and novels, and interrogates the conditions that have contributed to the failure of his poetry to reach the Anglophone world. Using Machado’s own essay on the Brazilian literary instinct, as well as José Luís Jobim’s work on both circulation and Machado’s development as a writer, this paper also helps place Machado’s poetry within the scheme of his larger literary project, encompassing his novels, short stories, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism. (shrink)

This article will consider some of the implications of the casting of two of France’s most renowned stars, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Omar Sy, in Olivier Nakache’s and Éric Toledano’s 2014 film Samba, the much-anticipated follow-up film to their box office hit Intouchables. It will examine the casting of Sy and Gainsbourg both in terms of how the film imports their respective star personae and the impact this has on characterisation in the film, and in terms of the representation of Frenchness. (...) After examining the socio-political context in which the film was made, the respective star personae of Sy and Gainsbourg will be considered through key scenes which demonstrate how these personae function. (shrink)

Amidst the recent and recurring negative reception of beloved worlds in video games produced by AAA studios such as Mass Effect: Andromeda and Fallout 76, Trent Hergenrader’s Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers is a welcome title. This book will be of most interest to educators, writers, gamers, and academics. This is an accessible and practical guide written for groups interested in building a world together, or for educators who would like to guide students through this process. Academics may also (...) find this title useful as a point of reference for game studies terminology with the glossary included and the case studies in chapter 6. While addressed specifically to groups of people, as “collaborative” suggests, the clearly outlined recipes for fictional worlds will be useful to individuals creating their own worlds as well. (shrink)

This essay places Toni Morrison’s Beloved into conversation with John Locke’s labor theory of property and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. I argue that Morrison adapts the Enlightenment tropes often found in slave narratives to her own postmodern project, creating a novel that not only refigures the Enlightenment tradition, but also searches for ways to reconcile African-American literary history with African Americans’ historical exclusion from the rights and protections, including that of self-ownership, championed by liberal (...) philosophy. As Morrison examines the implications of locating a seminal component of her own literary tradition within an historically adverse intellectual framework, she demonstrates the capacity of narrative to synthesize competing ideological paradigms and fashion visionary imaginings of the future. (shrink)

This paper examines Nick Land’s “numbering practices” for opening up language to modernity’s increasing technological entanglement beyond human comprehension. I begin by examining Land’s attempt to override our linguistic systems with machinic code and binary symbolism in a way which mirrors modernity’s technological future shock. I then consider his appropriation of Cantor’s set theory and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to plot ever greater degrees of reality’s excess to all anthropic logic. The third section looks at Land’s use of qabbalistic numerology to (...) uncover the absolute contingency of all our most strongly held beliefs, truths and values. The fourth section considers Land’s radicalisation of qabbalism through his own particularly abstract and inhuman notational “gematria.” I conclude by looking at Land’s interest in the computer keyboard’s lock-in to the QWERTY layout for proffering a glimpse of modern technology’s increasingly dehumanising meltdown of our anthropocentric delusions of grandeur. (shrink)

Headley’s The Mere Wife is both a celebration of motherly love and an exploration of the disruptive tension between coexisting opposites. While motherly love is the real focus of this novel, being its leading force, reversals of fortune are an equally important element. They permeate the story on a range of levels. The two main female characters of the novel could not be more different: American marine Dana Mills is a practical, lonely and down-to-earth woman who is mysteriously pregnant and (...) an amnesiac, while the beautiful Willa Herot is a fashionable, apparently-sociable and empty-headed woman who takes the whole day to do her grocery shopping. At first, Dana seems to be a woman who is deeply intimidating: not only did she fight during the War on Terror, witnessing terrible crimes;, she also remembers being executed on camera during that same war. Yet there she is, pregnant in a cave. (shrink)

Not waving shows I’m rude, an outsider; we three had driven and driven and drove: our sons were left behind.

My mother spread out cashews, pistachios, and walnuts in a single layer on a baking tray. She told me it was important not to mound them up, important that they were toasted evenly. She picked through, looking for small broken pieces, especially of walnuts, and removed them so they wouldn’t burn. Small pieces of burnt walnuts could spoil the flavour of the whole baqlaawe because, once they were ground up, the flavour would go throughout the whole sticky dessert. The oven (...) ticked as it heated up and would continue to tick for hours after it had been used as it cooled down again. While the nuts toasted in the oven, she cooked up water, sugar, and a little lemon juice. She held the temperamental ignitor down as the stovetop clicked into life with a whoomp of flame that settled into a more well-behaved, gentle burn on medium. The numbers around the dial were long ago cleaned off by an overly enthusiastic use of Jiff or Handy Andy. (shrink)