Category Archives: Writing Sample

This was originally presented at the MELUS conference in Cincinnati, OH 2019 Introduction             The first story in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s collection The Refugees is entitled “Black-Eyed Women.” A thirty-eight-year-old ghost-writer and her mother, two Vietnamese refugees living in America, are visited by the son of the family. The ghost-writing protagonist has a specialty inContinue reading “The Diasporic Aesthetic: Spectral Knowing in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ‘Black-Eyed Women’”

This is in response to Andrew Piper’s new book Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Univ of Chicago Press, Aug 2018). Piper’s characterization of literary studies does not hold up to contemporary literary studies (of which he is a part). He only uses examples from Auerbach and Barthes. While both of these are mammoth names in literaryContinue reading “The Polemics of Andrew Piper’s Enumerations”

The Water Lily This article began, perhaps, when a fellow graduate student asked of our Intro to Literary Theory class “what is it about the form of the assemblage that makes it useful to think through minoritized or marginalized identities?” Or perhaps this article began at a small conference where I presented a paper onContinue reading “Form(s) and Ideology: Thinking Through the Diaspora in Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman”

The review in The New Yorker of Garth Greenwell’s first novel What Belongs To You argues the whole novel reads like a single sentence and calls the text Woolfian.[1] To consider this prescription on its own terms, the present essay (1) thinks through what the Modernist sentence was, (2) asks whether Greenwell’s novel develops a/theContinue reading “The Sentence Queers Modernism: What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell”

Kathi Wolfe. Love and Kumquats: New and Selected Poems. Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books Inc., 2019. Reviewed by Preston Taylor Stone, originally published in the South Carolina Review (52.2 – Spring 2020) Kathi Wolfe writes in SCR 51.2, “Poetry emerges not only from the body (our physical, sensory, emotional, loving, sexy, dying bodies) but out ofContinue reading “Toward a Queer/Blind Poetics: Kathi Wolfe’s Love and Kumquats”