Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture

Queer Theory, Historicism, and Early Modern Sexualities

Pre-Modern and Early Modern Persian Literature: Written while Travelling?

In literary histories written in both Iran and the West it has generally be assumed that early modern Persian literary works are (technically inferior) copies of Western literary works. This has been and is still a claim. Almost no academically and scientifically sound works has substantiated this claim. While there is no point in denying a European influence on early modern Persian literature,...

Whither Psychoanalysis in Computer Culture?

The computer as an “object to think with” enters into how people think about their minds in several ways. First, it serves as a model of mind, both historically and in contemporary neuroscience and neuropsychology. Second, the computer enters into our thinking about mind through our everyday interactions with computational objects. In recent years, people have embarked on a range of new “inters...

Historicism Blues

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson calls this opening salvo from 1981’s The Political Unconscious the book’s “transhistorical imperative” and its “moral” (9). Is this, indeed, the most sacred of all critical commandments? The “thou shalt not kill” of literary studies (above all, perhaps, of American literary studies)? (Nietzsche might have called it, rather, the “thou shalt kill”: in his wor...

Linguistics, Historicism and the Humanities