Foreword
The polemicizing themes chosen by the committee members of both The Scattered Pelican and the Comparative Literature/Theory and Criticism/Hispanic Studies Graduate Conference at Western University emphasize an important point: students working in interdisciplinary fields feel an increasing need to engage with the political, economic, and social upheavals that they are exposed to on a daily basis. Being a graduate student in the humanities—even in a (Canadian) context that still provides some much-needed shelter, especially for those among us who are immigrants, in real life or in imagination—no longer offers the kind of intellectual bubble or academic cocoon that used to foster academic development exclusively through explorations of ideas in the abstract.
Faculty Contributions
We Live in Interesting Times—And That’s OK
Regna Darnell, University of Western Ontario
Unthinking of You: Today’s Rock Academe
Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu, Western University
Articles
Disability’s ‘Pinocchio Story’: A Modern Crisis of the Disabled Identity
Alexander Jackson, Western University
“Silence on Joual!”: Literary Violence in an Otherwise ‘Quiet’ Revolution
Alexandre Desbiens-Brassard, Western University
Studying Outside the Law: Kafka and the Question of Benjamin’s Politics
Jeremy William Arnott, Western University
Representations of the Dystopian Other(ness) in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Monika Kosa, Babeș-Bolyai University
Book Review
A Dark Deleuze for a Sunny Century
Justas Patkauskas, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism