Journalism
“What is intelligence? For millennia, western literature has suggested it may be a liability.” The Conversation. September 21, 2023.
Books
Shakespeare’s Exiles. New York: Routledge, 2025. [More info]
Shakespeare’s Mad Men: A Crisis of Authority. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. [More info]
Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. [More info]
The End of Literature: Essays in Anthropological Aesthetics. Aurora, CO: Davies Group Publishers, 2009. [More info]
Articles and Chapters
“Shakespeare’s Heroines and the Constancy of Love.” Anthropoetics 25, no. 1 (Fall 2019) [Link]
“Violence and Politics in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood.” In Mimetic Theory and Film, edited by Paolo Diego Bubbio and Chris Fleming. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. [PDF]
“Sad Stories of the Death of Kings.” Anthropoetics 24, no. 1 (Fall 2018). [Link]
“Science and the Idea of Culture.” In Rhetorical, Cognitive, and Epistemological Perspectives on Science and Culture, edited by Ronald Soetaert and Kris Rutten, 53-65. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2018. [PDF]
“René Girard’s Shakespeare.” Anthropoetics 21, no. 2 (Spring 2016). [Link]
“The Challenge of Originary Thinking: A Response to Jean-Loup Amselle.” Anthropoetics 19, no. 1 (Fall 2013). [Link]
“Stories, Jokes, Desire, and Interdiction: The Cognitive and Anthropological Origins of Symbolic Representation.” Fictions: Studi sulla narratività XI (2012): 91-113. [PDF]
“Mimetic Theory and Its Rivals: A Reply to Pablo Bandera.” Contagion 17 (2010): 189-203. [PDF]
“Doubt, Compromise, and Doublethink: Transcendence in a Secular Age.” Anthropoetics 15, no. 1 (Fall 2009). [Link]
“A Race of Devils: Frankenstein, Romanticism, and the Tragedy of Human Origin.” In Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture, edited by Alexander Dick and Angela Esterhammer, 124-146. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
“Kenneth Burke’s Shakespearean Anthropology.” Anthropoetics 14, no. 1 (Fall 2008). [Link]
“The Culture of Criticism.” Criticism 49 (Fall 2007): 459-479. [PDF]
“Hamlet’s Theater of Resentment.” In The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, edited by Adam Katz, 151-169. Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers, 2007. [PDF]
“Imitation and Human Ontogeny: Michael Tomasello and the Joint Scene of Attention.” Anthropoetics 13, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2007). [Link]
“In Memoriam: Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007).” Anthropoetics 13, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2007). [Link]
“Shakespeare and the Idea of the Modern.” New Literary History 37 (Spring 2006): 319-339. [PDF]
“Epistemologia e teoria generative. Derrida, Gans e il subtesto antropologico della decostruzione.” In Scene e linguaggi dell’origine. Antropologia generativa e decostruzione, 91-108. Rome: Stamen, 2006. Translation of “Epistemology and Generative Theory: Derrida, Gans, and the Anthropological Subtext of Deconstruction.”
“Crisis and Collegiality.” symploke 13 (2005): 158-167. [PDF]
“Sparagmos! A Dialogue on Girard and Gans.” With Pablo Bandera, Andrew Bartlett, and Christopher Morrissey. Anthropoetics 11, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2005). [Link]
“The Critic as Ethnographer.” New Literary History 35 (Autumn 2004): 621-661. [PDF]
“Cognitive Science and the Problem of Representation.” Poetics Today 24 (Summer 2003): 237-295. [PDF]
“The Hero Who Wouldn’t Be: Coriolanus and the Scene of Tragic Paradox.” Anthropoetics 4, no. 2 (Fall 1998 / Winter 1999). [Link]
“Three Models of Fiction: The Logical, the Phenomenological, and the Anthropological.” (Searle, Ingarden, Gans).” New Literary History 29 (Summer 1998): 439-465. [PDF]
“The Use of Fiction in Literary and Generative Anthropology: An Interview With Wolfgang Iser.” Anthropoetics 3 no. 2 (Fall 1997 / Winter 1998). [Link]
“Performative-Constative Revisited: The Genetics of Austin’s Theory of Speech Acts.” Anthropoetics 2 no. 2 (January 1997). [Link]
“The Anthropology of Speech-Act Literary Criticism: A Review Article,” Anthropoetics 1 no. 2 (December 1995). [Link]
“Epistemology and Generative Theory: Derrida, Gans, and the Anthropological Subtext of Deconstruction,” Anthropoetics 1 no. 1 (June 1995). [Link]