If it wasn't for

Cineaste, Vol. XXIV, No. 2/3, pp. 20-22, 1999

A critique of Benigni's purported Holocaust comedy and its historical accuracy.

Creative Arts in Education and Therapy, 2018

Cognitive Grammar in Literature, 2014

This is a chapter in a book edited by Peter Stockwell and colleagues. In my chapter, I analyze poetic uses of conditionals with 'if' across the centuries, ending with an analysis of Kipling's 'If' - a well-known poem.

Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2006

2011

2019

A reflection by Pêdra Costa on Billy-Ray Belcourt's "A Poltergeist Manifesto".

2012

Family Medicine, 2019

Konturen (konturen.uoregon.edu), 2009

The metaphysics of possible worlds proposed by the analytic philosopher David K. Lewis offers an account of fictional discourse according to which possible worlds described in fiction are just as real as the actual world. In an inspired reversal of the analysis of literary fictions by such philosophical means, the French poet Jacques Roubaud makes direct reference to Lewis’ controversial ontological picture in two cycles of elegies composed between 1986 and 1990. Roubaud’s poems take up the idea of possible worlds as real entities, and at the same time they challenge the notion that philosophy could offer an account of fiction in which the puzzling collision of the possible with the impossible that fundamentally characterizes the phenomenon of fictionality would be seamlessly unravelled. For Roubaud the lyrical genre of the elegy and its thematic concern with love and death stands as a prime indicator of the quandary that results from our inability to solve paradoxes of modality such as those raised by Lewis in strictly theoretical terms.

Family Medicine, 2023