Just a presentation paper from one of the last courses I took (after I didn't need more coursework)

The Algerine Captive is…one of the first attempts by an American novelist to depict the Islamic world, and lays bare a culture clash and diplomatic quagmire not unlike the one that obtains between the United States and Muslim nations today.
back cover to the Modern Library edition

If there’s not something timeless about the clash between Western and Middle Eastern cultures, there’s certainly something pesky and persistent about it. And whatever Royall Tyler reveals about slavery in his own country, by way of sketching a genealogy of Islam and Algiers, he simultaneously exposes the kernel of conflict between the US and Islamic nations. But let me go further: I think we miss an important point if we neglect to acknowledge that Updike Underhill’s promise to “every moment of my life” denounce “this detestable commerce” which is slavery (106) comes almost precisely midway through the book. The second half shifts from a concern about slavery to an interest in understanding the Algerines. Even if by analogy Underhill’s few reflections about his own enslavement are critiques of American slavery, the novel concludes with no reminder (much less one “every moment”) of the importance of this issue. In fact, Underhill’s commitment is “To contribute cheerfully to the support of our excellent government” (225), the same one that has legalized slavery and the slave trade. He says his “first object is union among ourselves” (226), and if Cathy Davidson reads this as a call for “inclusion,” “unity,” and “equality” (304), I read it alongside her epigraph: “He that is not for us, is against us” (233). In other words, there’s a sense in which Underhill’s ultimate platitude is a capitulation to consensus—precisely the principle that constituted slavery in the first place. Thus, instead of reading the second volume of the novel through the lens of what the first volume promises, I suggest we remember the traces from the first volume that help indicate the purpose and the problem of the second volume. Hence, we should follow the novel’s 2002 marketers who observe that there is something timely about reading this novel at present—and we should question what causes this timeliness.

Some notes on Michaels's method and argument in The Gold Standard

I have been reading Michaels along side Slavoj Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology, and several things about this juxtaposition strike me as noteworthy. Initially, Michaels's use of William James's psycho-philosophizing of the self seems jejune--if only because of James's historical position near the beginning of psychology--next to Zizek's use of Lacan (whose greater "sophistication" is probably mostly explicable by his more arcane writing). But of course, Michaels has deliberately chosen a contemporary of naturalism to illustrate his points. (For the same reason, he will use Josiah Royce in chapter 6.) But he never says anything like "these ideas were in the air" or refers to a sense of zeitgeist, so we have to wonder just what are "his points" in using by now outdated intellects to articulate the "logic of naturalism." I think the best answer to this question is to see that not insisting upon any universal status for his claims is merely a way of qualifying his argument. Nevertheless, he is articulating a logic of naturalism, and clearly William James is more useful for this purpose than is Jacques Lacan. Michaels's project is, after all, historicist, and thinking through this difference in method (between Michaels and Zizek) has helped clarify what should have been an especially familiar notion to me by now: what distinguishes the project of new historicism.