Article
Jan Baetens, Douglas Basford
Issue 123
...possible to tell a story, even to recount oneself, and “outdated notions” of personhood, chronology, mankind, narrative, psychology, history, etc. (Robbe-Grille, 1963) are quietly coming to the fore again. This...
Article
Thomas J. Armbrecht
Issue 134
Timothy Scheie’s book on the importance of the theatre in Roland Barthes’ oeuvre begins with what Scheie poses as an enigma: Barthes wrote frequently of the theatre at the beginning...
Article
Paul A. Harris
Issue 136
To date, David Mitchell’s fiction comprises six adventurously heterogeneous novels. Three are “cosmopolitan”1 in scope and structure, composed of sections that skip freely around in time and space: Ghostwritten (2001),...
Article
Bruno Chaouat
Issue 138
Leon Sachs’s The Pedagogical Imagination: the Republican Legacy in 21st-Century French Literature and Film sets out to examine the “parallels in the discourses of modern pedagogy and modern literary and...
Article
Jean-Jacques Thomas
Issue 124
While comics today have entered the world of what used to be called Western “high art,” manga—Japanese comics strongly associated with fan culture and genre—less publically breaks through into Anglo-European...
Article
Mark B. N. Hansen
Issue 129
...theorize the “agency” of the environment that comes to the fore as we humans enter, as we do increasingly today, into alliances with sophisticated, computational technologies.1 In concert with researchers...
Article
Michael Krimper
Issue 144
In 1956, Emmanuel Levinas devoted a provocative essay to the writing of his friend and companion in thought, Maurice Blanchot, entitled “The Poet’s Vision.” Therein, Levinas closely examines Blanchot’s meditations...
Article
Krzysztof Ziarek
Issue 132
The notion of vulnerability comes from the Late Latin vulnerabilis, derived from vulnerare “to wound,” which comes from vulner-, vulnus “wound.” As the Merriam-Webster dictionary suggests, it is probably akin...
Article
Lisabeth During
Issue 141
...philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) is a good example. In the years 1932 to 1933, she was connected to the dissident, Trotsky-leaning Communist Boris Souvarine and his Cercle communiste...
Article
Karin Littau
Issue 138
...reel they show towers at various stages of (de)composition. The images come from other gigantic installations Kiefer created, including the architectural landscape of concrete towers molded from shipping containers at...
Article
Inna Semetsky
Issue 121
...human thought, complemented by calculus ratiocinator and reflecting ratio embedded in Nature. The corollary is that, ultimately, the correspondence between primitive signs and the complex ideas for which they stand...
Article
Paul A. Harris
Issue 146
PETRIVERSE. Noun. 1). A world composed of rocks; e.g., a rock garden. 2). Words composed of rocks; i.e., verse written in and/or about stone. [Latin petra, rock; Old English vers,...
Article
Jesse Cohn
Issue 143
...social norms,” thereby “help[ing] us to think about and envision a better world” (Worden, “Politics of Comics” 69-70). Critical treatment of the works of American comics creator Chris Ware (b....
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Out Now SubStance 164 Volume 53—No.2—2024 See Contents A place for creative thinking We invite theoretical interventions in a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields that stretch the norms of...
Article
Gaurav Majumdar
Issue 120
...combinations and collisions, it performs verbal combinations, mutations, and collisions. That is to say, its very form evokes qualities and arguments that resist the ironies and asymmetries of orthodox assumptions....
Article
Ralph Schoolcraft III
Issue 119
Herman Lebovics’s latest collection of essays, sketchy in its argumentation, frequently off-topic, and rife with errors, is a disappointing treatment of a promising subject. The book’s objective is “to trace...
Article
Denis M. Provencher
Issue 116
In his latest book, Jean-Pierre Boulé provides a fresh look at Sartre by conducting a reading of the author’s life and work that focuses on the construction of selfhood and...
Article
Louis Betty
Issue 127
...caused in previous years has established the author as one of the world’s leading literary enfants terribles. This latest novel is, however, something of a departure from the past: virtually...
Article
Nathalie Rachlin, Rosemarie Scullion
Issue 133
...Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage!), a 32-page pamphlet authored by 93-year-old Stéphane Hessel, a former hero of the French Resistance, a concentration camp survivor and career diplomat. Hessel’s booklet, issued by...
Article
Anthony Reynolds
Issue 133
...began as “a protest against” it: “The irony … of the story is that often, especially in the United States, because I wrote ‘il n’y a pas de hors-text,’ because...
Article
Mathew Abbott
Issue 130
...hall of mirrors, or quasi-Derridean free play of significations: if the opening sequence of this film is an example of “intertextuality,” it is not because Kiarostami is spruiking some pop...
Article
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 140
...I never dared to enter the shop (I must be a little scared, I suppose) but I never miss looking into the window. Everything is a bit dusty. There are...
Article
Kenneth Surin
Issue 161
This most welcome book gets off on the right foot by eschewing such problematic terms as “post-structuralism” or “French theory” in studying the work of French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and...
Article
Luce Irigaray
Issue 160
...That is not to say that I have merely adopted these cultures as mine, the matter is more complex. For example, we have developed, in the West, a subjectivity that...
Article
Helen Deutsch
Issue 118
On August 6, 1763, the man who would become the greatest master of anecdotal form in English, James Boswell, and the object of his adulation and future biographical subject, Samuel...
Article
Donna Haraway
Issue 145
...and risky practices. Indeed, as in the subtitle of her book, Stengers seeks for and elucidates “une libre et sauvage création de concepts” (a free and wild creation of concepts)....
Article
Matthew Scully
Issue 148
“The problem of art in the modern era,” according to the opening of Audrey Wasser’s The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form, “is the problem...
Article
Hunter Vaughan
Issue 129
...memory-free instant of the passing image. This is the cinema, our world with cinema in it, our cinematic experience, according to Jean-Louis Schefer. In the enigmatic tone and unorthodox style...
Article
Richard Turner
Issue 146
...object from an ordinary rock to a viewing stone that invites close examination and perhaps contemplation. In this essay, I will examine the act of “re-grounding” rocks that have been...
Article
Eric Prieto
Issue 126
...valedictory stage. Coming hard on the heels of the 2007 publication of De la violence à la divinité, a single-volume collection of his four most important books (Mensonge romantique et...
Article
Michael Lundblad
Issue 126
...kind much at all in this otherwise erudite, wide-ranging, and impressive new book. But the cover art points toward the “two different senses of posthumanism” (xix) that are brought together...
Article
Mathieu Triclot, Charles La Via
Issue 147
...examined: the immersive multimedia installations of psychedelic culture, the flicker and its physiological effects, biofeedback devices, and the digital translations, in the world of computing, of these first analogical devices....
Article
Alex Moskowitz
Issue 149
...seeks to form a theoretical framework that contains the two eponymous figures. Bidet rightfully argues that most scholarship that strives to open a dialogue between Marx and Foucault merely results...
Article
Luce Irigaray
Issue 126
Entering into presence with an other is generally submitted to the rules of a world that is presumed to be neutral with respect to each one and to which each...
Article
Ranjan Ghosh
Issue 127
...of nature? Is living with/in nature all about encountering the spectre of the “unborn”—those who will come after us and who in some sense now must command the unfolding of...
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...make important contributions to fields of interest of the journal. All submitted articles are subject to peer review by our editors. For Book reviews and requests, please contact our Book...
Article
Vinciane Despret
Issue 145
...of humor is thus distinguished in the first place from irony (…). Humor is an art of immanence” (Stengers, L’Invention 79). In her book La Vierge et le Neutrino [The...
Article
Alison James
Issue 119
...of the authors mentioned in the course of the discussion. The book maps out a complex and varied intertextual field in which the diverse rewritings harness different potentialities of their...
Article
Laurence M. Porter
Issue 144
I undertook this review to celebrate Daniel Albright’s contributions to the theory of interrelations among the arts, and had nearly completed it before learning that he had died early in...
Article
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 147
...around machines with a common function. There were historians of science and technology, scholars in literature, art, media studies, gender studies, philosophers of science, and the list remained open. The...
Article
Aarnoud Rommens
Issue 143
It is not often that reading—let alone the reading of comics—is identified as a “need,” a function of basic physical “survival”: In Argentina, we were forced, as a question of...
Article
Joshua Armstrong
Issue 148
This article examines Olivier Rolin’s use of stream of consciousness narration in L’invention du monde (1993). It draws upon philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Paul Virilio to propose that the novel—with...
Article
Barry Nevin, Aoife O'Connor
Issue 158
...spectator-identification. This analysis ultimately aims to demonstrate the import of Kristeva’s theories to a more comprehensive understanding of the abject’s complex relationship to Refn’s œuvre and to spectator-identification in cinema....
Article
Rosemarie Scullion
Issue 146
On November 15th, one week after the results of the 2016 US presidential election were known to all, Timothy Snyder, a distinguished historian of Modern Europe, took to his Facebook...
Article
Liran Razinsky
Issue 144
This paper explores the autobiographical desire for a complete, comprehensive recording of a life. As long ago as 1762, Diderot wrote in a letter to his love, Sophie Volland: How...
Article
Ioana Vartolomei Pribiag
Issue 142
Gabriel Rockhill’s ambitious book responds to an acute need to re-think the relationships between aesthetics and politics. Radical History and the Politics of Art is an innovative, interdisciplinary attempt at...
Article
Paul A. Harris
Issue 140
In this landmark book, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen combines and culminates the two strands of his substantial scholarly work: ecology and Medieval and Early Modern studies. Stone is ambitiously synthetic and...
Article
Robert S. Lehman
Issue 139
In the autumn of 1798, Immanuel Kant published what was (excluding lecture notes) his final work, The Conflict of the Faculties. The latter comprises three essays, which ostensibly address the...
Article
Peter Fenves
Issue 126
...this semantic phenomenon that it can be found even in the case of confluent rivers. Thus, the name Rhein, Anglicized as “Rhine,” derives from the same complex of words that...
Article
Suzanne Nash
Issue 143
Pierre-Alain Tilliette is a Breton writer, who lives with his family in Paris, where he is Conservateur des fonds étrangers at the Bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville. The tragi-comic inventiveness...