Article
Wen Yongchao
Issue 154
4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition) is the defining feature of second-generation cognitive science, which replaces a computer-like cognitive processing model with one that highlights the interactive dynamism...
Article
Ara H. Merjian
Issue 153
...history yet simultaneously alien to it – that figures prominently in Pasolini’s aesthetics throughout the period: the African-American community and its particular cultural and counter-cultural expressions. By virtue of the...
Article
Danielle Sands
Issue 153
In this article, I examine Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers’s recent writings on Gaia, the mythological goddess repurposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis as geobiological trope....
Article
Christopher Norris
Issue 149
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual . . . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints;...
Article
Eran Dorfman
Issue 144
...said, ‘you shall examine’” (320d). So Epimetheus distributed to each animal qualities according to a principle of equilibrium and compensation, each becoming either swift or strong, skilled or large, and...
Article
Johanna M. Wagner
Issue 139
In criticism of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, more attention has been paid in recent years to the unconventional side of Lily Bart. Wai-Chee Dimock, for example, calls Lily...
Article
Laurence M. Porter
Issue 136
...or film. His main examples, in path-breaking analyses of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, come from nineteenth-century British literature, but they should inspire studies in other areas....
Article
Matthew Chrulew
Issue 134
...case, style. He takes as a prominent example the revolutionary transformation from princely menagerie to public zoological garden, as well as Carl Hagenbeck’s subsequent “revolution” in zoo design, which inaugurate,...
Article
Paul Patton
Issue 134
...pace that allows not only for frequent mention of things to be discussed (for example, that the reason of the strongest is always the best), but also for looping back...
Article
David Wills
Issue 134
...a writing that attempts to address what we call current events, particularly an academic writing—as distinct, for example, from journalistic writing—whose rhythms of composition and publication obey particular protocols and...
Article
Katey Castellano
Issue 125
...lost harmony between humans and nature” (229). Foreseeing that the rise and progress of industrial modernity might irreversibly erode both the landscape and local communities, Romantic literature questions humanistic, technological...
Page
For over 50 years, SubStance has published rigorous, creative contributions to contemporary critical debates from a range of theoretical perspectives. Consistent with our commitment to readers and authors to expect...
Article
Laurence M. Porter
Issue 131
...in English-Language Narrative Discourse from 700 A.D. to the present” (vii). Through comparison or contrast, many of its observations on character depiction and on the “developmental trajectories” of stories can...
Article
Mark Steven
Issue 147
This essay begins with Alain Badiou’s book, In Praise of Love, and ends with Jean-Luc Godard’s film of the same title. Between these narrative poles and drawing on a web...
Article
Judd D. Hubert
Issue 130
This issue of Mélusine pursues the research initiated in 1982 on the surrealist book, without giving the last word on such a complex subject. Demonstrating erudition worthy of La Revue...
Article
Ursula K. Heise
Issue 127
...them public. The slogan “Think globally, act locally,” coined by René Dubos in 1970, similarly summed up environmentalists’ commitment to a vision of planetary connectedness, as did Kenneth Boulding and...
Article
Chris Crews
Issue 159
...Most readers are likely familiar with some version of the Anthropocene by now, and its usage in these books (with a few exceptions) follows a common refrain in the humanities...
Article
Kamil Lipiński
Issue 158
In Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Ethnography, Paolo Magagnoli has undertaken the complex task of linking different aesthetic contexts through a study of experimental documentary audiovisual projects, treating...
Article
Daveeda Goldberg
Issue 150
“Is X good for the Jews?” This is the formula Bruno Chaouat borrows for the title of his recent book. It’s a cliché of a question, one that suggests notes...
Article
Matthew B. Smith
Issue 150
...many respects the book’s central figure, who is treated in two consecutive chapters. As can be seen in her choice of poets, Gavin’s approach is transnational and multilingual. This allows...
Article
Patricia Pisters
Issue 146
On my desk, next to my laptop, a small piece of lapis lazuli. My eye is captured by the intense blue from its most important component, the mineral lazurite. The...
Article
Jason Rhys Parry
Issue 144
In Book II of the ancient architectural treatise, De architectura, Vitruvius gives a mythical account of the conjoined origins of architecture and language: “[I]n ancient times,” he writes, “men were...
Article
Allan Antliff
Issue 143
...of graphic artist Kevin Pyle, an American-born artist with a substantive body of illustrated books and comics addressing a myriad of issues. I am interested in how Pyle undermines and...
Article
Mathew Abbott
Issue 141
Near the end of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the book’s eponymous protagonist recalls visiting the zoo of the Jardin des Plantes with his friend Marie.1 The zoo is in bad...
Article
Matthew Mullins
Issue 138
...disrupting and almost asserting themselves as components of the title. The effect is a fitting first impression for an eminently readable book that throws philosophy off balance and then tries...
Article
Carla Calargé
Issue 135
Valérie Orlando’s last work, Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society, is not a simple study of Moroccan films produced and distributed between 1999 and 2010. The book is...
Article
Karlis Racevskis
Issue 116
...it comes to the Enlightenment, as Elena Russo’s book shows, few concepts are as revealing as the notion of taste. While Russo is obviously not the first scholar to survey...
Article
Ralph James Savarese
Issue 159
This essay explores new technologies of communication, mischievously suggesting that an ordinary memoir, on some fundamental level, is no different from what occurred with a young woman in a persistent...
Article
Johanne Villeneuve, Will Bishop
Issue 138
...periodization). To write the history of any given medium and separate it into periods, one must also select the components “that gathered together as a way of giving ‘birth’ to...
Article
Rocco Gangle
Issue 121
Two issues for Deleuze’s thought converge in its encounter with combinatorial divination: (1) the problem of a philosophical affirmation of the “whole of chance” or of “all chance in a...
Article
Eric Prieto
Issue 119
Jacques Réda is best known as a poet of place, remarkable precisely for his interest in the unremarkable and his compelling descriptions of nondescript places, the kind that most of...
Article
Noëlle Batt
Issue 160
...who would at last be wise enough to remain discreet, and refrain from any untimely interference with the life of the Earth. Works Cited Levertov, Denise. “The Breathing.” AllPoetry.com, .com/The-Breathing...
Article
Zakir Paul
Issue 155
...So how, if at all, does Blanchot speak to the present? Responses to this question are quickly complicated by the rich and varied reception of his work. A lifelong friend...
Article
Tero Eljas Vanhanen
Issue 131
Well yes—Swirski is one of those critics who think that the relativistic postmodernism and social constructivism in much of literary studies has come to a dead end. While I did...
Article
Steven Ungar
Issue 128
...mémoire du monde (All the World’s Memory) among the eight short subjects he directed before completing his first feature-length fiction film, Hiroshima mon amour, in 1959. In particular, I consider...
Article
Andrew Elfenbein
Issue 159
The attractiveness of life writings stems from its promise of exceptional intimacy with a writer. Yet that intimacy can come at a cost, especially in relation to writers from marginalized...
Article
Jun Feng
Issue 158
Patrick Colm Hogan announced in 2002 that “cognitivist methods, topics, and principles have come to dominate what are arguably the most intellectually exciting academic fields today” (1). Today, what dominates...
Article
Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Issue 154
What comes after the language model of literary history? This essay considers that question by turning to works of contemporary fiction that operate at the edges of our most dominant...
Article
Serge Cardinal, Oana Avasilichioaei
Issue 152
In Balcony in the Forest, Julien Gracq composes a soundscape as a series of spatial events and material affects. He snatches it from “the smoke and the suburbs of Charleville”...
Article
Johanne Villeneuve, Debbie Blythe
Issue 152
My aim in this essay is to offer a reading of the documentary Havarie (2016), a film by Philip Scheffner that is essentially based on complex and unusual relationship and...
Article
Andrey Gordienko
Issue 150
This essay approaches Alain Badiou’s theoretical production during the period of militant fury commenced by May ‘68 in terms of his conflicted relationship to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Badiou’s...
Article
Banu Helvacioglu
Issue 142
...first of which is an analysis of the historical and political setting in France. The second, larger axis comprises a theoretical exploration of language’s indeterminate nature, the relationship between literary...
Article
Robert Sinnerbrink, Lisa Trahair
Issue 141
...that intersect with, without being reducible to, philosophical inquiry. Inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, many theorists are now engaged in what has come to be...
Article
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 140
...more likely, he just wants to make sure that he will be able to read the room temperature next time he comes. He is afraid to be too hot. He...
Article
Kir Kuiken
Issue 139
...aesthetic in its relation to the political. Coming after the exhaustion of debates surrounding the notion of “aesthetic ideology,”1 and expressing dissatisfaction with familiar arguments about the aestheticization of politics,...
Article
Kurt Lampe
Issue 139
The repertory of theories, practices, and stories associated with Greek and Roman Stoicism fills a significant compartment in the Western philosophical archive, the meaning and value of which are ceaselessly...
Article
Guy Zimmerman
Issue 139
Many who write about the playwright Maria Irene Fornes’s work comment with reverence about the experience of watching those productions she herself directed. Managing somehow to combine frank depictions of...
Article
Alan Singer
Issue 139
Sexuality and sexual desire remain tantalizing conundrums for the universalizing intellect, desirous of comprehending the human condition even in its most unconditional manifestations. The representation of sexuality in the history...
Article
Juergen E. Mueller
Issue 138
...be allegory […]. (Coleridge 33) In the community of scholars of intermedia research, the above quoted citation is commonly regarded as Coleridge’s coining of the term “intermedium” or “intermediality” (Higgins)....
Article
Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt, André Habib
Issue 137
...in the transnational circulation of ideas and cultural productions in a global cultural context. Yet translation – and the untranslatability it elicits and sometimes implies – has come to embody...