Article

The Anecdote: Introduction

Andrea Loselle
Issue 118
...be the childhood or adolescence of the printed book, interpreters of the former would somehow find within its meaning and essence the virtues of the latter. An anecdote must be...
Article

Jean Genet: Politics and Performance (review)

Gene A. Plunka
Issue 118
...full-length studies of Genet’s theater published in English since 1990 (I wrote one of them, while Brian Kennelly’s book on Genet’s posthumously published plays is the other), and there have...
Article

Wandering the Magnetosphere

Ingrid Koenig
Issue 162
Navigation notes: These emergent drawings–excerpts from a visual essay–take up the complex network of impacts across physical forces entangled with bio-geo-political time. A key element for this work is a...
Article

The Sylvan Ghosts of Class Mobility

Morgane Cadieu
Issue 166
Polity Press, in its Key Concept series, favors natural elements for the covers of its books on social issues: lush rice fields for Will Atkinson’s Class; close-up leaves for Muriel...
Article

Heights They Should Never Have Scaled: Our (Weird) Planet

Gry Ulstein
Issue 156
...reveal tensions in how we conceptualize the environment, the human, and the nonhuman. By comparing the narrative strategies in the walrus scene to similar strategies in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach...
Article

Varieties of Nothing

John Brenkman
Issue 155
...with Nietzsche in the antifoundationalist, postmodern philosophy of Gianni Vattimo, and with Pascal in the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, occasions pertinent comparisons to Blanchot as a reader of Pascal...
Article

Clon’d, or a Note on Propagation

Adam R. Rosenthal
Issue 148
...philological analysis of the word “clone,” I then turn to the conceptual parallels between vegetative reproduction and linguistic reproduction. Through a comparison between the clone and the double, I argue,...
Article

Preview: The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin

Paul A. Harris
Issue 148
SubStance@Work, a peer-reviewed imprint of SubStance, Inc., is a series comprised of born-digital works that integrate non-linear structure and multimedia content in innovative theoretical explorations. New works are previewed in...
Article

Claire Denis and the World Cinema of Refusal

Rosalind Galt
Issue 133
...to Argentina, Iceland and Greece in the 2000s. Embedded as it almost always is within the global circuits of capitalist culture, cinema has a particularly complex relationship to globalization: these...
Article

Art and Value: An Essay in Three Voices

Patrick Colm Hogan
Issue 131
...Indeed, when it comes to teachers and students of literature, even that question is not quite accurate. Rather, there are three separate questions. First, should verbal art matter? Put differently,...
Article

Introduction: “Impacting” Higher Education?

Eric Méchoulan, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 130
...of the public and the construction of a common ground. On the contrary, it seems that this allows the university to be appropriated by those with the means to do...
Article

Elove: What Does Fiction Know?

Sydney Levy
Issue 147
What does it take to make a machine that you may love and that has the potential of loving you back? It is the necessary conceptual components, as opposed to...
Article

Encounters with Impact

Wendelin Werner, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 130
One of the recurring themes in discussions among mathematicians, whether in informal lunch hour talks or in more formal committees, is what might be called “simplistic impact-bashing.” We are more...
Article

1, 2, 3, 4 Futures—Ludic Forms in Narrative Films

Henriette Heidbrink
Issue 130
...rely on well-known narrative schemata, and on the other hand they comprise something that is actually impossible: alternative futures. One central thesis raised by spokespersons of the forking-path-debate claims that,...
Article

Excess: Second Lives of Jacques Derrida

Vincent B. Leitch
Issue 128
...interest, scholarly and popular receptions. This work is not an intellectual history, nor is it a hagiography, nor an exemplary life. Instead, it combines biography of Derrida’s personal life, professional...
Article

A Globe of One’s Own: In Praise of the Flat Earth

Claire Colebrook
Issue 127
...in any ethical theory, then this virtual universalism would always struggle alongside moral valorizations of specified communities. How do we, from the particular world we inhabit, begin to think of...
Article

Lire Patrick Modiano, and: Lectures de Modiano (review)

Vanessa Doriott Anderson
Issue 127
...Magazine littéraire dossier devoted to Modiano, Maryline Heck, the dossier’s editor, announced the author’s “entry into the pantheon of French academia” while adding that “it seems the time has come...
Article

How Memories Become Literature

Lisa Zunshine
Issue 159
...1976), available at the Berlin Academy of Arts. The author shows that later versions of Patterns of Childhood have more complex embedments in the chapter describing the adolescent protagonist’s relationship...
Article

The Smell of Inner Beauty in Ancient China

Casey Schoenberger
Issue 159
...this paper uses the notion of “biological handicap,” proposed by Amotz Zahavi. As a peacock’s cumbersome tail feathers reduce its individual chances of survival but communicate valuable information to potential...
Article

Dondog (excerpt)

Ben Streeter, Antoine Volodine
Issue 158
...was a can of beer or of Coke. Empty, light, the tin cylinder followed its noisy course then stopped, no doubt because it had come up against heavier, grimier trash....
Article

Inhabiting a Viral Culture

Verena Andermatt Conley
Issue 157
...habitat and habitus. The depredations of COVID-19 tell us that we must urgently reset our physical and ethical compasses if we are to inhabit our many worlds with greater care....
Article

The Postlingual Turn

yasser elhariry, Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Issue 154
...the words we are producing on this page right here. It is, second, an axiom about the technologies of religion, media, communication, performance, translation, and circulation that distribute and also...
Article

The Inappropriable: On Oikology, Care, and Writing Life

Kélina Gotman
Issue 154
...thought, that come with parenting in an economy in crisis. Obliquely rearticulating the ‘work/life balance’ dyad to better think performative productivity in terms of oikological investments, the article performs another...