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
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
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...
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
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
Will Bishop
Issue 126
The American composer John Adams writes “One needs the stimulation of the tactile contact with the sound” (191). He illustrates this point with a kind of tautology, for he says...
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
Chris Danta
Issue 117
...and compose songs, but who really just cheeps like the rest of her folk and whose destiny it is to “be forgotten like all her brothers” (1979: 145). Kafka completed...
Article
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 147
...and Koen Vermeir. It ran for several years. The idea was to meet about once a month and invite scholars from various disciplines around a common machine, or at least...
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
Elisabeth Weber
Issue 160
...assumed responsibility for the “inspirited” land. Kimmerer comments: Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They...
Article
Adilifu Nama
Issue 160
...of wealth extraction enshrined the public ruin of Black bodies with public beatings to compel compliance, and later public lynchings to intimidate and psychologically terrorize Black folk into a forever...
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
David F. Bell
Issue 160
...finger, rubbing it lovingly against the front gum of the mouth. Freud’s “Über Coca” looms ominously in the background, the work of a phase in Freud’s professional career complicated by...
Article
Abigail Culpepper
Issue 166
We cannot see the forest for the trees. It is no mistake that one of the most common English expressions featuring trees is about myopia. So invested in seeing trees...
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
Joshua Armstrong
Issue 148
...its obsessions for information, technology, and space—depicts a crossroads of subjectivity. At that crossroads, natural and computational connotations of “stream” collide, fueling the novel’s central crisis. The misadventures of Rolin’s...
Article
Kevin Kopelson
Issue 133
...mother to whom both the coming-out testament and its continued refusal to come out are addressed?” asks Sedgwick. “And isn’t some scene like that,” she asks as well, “behind the...
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
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...
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
Diana Mistreanu
Issue 159
Published in Hermann’s prestigious “Savoirs Lettres” book series founded by Michel Foucault, Jean-François Vernay’s latest work is a compelling neurophenomenology of literary fiction. This makes it a valuable contribution to...
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
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
Peter Consenstein
Issue 156
...and studying French and/or American poetry of the mid- to late twentieth century was keenly aware of the fruitfulness of the exchanges between French and American poets. This book archives,...
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
Guy Zimmerman
Issue 151
This paper uses the concept of autopoiesis to describe Harold Pinter’s approach to dramatic composition. The playwright strikes a first note and allows the play to emerge from the resonances...
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
Rosemarie Scullion
Issue 146
...message, which captured the sense of urgency and foreboding that was palpable across large swaths of the land, instantly went viral. In a preface to comments informed by deep knowledge...
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
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
Kélina Gotman
Issue 143
...torch of a lighthouse, over the points of its author’s compass” (ix). As I write and muse on this, my shoulders aching from the hard wood stool I have been...
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
Ioana Vartolomei Pribiag
Issue 142
...common sense trinity—what is art? what is politics? what is their relation?” and accept fully the idea that these concepts have no determinable, transhistorical essence (3). They are always in...
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
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
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)....