Article
David R. Ellison
Issue 115
David Carroll’s new book on Camus is an important contribution not only to Camus studies but to contemporary reflections on postcolonial theory. The book is a model of scholarship and...
Article
Thomas McLean
Issue 94/95
...Communism to neo-capitalism, but it also responds to stereotypes of Poland that predate the Communist era. Centuries before Winston Churchill warned of an iron curtain descending upon Central Europe, writers...
Article
Bryan Counter
Issue 153
...By employing Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, Gernot Böhme’s discussion of a “new aesthetics” that can account for atmosphere, and Hannah Freed-Thall’s recent Spoiled Distinctions, this article examines the interconnection of...
Article
Sarah Rocheville, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 109
...rather a writer who ponders the law, it is perhaps because literature opened up a space from which he could observe life in a much more heightened way than was...
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...possible to tell a story, even to recount oneself, and “outdated notions” of personhood, chronology, mankind, narrative, psychology, history, etc.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
Peter Consenstein
Issue 150
...link those images to the photos. The least that can be asked of readers is to keep an open mind when opening La Lecture by Jan Baetens and Milan Chlumsky....
Article
Irving Goh
Issue 126
...can learn this through yoga) would involve the conscious sharing of air around us. What this sharing does is open us to the fact that the air we breathe is...
Article
H. Porter Abbott
Issue 94/95
...works like Hilary and Stephen Rose’s recent Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Harmony Books, 2000), contributors often freeze their target in order to shoot at it....
Article
Lynne Huffer
Issue 120
...full English translation of Foucault’s first major book, History of Madness, Anglophone readers now have the opportunity to retrace the ethical thread that runs through Foucault’s work from start to...
Article
Debarati Sanyal
Issue 101
...his oeuvre has fundamentally shaped — and continues to shape— our ways of reading cultural production. As an overview of the past fifty years of Baudelaire scholarship will attest, some...
Article
David Herman
Issue 114
...concerns and methods. Indeed, given the voluminousness of Ricoeur’s writings (helpfully assembled in a comprehensive, 9-page bibliography at the end of the book), readers in a variety of fields will...
Article
Antoine Volodine, Jean-Didier Wagneur, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 101
...marge, the interrogation was carried out on two fronts: that of information and that of literature. For example, in Vue sur l’ossuaire, the truth that the inquisitors seek with such...
Article
Daniel Deshays, David F. Bell
Issue 152
...functioning like the accelerator of a motorbike, ridden by an adolescent, screaming through the housing projects in the middle of the night… Examples of gestures to analyze, each with a...
Article
Eugene W. Holland
Issue 107
...Matrix (“Everyday Matrix” [9-29]), to Slack and Christa Albrecht-Crane’s examination of the implications of affect for pedagogy (“Toward a Pedagogy of Affect” [191-216])—and it varies in quality almost as much...
Article
Martin Paul Eve
Issue 144
Reading literature with the aid of computational techniques is controversial. For some, digital approaches apparently fetishize the curation of textual archives, lack interpretative rigor (or even just interpretation), and are...
Article
Réal Fillion
Issue 142
Jacques Rancière, it seems to me, is right: politics are rare (Rancière 1999; May 2008). Democratic political action makes manifest the part that has no part—not as a protest against...
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
Kélina Gotman
Issue 143
...this English-speaking world–my habitus–I have come into the habit of buying books in English even when they were written in my father’s French, because I can use them to teach....
Article
Marie-Pascale Huglo, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 111
In the cartography of the contemporary French novel, Lydie Salvayre’s oeuvre occupies a place apart—she affirms herself with a singular freedom of tone and a refusal of the serious. The...
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
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
Tom Conley
Issue 108
Jacques Rancière may have entered a French pantheon of film theory in 2001 after his publication of an array of essays on classical and contemporary films in La fable cinématographique....
Article
Guy Zimmerman
Issue 151
...of poststructuralist thought. In Ashes to Ashes, for example, the playwright deploys the fundamental form-generating characteristics of the theatre space itself in this contest against the totalizing schemata of neoliberalism....
Article
Debarati Sanyal
Issue 98/99
...write an experience that defies representation? Are certain forms of inquiry and representation better suited to the transmission of trauma than others? How can a historical writing of trauma attest...
Article
Andrew Benjamin
Issue 117
...(Though it should not be forgotten that Goya’s work belongs to the so-called Black Paintings.) The dog’s head interrupts the line. As a result, what is opened is a site....
Article
Grégory Chatonsky
Issue 160
This text was co-written with an artificial intelligence (AI). This so-called author wrote a sentence, then the software continued, and so on, each influencing the other, completing each other. Another...
Article
Gail Friemuth Wronsky
Issue 110
...But her emptiness-ness is hemmed in by lines of type, lines of time. By lies. She’s an opening caught up in flesh, or text. A conniving nothing inside a torture...
Article
John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Ellen Spolsky
Issue 94/95
...us) cannot accept. For example, for those attempting to construct computational models of the mind, Spolsky’s counterposing of “human, rather than machine processes”–and at other points, consciousness to algorithms, flexible...
Article
Laura Otis
Issue 159
...as vision and touch) that blend as in lived experience. In this study of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive, I will examine...
Article
Luke Munn
Issue 161
...oil and gas industry) with insights from media, cultural, and environmental studies, this article explores this grappling with uncertainty. To manage uncertainty, companies strive to internalize the complexity and contingency...
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
Marie-Pierre Le Hir
Issue 103
...unfair—criticism that Bourdieu’s work is “intrinsically resistant to social change”(5). While Bourdieu’s political activism and visibility in the media from the early 1990s on clearly attest to the importance he...
Article
Brett Bowles
Issue 97
This recent pair of offerings solidifies Richard J. Golsan’s position as one of the preeminent American scholars of Vichy, one of the richest and fastest-growing fields in French Cultural Studies....
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
Paolo Virno, Max Henninger
Issue 112
...commedia dell’arte character masks; to comment on each of them individually would be not just tedious, but also futile. It seems more worthwhile to concentrate on a single aspect of...
Article
Rosalyn Diprose
Issue 132
...recognition of shared vulnerability and interdependence, Murphy rightly supports the kind of ontology that this emphasis on vulnerability comes from: an ontology of human existence emerging from existential phenomenology that...
Article
Joanna Howard
Issue 166
...fantasy, and lead to derangement, or madness. To own such a view would lead to worse, I suspect. However, my fancier friend argued it was not deranged to demand common...
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
Tom Conley
Issue 155
In L’Entretien infini (1969), in two essays on René Char, Blanchot engages what he calls a parole de fragment, an open-ended and ever-approximate form of writing that disorients, displaces, and...
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
Anthony Purdy
Issue 135
...reproachfully like jetsam on a beach: pens, pencils, piles of books and papers, a terracotta bowl containing paper clips, a small crescent-moon tin from the 1950s with the image of...
Article
Gerald Bruns
Issue 120
...also because any effort of conjunction threatens to limit the autonomy that opens the practice of poetry to its multifarious futures. (On my desk, as I write this, is a...
Article
Phyllis Taoua
Issue 102
A few years ago, Ania Loomba explored a number of critical approaches to the vigorously debated relationship between the local and the global in her book Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998). Since then,...
Article
Bruno Clement, David F. Bell
Issue 106
...that Circonfession works so hard to bring into the realm of thought. What I retain from this stunning book (hardly a book, in fact—more a series of annotations at the...
Article
Mario Perniola, Deborah Amberson
Issue 106
...His influence on my thinking grew significantly during the 1970s and ’80s, as is evident in my books Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World, (New York: Humanity Books 2001), Sex Appeal...
Article
Tom Conley
Issue 104
...own commercial motivations. A compelling chapter on the haeccity and quiddity—the “thisness”or “thatness”—of the musical performances determines how, for participants, sensation, movement, and affect conspire to produce “events” in the...
Article
Kat Matson
Issue 169
...task for herself to create “a book of practical philosophy about living in a folded cosmos” (5), and that playfulness keeps her book much more accessible than it could otherwise...
Article
Toby Miller
Issue 115
I begin with a quotation about the United States in 2004: [H]airy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat...
Article
Melanie White
Issue 134
...law, rights, justice, freedom and morality. For Émile Durkheim, founder of the French sociological tradition, the question of society is one such great question.1 Indeed, it was the question for...