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
Danièle Meaux
Issue 88
...dont la photographie constitute le repoussoir. Comme le montre Charles Grivel dans sa préface, le daguerréotype apparaît comme le degré zéro de l’art, tel que le conçoit Töpffer; il est...
Article
Andrew Sobanet
Issue 119
In a thought-provoking and well-researched new book, Richard Golsan explores the politics of complicity in two heterogeneous groups of French writers. Focusing on the 1940s and the 1990s, Golsan analyzes...
Article
Mark Bonta
Issue 121
Though it has been claimed that Deleuze sought to delink his thought from all religion (Bryden), a close examination of his major writings, as well as his collaborative work with...
Article
Ksenia Fedorova
Issue 169
...the apparatus of perception as the mediating component, which is pre- and trans-subjective. Through examples like Marnix de Nijs’s TAST and Michel van der Aa’s opera Upload, I investigate how...
Article
Ken Rinaldo
Issue 169
This article examines cognition, identity, and agency as distributed across biological, microbial, and algorithmic systems. It challenges the notion of the individual by framing humans as holobionts—complex assemblages of human...
Article
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 166
On July 12, 2022, a van caught fire on a small road, the “piste 214,” that winds through the pine forest towards the beach south of La Teste. After several...
Article
Leah Vonderheide
Issue 169
...sacred burial ground referred to as “The Pines.” The protest was famously documented by Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin in Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). As Obomsawin’s film depicts, the...
Article
Mareike Schildmann
Issue 165
...and progressive opposition like Büchner opened for the integration of peasants into the (liberal) revolutionary project. What is the function of literature in negotiating the political agency of the peasant...
Article
Sylvano Santini, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 97
...of cross-roads constantly traversed by thinkers and artists, a perpetually moving nerve center that opens aesthetic and intellectual experiences into countless interpretations. This is what was experienced at Cerisy in...
Article
Peter Consenstein
Issue 129
...[1995]), as well as a seven-volume (and “six-branch”) “récit autobiographique,” which David Bellos has compared to the work of Marcel Proust.1 The three books Roubaud published in 2008 and 2009,...
Article
Elisabeth Ladenson
Issue 106
Pity the academic book reviewer! Inflation in the language of review is akin to what has happened to letters of recommendation: as a colleague recently observed, hiring and promotion committees...
Article
Charles J. Stivale
Issue 100
...writer composes two books, one in ink, the other “written in the soul, with silence and blood” (3). This insight inspires Buchanan to find ways to read this “other book”...
Article
Roland Arthur Greene
Issue 109
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s book belongs to a short but dense tradition of retrospectives, proposals, and jeremiads on the topic of Comparative Literature, a discipline always in search of itself. Delivered...
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
John Mowitt
Issue 152
...the articulation between racial difference and sound by probing the now common association of color and noise, for example, the “pink” noise routinely used as a sleep aid. Despite the...
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
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
S.F. Kislev
Issue 151
At what “resolution” does Hegel’s dialectic operate? Does it dictate the transition between arguments in a chapter, or the transition between chapters in a book, or the transition between books...
Article
Stuart Kendall
Issue 93
...time describes a circle eternally bereft of a center. For Hill, and for us, Blanchot’s oeuvre offers a present that is already past and will always be yet to come....
Article
Odile Passot, Paul Lafarge
Issue 90
...He cares little whether the common reader understands: “Having, then, to take account of readers who are both attentive and diversely influential,” he writes in Commentary on the Society of...
Article
Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Ole Birk Laursen
Issue 143
...of Ernest Riebe and Ern Hanson in the IWW’s Industrial Worker in the early twentieth century, comics and cartoons have been prominent fixtures in anarchist publications, while comic books themselves...
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
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
Peter Consenstein
Issue 156
...records, and documents the challenging theoretical, national, and literary questions that both French and American poetries of this period address. Lang’s book is composed of an approximately thirty-page introduction, followed...
Article
Christophe Pradeau, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 97
Over the last 30 years, Judith Schlanger has devoted a dozen books to the exploration and description of the intellectual world as it consists of invention, of works–a dynamic space...
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 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
Rosemarie Scullion
Issue 87
...where an entire human community lives “in thrall to the Olym- pic ideal” (WIMemory iii).2 Following interpretive leads the author himself provided on the novel’s back cover, these critics have...
Article
Rosemarie Scullion
Issue 87
Demythologizing the Occupation In Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), a work often considered one of the founding texts of the hydra-headed discipline of “Cultural Studies,” Roland Barthes observed that myth-making invariably...
Article
Carrie Tarr
Issue 87
...and emotions. If some were critical of the incorporation of elements reflecting Cocteau’s poetic universe,1 they nevertheless applauded the film’s imaginative combination of modern setting and universal theme, its stylized...
Article
Pascale Gaitet
Issue 87
...about the Liberation of Paris, by which time he had distanced himself from Surrealism. The poem in question is called “Comprenne qui voudra” (“Understand Who Will”) and is preceded by...
Article
Michel Laronde
Issue 87
...Calixthe Beyala). La liste des 21 romans par 13 auteurs femmes qui servent de corpus de base à cette étude apparaît à la page 22. Pour comprendre l’identité du “nouveau...
Article
Sylvie Kandé
Issue 87
...productions littéraires en français de l’outre-Hexagone est immense. Mais tout aussi immenses sont les problèmes épistémologiques que soulève cette “communauté imaginée” dont les frontières—au moins celles de la Francophonie du...
Article
Hélène Merlin, Craig Moyes
Issue 88
“Decontextualizing Context”: even if my title sounds like a deconstructionist slogan, what I really want to consider is the relation between text and context, and the question of the autonomy...
Article
Eric Méchoulan, Christopher Prendergast
Issue 88
From the point of view of history (historical inquiry and “method”), the work of literature is both paradox and problem. As Roland Barthes put it, “la litterature est a la...
Article
David Simpson
Issue 88
YES INDEED. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN, and is perhaps now more so than ever. For the most part our approach has been compulsively inclusive; nothing human or inhuman is alien...
Article
Ursula Link-Heer, Lisa McNee
Issue 88
IT HAS BEEN SOME TIME SINCE PSYCHIATRY, followed by the mass media, rediscovered a syndrome that kept specialists in various dis- ciplines, including philosophy, in suspense even at the turn...
Article
Simon Goldhill
Issue 88
“Literature” began, as Auden might have put it, in 1823, along with “Art” and the other shibboleths of Romantic aesthetics. The rise of “Literature” as a category is paralleled by...
Article
Steven Jaron
Issue 88
...turns his shoulder he will lose all he sought to retain; and yet, upon coming to the light of day, he is damned, struck mad by a blinding sun. Further,...
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
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
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
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
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
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...