Article

Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton

David Herman
Issue 86
...sources (from The New York Times Book Review to The Nation) attest to the power of Eagleton’s story about literary theory and to the skill and persuasiveness with which he...
Article

On the Risk of Gaia for an Ecology of Practices

A.J. Nocek
Issue 145
...or concepts that easily encapsulates her work. Nevertheless, in recent years concepts such as “cosmopolitics” and the “ecology of practices” have gained a special currency in the context of humanities...
Article

Pierre Bourdieu and Literature

Jacques Dubois, Meaghan Emery, Pamela V. Sing
Issue 93
Bourdieu’s thought is disturbing. Provocative. Scandalous even, at least for those who do not easily tolerate the unmitigated truth about the social. Nonetheless his ideas, among the most important and...
Article

Invocation: “FIFTY is Nifty”

I.M. Lithic
Issue 160
...isn’t mimicking ‘in’ things, isn’t gimmicking slick tricks. It isn’t sticky with insipid kitsch; it’s minting first citings, glinting with birth-writings. This imprint isn’t stifling, it isn’t middling. It isn’t...
Article

Revisiting A New History of French Literature

Denis Hollier, Richard Joseph Golsan, Ruth Larson
Issue 102
R.J. Golsan: A New History of French Literature was published in 1989, when the effects of the de Man and Heidegger affairs were challenging not only the prevailing critical formalism,...
Article

A Diary, Some Poems (French irregular plural)

Michelle Grangaud, Jordan Stump
Issue 96
...diary, which is to say, ideally, an entire lifetime. In preparation for this long journey, he arms himself with a strange sort of compass, composed of the assemblage of a...
Article

Portrait of Guy Debord as a Young Libertine

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

Abstraction in Comics

Jan Baetens
Issue 124
The study of narrative in comics (which I will use as a general term covering both mainstream comics and more highbrow graphic novels) has often been a mere copy of...
Article

The Art of Survival: The Translation of Walter Benjamin

Betsy Fleche
Issue 89
Walter Benjamin is experiencing a startling new life. The translation project at Harvard University Press intends to make Benjamin’s writings more accessible to English-speaking readers, while many scholars know Benjamin...
Article

Modern Visual Poetry (review)

Ann Smock
Issue 101
...and holopoems which, as the 20th century drew to a close, you could access easily on UbuWeb. It takes in the exuberant experiments of the Italian Futurists, the “ascetic exercises”...
Article

Coughin’/Coffin Air

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

The Bergsonian Model of Actualization

Steven Maras
Issue 85
Introduction IN HIS COMMENTARIES ON BERGSON, DELEUZE REITERATES that a key task for philosophy is the stating and creation of problems (Bergsonism 14). In the discussion of his method, Bergson...
Article

Sublime Comedy: On the Inhuman Rights of Clowns

Joshua Delpech-Ramey
Issue 122
...those of a modern comedy. Beckett—whose theater, when “completed” correctly, is truly hilarious—was well aware of this. (75) Now of course the comedy Badiou has in mind here is not...
Article

Breathing Emily Dickinson: Inspiration/Expiration

Eric Méchoulan
Issue 160
...hour behind the fleeting breath G. Share; experience; partake of; have in common When it comes, the Landscape listens — Shadows — hold their breath — H. Inhale deeply; rest...
Article

Inspiration/Expiration (Completion)

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

Residues of the 1930s

Robert F. Barsky
Issue 93
The following is a discussion of Patrick Deane, ed., History in Our Hands: A Critical Anthology of Writings on Literature, Culture and Politics from the 1930s (London & New York:...
Article

The Time of Law: Eighteenth-Century Speculations

Peter De Bolla
Issue 109
...mathesis of modernity. There is a moment, a precise point at which this shift becomes visible, stabilizing the slow-moving plate tectonics of epistemological contest in a discursive daguerreotype whose silvered...
Article

Derrida’s Hamlet

Christopher Prendergast
Issue 106
...of the Communist Manifesto) and the ghosts of Marx (broadly, what Derrida means by the “legacy” of Marx, as the constant returns of a kind of spectre in the midst...
Article

The New Digital Flesh of Fantastic Bodies

Denis Mellier, Charles La Via
Issue 147
From the fantastic inscribed on bodies, frightening as well as suffering bodies, and cinematic technologies inventing new spectacular forms of these bodies, a history of the one based on the...
Article

Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature

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

The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter by Mary Ann Caws

Katharine Conley
Issue 86
...her impressive new book, in terms of each movement’s vision. Her perceptions, based on surrealist models include René Char, Dorothea Tanning, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Claude Cahun, Robert Desnos, Antonin...
Article

Naked Terror: Political Violence, Libertine Violence

Marcel Hénaff, Lawrence R. Schehr
Issue 86
SADE AND TERROR: PUTTING THIS NAME AND THIS WORD TOGETHER might first evoke figures of libertine executioners, the cruel despots of the Marquis’s tales (Saint-Fond, Noirceuil, Blangis, Brisa-Testa) or figures...