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

Pitiable or Political Animals?

Julian Murphet
Issue 117
...preponderance today of a public pity for what is here posed only in the subjunctive. It is a pity about which a veritable war has been waged for two centuries...
Article

Refusing Impact: Aesthetic Economy and Given Time

Anthony Mellors
Issue 130
...what she sees as a wasteland of lumpen, non-productive whingers. Yet her epic free-market fantasy centers on a utopia populated by refuseniks—industrialists, bankers, academics, engineers, artists—who have fled to a...
Article

In/habitable

Thangam Ravindranathan
Issue 157
...to produce, as the condition and obverse of all in the world that is beautiful and comfortable (i.e., giving one a sense of security, identity, freedom, opportunity, growth, meaning), another...
Article

Derrida and Durkheim on Suffering

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...
Article

Poetry, Philosophy, and Smart AI

Christopher Norris
Issue 163
Here I look at sundry aspects of the current controversy about Generative AI and, in particular, the implications of this new and rapidly evolving technology for poetry, the arts, and...
Article

Against Pessimism, or, the Education of Hope

Mikkel Krause Frantzen
Issue 151
...and the latest news: Europe’s taxpayers have been swindled of €55 billion, as revealed by the so-called #CumExFiles. So the old question bears repeating: What is to be done? Or,...
Article

Sartre, Self-Formation and Masculinities (review)

Denis M. Provencher
Issue 116
In his latest book, Jean-Pierre Boulé provides a fresh look at Sartre by conducting a reading of the author’s life and work that focuses on the construction of selfhood and...
Article

Subtle Bodies and the Other Jouissance

John Carvalho
Issue 118
...longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects,” Butler writes, “a new configuration of politics would surely emerge...
Article

La carte et le territoire (review)

Louis Betty
Issue 127
La carte et le territoire, winner of the 2010 Prix Goncourt and Michel Houellebecq’s first novel since La possibilité d’une île in 2005, may be the author’s most compelling work...
Article

The On-tology of Beckett’s Nohow On

Peter Poiana
Issue 119
...narratives, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho gave rise to a similar controversy. When John Calder first published the three prose texts in Britain under the single title...
Article

Preface: Fidelity to the Unruly

Zahi Zalloua
Issue 120
The late twentieth century witnessed unprecedented attention to ethics in literary studies. The notion of an “Ethical Turn” was in fact coined to attest to this burgeoning academic interest. Unfortunately...
Article

Storylines

Jared Gardner
Issue 124
...narrative, for example, one could have imagined narrative theory beating a hasty retreat. After all, as Metz reminds us, film is not a language system; it has no easy equivalent...
Article

Lascaux IV, Chauvet II, Planet B

Vincent Bruyere
Issue 157
...IV proposes a complete replica integrated within an interactive museum environment. The replication project continues: Chauvet II in 2015; Cosquer II in 2022. How these replicas were built is well...
Article

Closing Thoughts: Benjamin to Brecht

Christopher Norris
Issue 149
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual . . . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints;...
Article

Social Minds in the Novel by Alan Palmer (review)

Laurence M. Porter
Issue 136
...or film. His main examples, in path-breaking analyses of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, come from nineteenth-century British literature, but they should inspire studies in other areas....
Article

Sovereignty Conditioned and Unconditioned

Paul Patton
Issue 134
...pace that allows not only for frequent mention of things to be discussed (for example, that the reason of the strongest is always the best), but also for looping back...
Article

Drone Penalty

David Wills
Issue 134
...a writing that attempts to address what we call current events, particularly an academic writing—as distinct, for example, from journalistic writing—whose rhythms of composition and publication obey particular protocols and...
Article

“Of Politics, Aesthetics, and Guilty Subjects”

John Champagne
Issue 134
...critical practice will be adequate to the political commitments that inspire it” (2-3). Wiegman’s book is an attempt to do so. The remainder of the book is divided into chapters...
Article

Romantic Conservatism in Burke, Wordsworth, and Wendell Berry

Katey Castellano
Issue 125
...lost harmony between humans and nature” (229). Foreseeing that the rise and progress of industrial modernity might irreversibly erode both the landscape and local communities, Romantic literature questions humanistic, technological...
Article

Appreciating Appreciation

Charles F. Altieri
Issue 131
...and acts of expression that display states of mind and feeling but do not describe them. My full case will require a book. That is good news for me but...
Article

What Is Neuro-literature?

Catherine Malabou
Issue 140
Neuroliterature: this word is not a name for a new discipline, which—like neurolinguistics, neuropsychoanalysis, or neurophilosophy—would tend to explain the way in which our mental acts are rooted in biological...
Article

Ethics and Irony

Paul Allen Miller
Issue 120
...of that reflection as the creation of new forms of selfhood, then irony and ironic texts will play a fundamental role in any genuinely ethical work. For irony and the...
Article

Public Water

Mary Mattingly
Issue 160
Mary Mattingly’s Public Water brings attention to the rarely-seen labor that humans (and non-humans) do to care for New York City’s drinking water. For more about these public art projects,...
Article

Breathing Together

Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Issue 160
...of involuntary, inchoate expression in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Like other Bloomsbury artists, Forster was committed to ushering out traditional ideas of self-restraint and maturity and...