In the Middle

Ce visage qui n'en est pas un

2012-01-25T11:08:00.009-05:00

by KARL STEEL

Hwaet, I mean, Hey! Read this first. SUBMIT. Very exciting. And if you've never heard Act III from here, do yourself a favor.

So. I've been away a while. With my blessings, please skip the following ritual auto-dressing-down, surely as tedious a feature of blog-writing as the speaker-for-hire's opening joke.

Again: so. I know others can teach 5 classes, raise a family, and publish a great blog and an awesome book (which I'm reading now when I'm not working my way through these), and do it all without cracking a beard, but not me. I taught 12.5 credits last semester (which will elicit either a "that's IT?" or "sweet Anubis, you poor fellow" or "can it, brother: at least you have a job job"), which made the last bit of the semester a bit of a tourbillon: that, plus a November that saw me giving talks (or receiving honors) to Urbana-Champaign, to Ann Arbor, from DC, or, after a fashion, to my inlaws in Newton, New Jersey. And then in December, when I wasn't grading, my wife and I packed, cleaned, and sublet the apartment, and, after two weeks' vacation seeing friends in London and Istanbul, we moved to Paris, which will be our HQ from now until this conference. Surely there's more I could say, mais--as I'm told on dit here, j'en passe, or, if you like, et patati et patata.

Excitement continues in my absence. This is both a properly Heideggarian position of ex-istance and/or, better, an ooo position of knowing that I'm the center only of my world. If even that. Some of the excitement, which you must have already experienced, include Eileen's harrowing, that is, her renewal of her ongoing call to batter down (or sidestep) the gates. Reread it and live it, you. If you're besieged, find your allies. Tunnel out.

As for me, my plan's to get medieval. I have material from my November talks that wants to see you. Some of this, like what follows, belongs to my book, but just not in the frozen, published form. If, like Wordsworth or Langland or Gerald of Wales, I could keep tweaking my texts, this bit, on Yvain's Wild Herdsman, would be in the book, sometime. As it stands, the blog serves, and I only wish I'd done the following (which I'm now recommending to anyone about to publish a book): end the acknowledgments with "Occasional Updates to this Book may be found online at the following url." Next time, next time, next time. Let's end the pretense of conclusion.

My book deals with the Herdsman on pages 151-62. There, drawing on Judith Butler's last fews years of work, I argue that the meeting between the monstrous Herdsman and Calogrenant in a forest clearing is not simply a meeting between culture and nature, as it's normally been understood, but rather a kind of witnessing to the violent emergence of the human from the animal. The Herdsman is human, as he claims, because he is lord of his beasts, and he is lord of his beasts not only because he beats them, but also because he hears their pleas for mercy as only imitative of proper--which is to say, human--cries for mercy. Calogrenant, at first terrified by the Herdsman, then asks the Herdsman to direct him to a wonder. He's thus ceased to recognize the Herdsman as wonderful, which is to say, he sees him now as a fellow human. Calogrenant becomes complicit in the Herdsman's humanity. Of course, human emergence doesn't work perfectly: after all, the Herdsman's face is a mess of beastly forms. We see, then, both the violent emergence of the human and the evidence that such emergence can only ever be partial.

Straightforward, right?

But I could have done more. It's hard to determine what kinds of animals the Herdsman herds. Calogrenant says that he saw him herding "tors sauvages et esperars" [278; wild, excited bulls]; that's David Hult's solution to a difficult line, drawing from BN fr. 1433 and, also, Vatican, Regina 1725 ("torz sauvages et espaarz").

(key line from BN fr. 794, via here)

Espars is a hapax, found only here and nowhere else in the Old French corpus, and it's of uncertain meaning. Scribal confusion may have muddled the line from very early on in the romance's history. Another manuscript (see above) speaks of “tors salvages ors et lieparz,” wild bulls, bears, and leopards (see also BN fr. 1450, "et tors savages et lupart"), while another subtracts the bulls and has, instead, three wild bears, and one leopard ("trois ors sauvages et .i. liepart" (BN fr. 12560)).

Medieval translations of Yvain—into Norwegian and Swedish, Middle High German, and Middle English—have their Herdsman guarding, depending on the translation, lions, leopards, and bears, stags and deer, serpents, dragons, and, in Hartmann von Aue's Iwein, “all kinds of beasts that had ever been named to me” (405-6; aller der tiere hande / die man mir ie genande"--from here; trans. from here), but particularly bison and aurochs. Because Chrétien's romance nowhere else speaks of the Herdsman as overseeing anything but bulls (see lines 285, 345, 706, and 792), editors have tended to brush aside these other animals and to take the hapax “espars” as an adjective describing the bulls as “roaming” or “lively.” Problem solved, but not without some editorial creativity.

I prefer to keep the Herdsman's menagerie uncorrected, even if the leopards and other animals are just the fault of later embellishments or sloppy medieval solutions to a corrupt or obscure line. I prefer to think, at least, that later scribes saw an opportunity here, not only to increase the wonder of the episode, but also to say more about the Herdsman's immersion and subsequent emergence from animality, and as well, to say more about the auto-humanizing effects of the Herdsman's brutalization of his charges. The Herdsman beats his animals and doesn't listen to them; he and Calogrenant mark the animals' vulnerability as their proper lot rather than as an injustice to be rectified; in so doing, they confine all these critters, in all their heterogeneity, into the disdained and homogeneous category of animal.

Now, it would be one thing for the Herdsman to animalize only one kind of critter, bulls for example. Bulls like humans are their own species, so a binary of bulls and humans works well enough. But it's another thing, far taxonomically sloppier, to take bulls, lions, bears, leopards, serpents, dragons, stags, and deer, and, heedless of their particular differences, to treat all these critters collectively as one thing, animals, collectively distinct from humans and collectively like each other. Depending on the version of the romance, the Herdsman does this to domestic critters, wild ones, fabulous ones, critters mundanely familiar to Northern Europe and others known only from bestiaries, scripture, encyclopedia, or romance. In Hartmann von Aue, the Herdsman does this, as hard as it is to imagine, to all animals. All of them, whether bulls, leopards, or dragons, become one thing, banished to the other side of the binary in the Herdsman's declaration “thus I am the lord of my beasts” (353; "ainsi sui de mes bestes sire"). In sum, if we don't go along with the editorial correction, if we accept the heterogeneous menagerie, we can much more clearly discern the homogenizing invention of the category of animal.

Derrida can help clarify what happens here [and those who know his work on animals will have seen this coming]. In his lectures on animals—classic and indispensable for critical animal studies—Derrida asked his audience to hear l'animot whenever he said les animaux, animals. L'animot puns on the homonymic mot, or word, in the plural maux-ending, and might be translated as “animals-animalword.” Its jarring solecism of a singular pronoun used with a plural-sounding word aims at least to unsettle humans by reminding them of the bêtise, the animal stupidity, of classifying all nonhuman critters, no matter how disparate, into the homogeneous category “animal.” Through Derrida's coinage, animals might be understood, as Matthew Calarco glossed the word, “in their plural singularity rather than their generality.” Hearing l'animot rather than les animaux means refusing to allow nonhuman animals to be neatly collected as animals, all like each other in their nonhumanity. Refusing the category of animals would at least frustrate human self-certainty by transforming the hierarchical and anthropocentric binary of human and animal into an acentric meshwork of relations in which humans would be one node or intersection among many.

Here in the forest clearing, the essars, we have only a newly born community of two humans and a disparate crowd of beasts forcibly conjoined into a singular mass. Nonetheless the tiny circle occupied by humans has not quite been freed of animals: recall the Herdsman's face, the mingled horse, elephant, owl, cat, wolf, and boar that, at first glance, look out mutely at the knight. Stuck with his face, the Herdsman doesn't ever fully emerge from animality. Like us, he remains one of them, whatever his efforts. If this is forgivable in 2011 [make that 2012!], I want to call him the Herds/Man, with a slash between Herds and Man, for in this space of sylvan emergence, the Herdsman never quite arrives at being singularly human. He may deny his beasts a face, but he can't lose his own. His own face dispossesses him. He can't make his face one.

Announcing the Biennial Michael Camille Essay Prize [postmedieval]

2012-01-25T11:01:00.000-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

Figure 1. Michael Camille in Paris avec the Chimera of Notre Dame [photo taken by Stuart Michaels]

. . . what do they all mean, those lascivious apes, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs that protrude at the edges of medieval buildings, sculptures, and medieval manuscripts?

--Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (1992)

Our most cherished cultural monuments are not the neatly packaged products of a distant and therefore irresponsible medieval past. Cathedrals are above all spectacular sites in the here and now, sites that are continually being reinterpreted, reconstructed, and interrupted by new monsters of our own making.

--Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (2009)

Myra Seaman, Holly Crocker and I are thrilled to announce the biennial Michael Camille Essay Prize, to be jointly sponsored by postmedieval, Palgrave Macmillan, and the BABEL Working Group. The competition will be open to early career researchers: those currently in M.A./Ph.D. programs or within 5 years of having received the Ph.D. (for the first award, that will include those graduating in 2007 or later). Essays in all disciplines are encouraged. The prize will be for the best short essay (4,000-6,000 words), on a variable theme, that brings the medieval and the modern into productive critical relation. For 2012, the theme is inspired by Camille’s last book on the gargoyles of Notre Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (conceptualized and imagined in any way the author sees fit). The award for 2012 will include: publication in postmedieval, 250 dollars, and one year’s free print and online subscription to the journal.

The prize is named after Michael Camille (1958-2002), the brilliant art historian whose work on medieval art exemplified playfulness, a felicitous interdisciplinary reach, a restless imagination, and an avidness to bring the medieval and modern into vibrant, dialogic encounter. In addition, we wish to honor Camille for his attention to the fringes of medieval society, to the liminal, excluded, ‘subjugated rabble,’ and disenfranchised, and to the socially subversive powers of medieval artists who worked on and in the margins. The prize is also named after Camille because his work was often invested in exploring ‘the prism of modernity through which the Middle Ages is constructed’ and because, as his colleague at the University of Chicago Linda Seidel said shortly after his death, he had ‘a mind like shooting stars.’

Deadline for submissions is June 30, 2012. Submissions will be judged by a panel of scholars selected from postmedieval’s Editorial Board, and the winner will be announced at the 2ndBiennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, to be held September 20-22, 2012, in Boston, Massachusetts. Please send submissions (as a Word document, formatted according to Chicago Manual, author-date style with endnotes + list of references at end) to the editors, Eileen Joy and Myra Seaman, at postmedievaljournal@gmail.com.

University of Michigan Summer Research Opportunity Program

2012-01-24T12:29:00.000-05:00

by J J Cohen

Please share this announcement, forwarded to me by Peggy McCracken. I am happy to post it here and hope you will pass it along.

---------------

The University of Michigan's Summer Research Opportunity Program brings talented underrepresented students to Ann Arbor to work with faculty mentors on research projects during two months in the summer. Applications from rising juniors and seniors interested graduate study are welcome. The program offers housing, food, a stipend, and seminars to prepare students for graduate study in addition to research experience.

This year a number of projects in Classics and in English and French medieval and early modern studies led by Michigan faculty members (Gina Brandolino, Elaine Gazda, Peggy McCracken, Laura Miles, Cathy Sanok, Patricia Simons, Theresa Tinkle, Doug Trevor, Arthur Verhoogt) who are eager to recruit excellent students. We're especially eager to get students interested in medieval studies!

The program and eligibility are described here: http://www.rackham.umich.edu/prospective_students/srop/

If you have students who might fit the program, would you please let them know about ths opportunity and encourage them to take a look at all the different medieval research projects on offer? It would be great to increase diversity in our field. The deadline is coming up fast: February 13, 2012.

Questions/more information: peggymcc@umich.edu.

West[Michigan]ward, Ho! 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies

2012-01-20T20:26:00.002-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

The schedule for the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies [10-12 May 2012, Western Michigan University] is now published, and that means this is the time of year to start thinking about which chain-mail dress you want to pack, which medievalists you want to either hug or slap this coming May, and how you are going to sneak your way into Elizabeth Teviotdale's bedroom, thereby ensuring better time slots at next year's Kalamazoo -- that is, if you're a great lover and you're her type [gosh, I really hope Liz Teviotdale has a good sense of humor; I think she does, actually].

All kidding aside, I thought I would highlight here some sessions that In The Middle-ers, BABEL, postmedieval, and GW-MEMSI will be involved in, and PLEASE feel free to tell us in the comments section which sessions you think we should take note of [and yes, isn't it refreshing to use those dangling participles, now that we're allowed to?]. I know there are a LOT more sessions I am not listing here that promise to be REALLY interesting, like Session 124 on "Thing Theory and Object-Oriented Studies in Medieval Contexts" and Session 437 on "Cosmopolitanism in the Middle Ages," and I could go on and on, but I won't.

Session 12: Literature, Theory, and the Future of Medieval Studies: Middle English and Its Others
Thursday, May 10 @10:00 am
Sponsor: Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies

A roundtable discussion with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington Univ.;
Theresa M. Coletti, Univ. of Maryland; Donna Beth Ellard, Rice Univ.; Eileen A.
Joy, Southern Illinois Univ. Edwardsville; Karla Mallette, Univ. of Michigan–Ann
Arbor; Deborah McGrady, Univ. of Virginia; and Zrinka Stahuljak, Univ. of
California–Los Angeles.

Session 70: Fuck Me: On Never Letting Go (A Roundtable)
Thursday, May 10 @1:30 pm
Sponsor: BABEL Working Group

"Tearsong," Anna Klosowska, Miami Univ.
"Why I Can't Let Go of Mysticism," Christopher Roman, Kent State Univ.-Tuscawaras
"61 Reasons I Can't Leave This Ashmole," Myra Seaman, College of Charleston
"Sticking Together," Lara Farina, West Virginia Univ.
"Hymns of Invitation," Cary Howie, Cornell Univ.
"Rickrolled by Beowulf," Marcus Hensel, Univ. of Oregon
"Cathexis: The Litel Clurgeon's Closure Comes as a Cost," Miriamne Krummel, Univ. of Dayton

Session 117: Fuck This: On Finally Letting Go (A Roundtable)
Thursday, May 10 @3:30 pm
Sponsor: BABEL Working Group

"Splitting Hairs, Spitting Feathers," Elaine Treharne, Florida State Univ.
"Fuck Romance," Cord Whitaker, Univ. of New Hampshire
"Fuck Activism/Forget Feminism," Martha Easton, Seton Hall Univ.; Maggie M. Williams, William Paterson Univ.
"Letting Go of the Dead Hand," Carolyn Anderson, Univ. of Wyoming
"Fuck Readers," M.W. Bychowski, George Washington Univ.
"Historicism and Its Discontents," Erik Wade, Rutgers Univ.
"Fuck Orientalism," Erin Maglaque, Univ. of Oxford
"Fuck Point of View," Valerie Vogrin, Southern Illinois Univ. Edwardsville

Session 154: Burn After Reading: Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval Studies (A Roundtable)
Thursday, May 10 @7:30 pm

"Intentionally Good, Really Bad," Heather Bamford, Texas State Univ.–San Marcos
"Kill the Shakespeareans," Will Stockton, Clemson Univ.
"Waging Guerrilla Warfare against the Nineteenth Century," Matthew Gabriele, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ.
"Net Worth," Bettina Bildhauer, Univ. of St Andrews
"The Gothic Fly," Shayne Aaron Legassie, Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
"This Is Your Brain on Medieval Studies," Joshua R. Eyler, George Mason Univ.
"The Material Collective," Asa Simon Mittman, California State Univ.–Chico; Nancy Thompson, St. Olaf College
"Blast This: Manifestos, Credos, and Statements of (Mis)belief," Ruth Evans, St. Louis Univ.
"De catervis ceteris," Chris Piuma, Centre for Medieval Studies, Univ. of Toronto
"History and Commitment," Guy Halsall, Univ. of York
"Burn(ed) before Writing," David Hadbawnik, Univ. at Buffalo
"Second Program of the Ornamentalists," Daniel C. Remein, New York Univ.
"Radical Ridicule," Noah D. Guynn, Univ. of California–Davis

Session 215: Ecologies (A Roundtable)
Friday, May 11 @10:00 am
Sponsor: Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (MEMSI), George Washington University

"Fluid," James Smith, Univ. of Western Australia
"Trees," Alfred Siewers, Bucknell Univ.
"Human," Alan Montroso, Independent Scholar
"Post/apocalyptic," Eileen Joy, Southern Illinois Univ. Edwardsville
"Hewn," Anne F. Harris, DePauw Univ.
"Recreation," Lowell Duckert, George Washington Univ.
"Green," Carolyn Dinshaw, New York Univ.
"Matter," Valerie Allen, John Jay College of Justice, CUNY

Session 218: Insular Perspectives I: Anglo-Saxon Elements in Medieval Literature
Friday, May 11 @10:00 am
Sponsor: The Chaucer Review

"The Blind Briton and the Book: Unsettling English History in the Man of Law’s Tale," Paul A. Broyles, III, Univ. of Virginia
"Becoming English in the Man of Law’s Tale," Mary Kate Hurley, Columbia Univ.
"Anglo-Saxon Saints in the South English Legendary," Andrew M. Pfrenger, Kent State Univ.–Salem
"English Saints’ Lives, Bury Saint Edmund’s Abbey, and Lydgate the Monk," Timothy R. Jordan, Zane State College

Session 402: Activism and the Academy
Saturday, May 12 @1:30 pm
Sponsor: Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship

A roundtable discussion with Eileen Gardiner, Medieval Academy of America; Dorothy Kim, Vassar College; Asa Simon Mittman, California State Univ.-Chico; and Sara Ritchey, Lousiana State Univ.-Lafayette

Session 460: Medieval(ist) Alterities: Cultural and Temporal Alterities in Transdisciplinary Perspective
Saturday, May 12 @3:30 pm
Co-Organizers: Beatrice Michaelis, Justus-Liebig-Univ. Giessen and Wolfram R. Keller, Humboldt Univ.-Berlin
Presider: Eileen Joy, Southern Illinois Univ. Edwardsville

A panel discussion with Andrew James Johnston, Freie Univ. Berlin; Sharon
Kinoshita, Univ. of California–Santa Cruz; Ursula Peters, Univ. zu Köln; and Kristin
Skottki, Univ. Rostock.

Session 467: The Canon in the Classroom
Saturday, May 12 @3:30 pm
Sponsor: Medieval Academy Graduate Student Committee

A roundtable discussion with David Wallace, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Fiona Somerset,
Duke Univ.; Ian Cornelius, Yale Univ.: Ann Marie Rasmussen, Duke Univ.; and
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington Univ.

For those interested in the entire Congress program, go HERE.

Fuck Pessimism: Embrace Youngsterism

2012-01-14T11:49:00.003-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

To become adult in our culture (which for most of us means to become compliantly productive) is . . . to be increasingly disabled for the kinds of humorous and dire, purposeful play that creates geometries of attention revelatory of silences in the terrifying tenses that elude official grammars.

--Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager

Thanks to Jeffrey's recent post on Tweeting the MLA Conference [a conference, moreover, that included a concerted attention upon the digital humanities and its possible future(s)], a very lively set of comments emerged, and I'm glad they have because they arrived at the exact moment I was contemplating writing a post titled "Fuck Pessimism," and gave me some extra fuel. Late December and early January is a queer time of year--on the one hand, it heralds [if even as a mirage] new beginnings and re-tooled ambitions and second [and third and fourth and so on] chances as well as a chance to pause and rest and refresh; on the other hand, for many of us working in literature, history, philosophy, cultural studies, new media, and foreign languages departments, it signifies that annual meeting [MLA, AHA, APA, etc.] where hundreds and hundreds of anxious and well-trained and talented job seekers gather to make the best pitch they can for some future job security, and this at a time when the economic picture for those in the humanities does not look so hot [although recent numbers do indicate a slight up-tick in available jobs], and the American economy in general kind of sucks, and everyone is admittedly worried about the future of academic publishing. This worry might take the form of being concerned about whether or not the age of a beloved-by-many print culture is ending [along with all of its cherished protocols of "review"] or it might take the form of hand-wringing over whether or not tenure committees will take digital publications seriously or it might take the form of despair over shrinking library budgets coupled with corporate academic publishers continuing to privatize at prohibitive rates the scholarship that *we* produce and review and edit and shepherd through over-burdened gift economies, and so on. At this time of year, we see and read many essays, articles, and various social media posts bemoaning this state of affairs. At the same time, I've been struck this year by how many essays have been published [primarily in The Chronicle Review, but also in many other publications, in print and online] that voice only complaints and worries about the state of our profession ["quick and dirty" publication is destroying "serious" scholarship, no one is really reading academic scholarship (so why bother to keep doing so much of it?), students' language and ability to communicate has degenerated to new low levels, the digital humanities is yet another false "new religion" that has perhaps lamentably replaced the literary studies that used to trade in valuable meaning, the golden age of the theory journal is over, professors and students in the Univ. of California system are spoiled and whine too much about their state's so-called higher education disaster scenario, the digital humanities remains "impenetrable" to most people who sit on tenure committees, and I could go on and on . . . but I won't. And thanks to Ian Bogost, we can also recognize, perhaps sheepishly, that "what one [often] does in the humanities is talk about the humanities," and that a lot of professors "are actually using computers to do new kinds of humanistic scholarly work in breaks between debates about the potential to use computers for new kinds of humanistic scholarly work." Hopefully, this post will not be yet one more instance of blogging about the humanities as a form of what the humanities talk about. Indeed, one of the main things I want to say with this post is WILL EVERYBODY PLEASE SHUT UP AND START DOING AND MAKING THINGS? [And this relates as well to Jeffrey's even more recent post, "Additional Readings May Be Found Here," and the links you will find there -- like this one -- to pieces by professors who want to re-envision and put into place new core interdisciplinary programs in the humanities, at the undergraduate and graduate level, designed around *making* and *doing* and *building* things with new technologies, which does not, nevertheless, necessitate *not* still continuing to *think* about things, I might add].

In the comment thread to Jeffrey's post about tweeting the MLA [cited above], a rich discussion emerged regarding whether or not it is appropriate for some people to "tweet" other people's papers at conferences, and if so, what sort of protocols might be developed to make some feel more comfortable about this practice [or even allow them to opt out of it completely--being tweeted, that is], to also protect various intellectual property interests as well as to make Twitter feeds more accessible and "plugged in" to larger, more inclusive academic conversations. Along with this, discussion also emerged relative to how various forms of e-publication [whether blog posts or Twitter lectures or whatever] might prohibit some work from being accepted later in more conventional print media, such as the academic print journal, and whether or not we should worry about this, and this all also led to talking about how we might now start re-defining [or defining anew] what we mean by "publication" and how any of that might be assessed in relation to things like tenure review. Jeffrey brought up the fact that the profit motives of corporate academic publishers [like Brepols or Ashgate or Palgrave or Wiley-Blackwell] "is not compatible with the desires of scholars to have their work disseminated as widely as possible," which is especially maddening when the it is precisely the volunteer efforts of scholars [as authors, as editors, as reviewers, etc.] that keeps this system in place. Jeffrey also wrote,

I understand why publishers worry that too much work is already out there, and why they then hesitate to publish things that haven't been raised in a seclusion. Publishers can be as wrong as they'd like. But look at publications that succeed -- like not-for-profit U Minn Press and its success with Ian Bogost's work, much of which has appeared via Twitter and his blog. Come on: getting work out through multiple channels is publicity that can only aid a scholarly project. We shouldn't convince ourselves that we need to write in cloisters and keep our books in noncirculating scriptoria.

It will not be my intention to spend time in this post re-hashing all the points I've made a gadjillion times about why I believe in open-access publishing, in open peer review, in using social media to do "real" scholarship, and in working toward a more "open," misfit, and co-affective university in general. [Those who want to know my more specific pleas on behalf of some of those things can look HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.] What I want to say here is something like, "I know we need critique in the university, and strong debate and dialogism -- don't remind me, it's not like a gadjillion academics would ever stop doing those things -- but what we really really really really need now is some collective optimism, some collective risk-taking, and some collective project and institution building," especially in relation to Jeffrey's points regarding the often-cloistered state of our academic affairs. And we need to stop being so afraid all of the time that every time we think of doing something differently that some cabal of academics will quash our freedoms and careers while also telling us, "that's not how we do things around here" or "it will never work for X, X, and X reasons, all of which are founded on what never worked BEFORE." And we also need to stop acting as if every time someone comes up with a new idea [whether a theory or a method or a subject area or an entity of some sort: like a machine that can read texts] they must have done so cynically or with only careerist ambitions in mind or because they vapidly like to chase shiny, new things or because they want to destroy Western civilization and everything that is good in it. And we need to stop being so fucking pessimistic about everything. I can personally vouch for the fact that one can change a LOT in our profession, and for the better, with a handful of friends dedicated to one another and a common vision [that also honors difference and dissensus], a laptop, and endless carafes of coffee [and maybe some cigarettes and whiskey and karaoke]. Add in foolish bravado, boundless non-naive optimism, and being smart and creative as hell, and it's amazing what you can make happen. I am not kidding.

I had a conversation with someone who I respect VERY much at the recent MLA meeting in Seattle who told me that it seemed like my/our projects [the BABEL Working Group, punctum books, postmedieval, In The Middle, etc. -- all initiated and enabled collectively, I might add] were aimed, successfully, at creating an alternative, parallel universe to the university, or to medieval studies as a field [this was intended as a compliment], and that I should remember that it is also important to effect change from within the university, and from within medieval studies, that there is still much important work to be done on the inside of traditional academic structures, such as the MLA, or Medieval Academy, for example. Who could forget? I could argue and say, no, I'm not interested in effecting change from within [there will always be others to work on that and I can't stand the glacier pace of much of that kind of bogged-down-in-bureaucracy labor], but that would be laughable since pretty much my whole career, has been concerted upon effecting change from "within" [after all, am I not a tenured Assoc. Professor who teaches at a regional institution of higher learning and doesn't that institution pay my salary and also support and reward my extra-regional academic endeavors? and have I not served on and even chaired committees to revise guidelines for tenure and promotion and also to revise curricula, etc.? and have I not always attended the Kalamazoo Congress on Medieval Studies and worked tirelessly on its behalf? and do I not constantly organize academic events at traditional academic institutions? etc. etc.].

BUT, at the same time, I think I also want to embrace the idea that what I am ultimately interested in *is* something like COMPLETE AND RADICAL CHANGE of whatever is going on "within" the university, but undertaken from a position that is partly "extra" to or "para" with or "outside" the university, especially if, by "outside," we mean something like, "I will not let what is happening, or that which is status quo, *within* the university ever deter me from pursuing what MIGHT be a better vision for the university." And sometimes you have to stop asking for permission to do everything you want to do [from those *within* the university placed in positions of power] and just do exactly whatever it is you want to do, with the hope that it might make you feel good, that it might shed some light in the dark corners inhabited by others who need a little light and warmth, and maybe also even add to the general store of this thing we call "knowledge," which might actually effect, in the long term, some change [for the better] in the largest possible share of a general well-being of everything. One can fail in these endeavors, but one also has the *right* to do so. One also has the right to engage in extra-curricular experiments in building new para-academic collectives and alternative-academic careers which might only endure for a short period of time, but which make important things *happen*, nevertheless, that are self-enriching, *pleasurable*, and also contribute to the work of the so-called "university." I want to state this again because I believe in it so much: one has the RIGHT to fail. Failure is necessary. Try working on behalf of grandly visionary likely-to-fail projects. Otherwise, nothing is ever going to happen.

And here's another thing: can we maybe try a little bit harder to expand our definition of what a university IS and what it is capable of DOING? For me, the university is everywhere and anywhere I am at any given moment, and this also extends to all of you who work alongside me, in whatever "location," virtual, material, or otherwise [so I kind of wish we would dispense with this idea of the alt-ac career and realize that we are actually all alt-ac together]. The university is not just the buildings and lawns demarcated by specific geographical coordinates [42° 22′ 25″ N, 71° 6′ 38″ W: Harvard], but anywhere we gather to disseminate: I define this as a practice of, quite literally [following the Oxford English Dictionary], "scattering [knowledge] abroad" and "sowing" things and "spreading [knowledge] here and there," and "dispersing (things) so as to deposit them in all parts." Obviously, in some cases, specific locations matter a great deal, and the very hard work of the professor and student activists to save the Univ. of California system or to preserve the discipline of philosophy at certain universities in the UK system are extremely worthwhile and important political causes that we should all support however we can. But if *some* of us want to create alternative "campuses," shorn of much of the top-down and corporatized administrative structures so prevalent at so many institutions of higher learning, and located where you might not expect them to be [like in a gallery in Brooklyn or an architectural bookstore in Manhattan: witness the work of the The Public School all over the world, and also in New York, or on Twitter], then . . . it's all to the good. It gives me great joy, actually, to think about starting entirely new alternative schools, new markets of intellectual production and exchange, new presses, new journals, etc., while at the same time, of course I care about the "institution" of higher education and of medieval studies, and it's entirely possible that I can do *more* good for those institutions on the periphery or more proper *outside* of them. In fact, we've never really taken inter- or cross- or multi- and extra-disciplinarity seriously enough [partly because going all the way with it would mean dispensing with things like "departments"]. I think the most enjoyable and productive career [for me, anyway] would be one in which I spent as much time as possible searching out and cultivating vagabond and extra-institutional spaces for intellectual and creative work, while also acknowledging that the players who join me in these spaces will mainly be comprised of academics . . . at first. And then, one day, hopefully soon, I'll really be on the outside, but still playing with those "within." In other words: screw this inside/outside business. It's mainly an illusion, plus a lot of techno-bureaucratic structures that we can happily leap across or walk through or re-shape and bend and twist, if only we had the courage.

When I was a little kid, I used to watch marathons of old movies on Sundays on Channel 20, one of two independent stations beyond the 3 major networks and PBS that were available in Washington, DC in the early 1970s. One of my favorite often-recurring movies was Babes In Arms (1939) with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. I can't remember anything about the plot of the movie [and had to check Wikipedia to recall that the plot concerns some "youngsters" who try to convince their parents they can "make it" on Broadway], but one scene that always stood out in and never left my mind [and I probably have this wrong, somehow, since memory is tricky] is when Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland get all excited about the possibility of putting on a musical and everyone's, like, you can't do it, you'll never be able to do it, you don't have the stuff you need to do it, and Mickey Rooney is, like, "we can use my parents' barn!" and Judy Garland is, like, "And I can use my mother's sewing machine to make the costumes!" and then they run off gleefully to start putting everything together. UNFORTUNATELY, what I also learned from my research, is that the show they end up putting on is [gasp] a minstrel show. YUCK. Now I hate this movie.

But let's just pause and end the movie at the moment Rooney and Garland run off to make their theatrical preparations [after all, that's the only part of the movie that ever stuck in my head, and I think I know why, given my own general outlook on life]. Do you know what is happening in this scene? It's youngsterism. We need more of that in the university. It's not the same thing as being critically naive, by the way. It's just a kind of foolish belief that anything is possible. If you have a barn. And a sewing machine. And anything else at hand. Embrace youngsterism.

Additional Readings May Be Found Here

2012-01-14T07:47:00.003-05:00

by J J Cohen

So if you're not quite ready to take the Twitter plunge, and prefer your tech to be old fashioned like rotary phones and VCRs, two blogs to add to your subscription list are the wonderful site Allan Mitchell has created for his seminar Becoming Human, and Elaine Treherne's History of Text Technologies. In case you missed it, Anne Harris's Medieval Meets World is also terrific (and has been around for quite some time).

I'm being tongue in cheek, of course: blogs are not old tech so much as a comfortable expanse within our current scholarly landscape. If they don't seem especially new any more, that doesn't mean they are any less useful. Or inspiring.

And speaking of inspiration, my wonderful colleague Holly Dugan sent out a series of tweets last night that exactly get at one of the promises inherent in digital humanities, including blogs. She wrote:

#Altac tweets from #mla12 emphasize author responsibility to promote and disseminate, not just produce and research

Their point was about new modes of publishing and new platforms, but the take away also resonated with me about gender and the profession.

I like both these observations because they reveal another change in the way we conceptualize and disseminate scholarship: in a wired world, patiently waiting for conventional print to do its work is an option (as is watching coral reefs grow at one centimeter per year), but not necessarily the best option. We need to enhance its agency. No one likes over-the-top self promotion, and we can all spot obnoxious or arrogant horn tooting when we hear its blare. But there is nothing wrong with being a firm advocate for the scholarship you have accomplished and for the expertise that you possess. There is nothing wrong with bringing your research skill to as wide an audience as possible. If you have labored over figuring out a problem or a context, if you have worked to possess a knowledge about an issue or text, then being humble and awaiting the reader who will find your insight buried in a $90 book or within a paywall guarded journal might not be the best method for instigating the conversations that are in fact the way our work lives, breathes and changes. A scholar's work is at its midpoint once something appears in print or electronically: that isn't the time to walk away and see what happens from afar. Don't we teach our undergraduates that no question is ever fully answered, that no project is ever really done? Shouldn't we take responsibility for the (potentially change-filled) future of our work rather than think that at a certain point it is petrified, inert?

It's a daunting challenge, isn't it, to be responsible not only for ushering your work into conventional print but then to nurture its life after it appears. Many scholars won't want to do so (and that is OK, honestly: sometimes you are so tired of a project that you need to walk away after its release, at least for a while); many others lack the technological savvy to be their own best advocate. Training in DH needs, at a minimum, to be part of the graduate curriculum. It starts on day one -- or, better, as Ryan Cordell has written, it starts as part of undergraduate humanities training.

Right?

Get Medieval With Us: Introducing Glossator Special Editions

2012-01-12T13:06:00.001-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

All our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text.

–Nietzsche

Nicola Masciandaro and I are pleased to announce a new imprint of punctum books, Glossator Special Editions, a co-production of punctum and Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary. Glossator Special Editions will publish book-length commentaries and aims to encourage the practice of commentary as a creative form of intellectual work.

The first edition in this series, to be published in early 2012, is Ann Hassan’s Annotations to Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech!, a thorough and patient explication of Hill’s 120-stanza densely allusive poem that both clarifies and deepens the poem’s difficulties, illuminating its polyphonic language and careening discursive movement. The author’s method is at once commentarial, descriptive, and narratorial, staying faithfully with the poem and following its complex verbal and logical turns. The book generously provides, rather than direct interpretative incursion, a more durable and productive document of “the true nature / of this achievement” (stanza 92), a capacious, open understanding of the text that will prove invaluable to its present and future readers.

What is commentary? While the distinction between commentary and other forms of writing is not an absolute one, the following may serve as guidelines for distinguishing between what is and is not a commentary:

A commentary focuses on a single object (text, image, event, etc.) or portion thereof.
A commentary does not displace but rather shapes itself to and preserves the integrity, structure, and presence of its object.
The relationship of a commentary to its object may be described as both parallel and perpendicular. Commentary is parallel to its object in that it moves with or runs alongside it, following the flow of reading it. Commentary is perpendicular to its object in that it pauses or breaks from reading it in order to comment on it. The combination of these dimensions gives commentary a structure of continuing discontinuity and a durable utility.
Commentary tends to maintain a certain quantitative proportion of itself vis-à-vis its object. This tendency corresponds to the practice of “filling up the margins” of a text.
Commentary, as a form of discourse, tends to favor and allow for the multiplication of meanings, ideas, and references. Commentary need not, and often does not, have an explicit central thesis or argument. This tendency gives commentary a ludic or auto-teleological potential.

Those interested in submitting a manuscript to Glossator Special Editions should contact Nicola Masciandaro at glossatori AT gmail DOT com.

The Best MLA is the One I Didn't Attend: Tweeting the Conference

2012-01-09T08:05:00.001-05:00

by J J Cohen

Because I'm on fellowship leave, and because I'm committed to an extraordinary amount of travel in the semester ahead, I didn't attend the recent MLA conference in Seattle. I followed the event at a distance through friends on FB and the occasional text message or phone chat. I know a few people who are on the job market, and a delegation of GW English faculty were conducting interviews for our Romanticist position. And maybe that says it: the MLA convention is easy shorthand for the US academic hiring process in literature, since in hotel rooms at that conference most of the interviewing is undertaken.

This year, though, I also experienced the unfolding of the meeting via Twitter (hashtag #MLA12). You know already from Eileen how much Twitter can offer the plugged-in scholar; MLA 12, though, seemed crowdsourced. Most of those who tweeted from sessions are Digital Humanities scholars -- a field in which I participate (you're reading this on a blog, after all), but without knowing enough about its contours. So it was illuminating to hear quick takes on panel presentations that outline some of the issues currently being discussed, everything from e-lit to digital editions to the labor conditions hidden by our assumption that technology comes to hand without human expenditure. Digital humanities were so prominent at MLA that they also received the predictable backlash: that DH is the next fad (as if feminism or critical race studies were fads rather than enduring transformations to our scholarly modes), or that DH is parvenu (as if it didn't have a history that goes back decades, and as if it didn't have deep roots in the technologies and study of the distant past). Intriguing, too, to see via Twitter video game theorists alongside those who study Shakespeare's plays, so that arguments about quarto and Folio versions of Lear resonated with the phenomenology of objects in electronic worlds. Some of the accounts I followed: Sarah Werner, Rosemary Feal, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Matt Thomas, Ryan Cordell, Ian Bogost, Stacey Donohue, George Online, New Faculty Majority, Doug Armato, Mark Sample, Dan Cohen, MLA Convention, Erin Templeton. That's a quick sampling.

Tweeting a conference creates a more embodied space for scholarship to transpire within. One scholar reported as her plane was delayed multiple times and she wondered if she'd ever make it to Seattle (and admit I was relieved when she did arrive; it was a nail biter), another noted the preponderance of black while wearing her own orange sweater. Tweets often surveyed the room and told us the gender breakdown at specific sessions. Sometimes speakers were chided for taking too long, squeezing out those who came after them or disallowing conversation. Most focused on the substance of the presentations, offering tantalizing insight into large, exciting projects (and yes, a talented writer can convey revelatory information in 140 characters). Some people, I know, like their knowledge to arrive without such context; I look to journals for such disembodied delivery systems. Scholarship unfolds in a world, and I like to experience what I can of that complicated unfolding. It deepens my understanding of how knowledge works, and increases the likelihood that I'll retain what I've learned.

One of the most provocative tweets came from Elaine Treherne, who was likewise following the conference:

Is tweeting all the main points of an unpublished conference paper really ethical? Has permission been sought from the speaker, I wonder?

I wonder about this situation as well. Is one required to seek permission before reporting on a speaker's presentation via twitter or a blog? Or is a presentation inherently public, reportable (with proper attribution, etc)? Those tweeting the DH sessions didn't worry. What's happened, I think, is that a conference is no longer considered a closed or private space where you impart an argument in its almost-article form, just before you publish a citable (and non-dialogic) version within the cement of a paper journal. Despite the fact that someone will check your nametag at the door to ensure you've registered if you want to sit at session, conferences in the digital age have become networked, public forums with potentially immediate and wide impact. That is especially true in digital humanities, which embraces that flow of information in subjective and multiple forms. Relatively few of the sessions on more tradition topics were tweeted.

Delegate assemblies and governance meetings did get some coverage, though. Rosemary Feal did an impressive job of disseminating information about them. As executive director of the MLA, she has rendered the organization's workings transparent via her frequent use of twitter. Her electronic outreach matters, and has often been aimed towards those who are young in the field and those who are not traditional TT faculty. The MLA that Feal conveys is a much more welcoming one than those who know the organization only thorough the conference, and the conference only through the interview process. This year I was happy to witness its diverse and vivacious other side, the reason MLA actually exists -- a witnessing that confirmed for me that those working in DH are leading the field in promising new directions.

Death to all Flands, or whatever: "Henchminion" Befuddles the Plagiarists

2011-12-28T12:30:00.004-05:00

by KARL STEEL

I know opinions justly vary about College Misery, but trust me, medievalists, you don't want to miss this post. In 2005, a certain "Henchminion" wrote a "Trojan Horse" paper on the Magna (or is that Manga?) Carta and planted it with various plagiarism sites (here it is in the wild) and periodically googled key phrases to see where it had turned up. Recently: Paydirt! A plagiarist used the whole thing, including the phrase "Discipulus tuus hunc tractatum non scripsit."

Heh.

Glory in King John's war on the Flands, a merchant people dwelling on the coast of Luxembourg! Wonder at the Pope, the Enemy of Freedom. And by all means write your own Trojan Horses.

Go, Read it!

Getting Things Done

2011-12-26T18:50:00.001-05:00

by J J Cohen

Dame Eleanor Hull has a just-in-time-for-the-New-Year post about making big changes to work habits in the hope of accomplishing more. Recently I've also been tweeting back and forth with Rosemary Feal (of MLA fame) about her strategy of using social media to frame intensely concentrated bursts of work, typically in 30 minute intervals, with a check-in at the beginning and small reward at the end; she'd hastagged it #worksprint, and there's a Chronicle thread on the process here. I realized through this conversation with Rosemary that I tend to work in a similar way: focusing fairly intensely for short-ish periods as I write, then taking a brief break every 30-40 minutes to glance at Twitter or Facebook or email, maybe sending off something brief, and then back to work for about the same amount of time. Every hour or so I get up and do some small task (laundry, coffee, grab a book from upstairs, eat an orange while standing, shift to another workspace) just to ensure my muscles don't lock in place.

This process doesn't work perfectly every day, of course, but in general it's a sequence of labor and breaks that serves me well for accomplishing writing by breaking the day into smaller segments. For the larger picture, I'm an inveterate keeper of calendars that lay out my projects but cut them into accomplishable chunks. I also have a tendency to blog about these schedules: articulating publicly what is on my plate clarifies my work and my goals to myself, and makes their undertaking seem more of a commitment.

I'm fairly regimented in my work habits, so the discipline to follow through on my calendar is not, fortunately, an issue. A typical day is structure like this: up at 5 am to run; breakfast with spouse and oldest child, during which I glance at email and the news online; daughter to before school care (this buys me an hour extra in the morning, and she is happy to go); at the computer for writing by 8 am. I work intensely until about noon, writing or revising, then read something as I eat lunch (reading is actually a great break from writing). I'm mentally a bit fatigued by then so I might walk to the store to buy ingredients for dinner, then I will spend the early afternoon mostly revising, or working through essays, or both. The High Schooler arrives home around 2:45, so I try to be off the computer by then; usually from 2:30 onwards I'm doing nothing but email anyway. I walk over to pick up Kid #2 from the school yard by 3:10. On most days I try to avoid attempting any more writing or research once the kids are home. I might check email and do some business for essay collections or MEMSI, but I know that Deep Thoughts are both out of the question and unfair to the family when I am there but not there. I also get cranky when I am thinking, because it hurts my cerebellum, and I don't want to inflict that dyspepsia on my family because then they ridicule me.

I don't follow the same routine every day. On Tuesdays, for example, I generally work on campus, and on Wednesday a guitar lesson interrupts the morning. But this is generally my invariable routine. It's too rigid, I know, for many people, especially those who like the flexibility that an academic schedule yields -- but I don't like to be composing essays at 9 PM; that seems to me more curse than "flexibility." Then again, I do like to eat the same thing for breakfast every single day (cereal with almonds, blueberries, and kefir): that will tell you something about me as well. Some routines create ruts, others enable the day to progress in ways that seem to me freeing rather than constricting.

As you can see, I've been thinking about my own work habits today. It's the end of the year, after all, so it's time to make that reckoning of what I've accomplished and what needs to be done. My calendar of deadlines portions my obligations into a number of weeks (or days) that I've allotted to accomplish it; I've had to radically revise it only once this fall. At first I thought I'd spend the autumn completing everything not related to the book I'm writing -- all the essays due in the spring, all the keynotes and other presentations. I had a little bit of success but found by October that I really wanted to be working on my book. So, according to the revised calendar, I am supposed to have the drafts of my first two chapters accomplished by December's end. They are quite draft-y, but at least they are done. Somehow I also finished my Speculative Medievalisms talk, a piece for a cluster on animals for Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and the collection Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (introduction AND editing the essays). Whew!

I'll draft chapter three of my book in January, but then I must turn my attention to a presentation for the Exemplaria symposium, an essay I'm co-writing with Stephanie Trigg for the Ecomateriality issue of postmedieval, a talk on ethics and objects for an event at which I'm speaking with Tim Morton. Right after that comes my big stint as guest scholar for IAFA in Orlando (where I believe I have promised to publicly smack China Miéville for dissing Tolkein), a gig at SAA, Kalamazoo, and then this keynote in Edinburgh.

Yes, I am going to need a very good work ethic to survive the spring ...

OOO as a mode of literary criticism

2011-12-23T06:40:00.002-05:00

by J J Cohen

If you missed Eileen's excellent Swedish Twitter University lecture on object oriented ontology as a trigger to a reconceived practice of literary criticism, check out the archive here. Her key question -- which under the pressure of twitter's 140 character limit becomes gnomic -- is:

What happens when we see literary texts as having propulsions of their own, as actants on the same ontological footing as everything else?

I think she's exactly right, and would not limit such activity to texts: architectures work in just the same way, as propulsive and emissive objects rather than passive conveyors of humanly inscribed content.

And, as a follow up, Levi Bryant ruminates over the lecture and intensifies some of its suggestions. In the face of the humanist proclivity to reduce texts to a war of human-given meanings (patent, latent and polysemous), here's how Bryant expresses the liveliness of a text-object:

Object-oriented criticism for its part– and it is here where I am unsure as to whether or not Joy will agree with me –begins from the premise not of the meaningfulness of the text, but of the materiality of the text. The text is something. A text is an entity that circulates throughout the world. And like all bodies or objects that circulate throughout the world, texts have the capacity to affect other bodies. Here then we get the first sense of what it might mean to say that criticism comes after the text. This thesis is not the bland truism that the text must first exist for us to “criticize” it, but rather is the thesis that criticism is a production based on the affectivity of the text. In other words, the question is no longer the question of what the text means with the aim of closing the text, but rather is the question of what the text builds.

Eileen and Levi's pieces are both worth your time. For me, reading through them has elicited an uncanny frisson since so much of what both compose resonates so deeply with the book chapter on Stonehenge and lithic radiance I've just completed.

aventure

2011-12-20T09:32:00.002-05:00

by J J Cohen

[don't miss Eileen tweeting like an angry little bird today]

As this first semester of fellowship leave is coming to its quick end, I've been thinking about how fortunate I am to have had some time to be with my book project. Holly Crocker wrote an eloquent comment on the value of research leave that I frontpaged last week, and I'm not sure I can say anything more than she did, but I do want to emphasize something often lost when lawmakers (for example) talk about the supposedly easy life that college professors enjoy. Writing and thinking are hard work. They require time and cannot be rushed. Too often work is associated only with that which bodies perform. Standing in front of a class and leading a discussion is evidently labor, while devoting time to something as intangible as contemplation is not. Except, of course, it is.

Although there are days when I cannot decide if the book I am writing is innovative or simply insane, I am grateful to have the release from teaching and service that are enabling its composition. By the end of this week I'll be finished with the rough draft of the second chapter, putting me right on schedule. The particular chapter I'm writing has been conceptually the most difficult. It's on radiance, the ability of stone to intervene in human affairs in ways that are disruptively beautiful (I align this effusive power with aesthetic force and with what romance calls aventure, or transformative advent), as well as stone's ability to withdraw in an object-oriented ontology way: withdrawal indicates not an activity orintentionality so much as an inbuilt occlusion; stone, like any other object,is always more than the totality of relations formed with it, always possesses an unfathomed reserve.

Stone's radiance is not constantly perceptible, but when we do glimpse that force its power astonishes. Here's what I wrote about that wondrous word in my chapter:

The power of things to re-orient that with whichthey form relations precipitates astonishment, the state of being what inMiddle English was written astoned. This adjective derives from the Anglo-NormanFrench verb estoner, “to stun” or “tobe stunned,” which in turn comes from Latin tonare,“to thunder.” Astonish is therefore aword with a sonorous etymology, and indicates the feeling of being outsideoneself that arrives at a sudden thunderclap. Yet for both medieval and modern Anglophoneaudiences the ecstatic term carries a lithic suggestiveness: a-stoned. Thus Chaucer describes a dazedPandarus, reeling from Troilus’s rebuke, as rock-like: “This Pandarus ... stant, astoned of thise causes tweye, / As stille asston” (Troilus and Criseyde 5.1728-29). Rock-like, those who have been astonished routinely fall to the ground,as the examples of astoned compiledby the Middle English Dictionary detail.Heidegger’s designation of stones as weltlos(“worldless”) seems to designate the same state until we remember thatastonishment is a movement, an oscillation. The astoned person returns to consciousness – though perhaps, like Saulafter the thunderbolt, no longer quite the same.

I'd been thinking over the past few days about how to bring together aventure and astoned, without all that much luck. But then the connection hit me this morning like a piece of coparius. I was taking my morning run, warm beneath scudding clouds, listening to Vampire Weekend's M79 (violins, harpsichord, drums and mountain climbing: what better combination could you ask for when you need an insight?). I realized that The Peterborough Lapidary describes what must be meteors in a way that resonates with Chrétien de Troyes's envisioning of the Storm Knight's fountain in Yvain (Le Chevalier au lion). Both the lapidary text and the romance link thunderous tempests, aventure, and lithic radiance (also called vertu). So this morning I wrote:

Lithic radiance means that stones astonish. The advent of this wonder is announced, sometimes quite literally, by a thunderclap; or, to put it differently, the stone’s radiant power triggers what romance calls aventure, an unexpected arrival that transforms the moment into which it erupts. The Peterborough Lapidary describes coparius as a rock engendered by clouds that topples to the earth accompanied by a tempestuous soundtrack:
Coparius is a stone þat is bred in þe eyre & some callen it fouldre; & he falleþ with tempest to þe erþe when gret tempest of þondres and ly3tnyng fallen, & it falleþ in to þe erþe ix fote, & þe erþe reboundeþ a3ene by vertu of þe stone. (81)
This celestial stone, its advent announced by thunder and lightning and “great tempests,” then hides itself for nine days, after which those who know its arrival may earn its discovery. To possess coparius is to be protected from lechery, storms and mysauentur (mis-adventure). This meteoric rock that plummets and rebounds and lends its force to any fortunate companion reveals the intimacy of thunder, rock, radiance, vertu and collectors of rare gems.

I know, the meteoric advent of coparius isn't exactly a revelation. But it hit me like one. And I'm certain that I would not have been able to bring all these disparate medieval and modern terms together had I not had the freedom to have spent an entire day on my book yesterday, and to wake up knowing I have another such day ahead.

Now I just need to walk over to library to grab Chrétien in Old French and see if I can really bring make my small insight cohere via a basin, a gem, and water that soaks the land like a monsoon. Wish me luck.

Swedish Twitter University Lecture: More Notes Toward a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism

2011-12-19T13:38:00.008-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

Yes, Virginia, there is a Swedish Twitter University, and I am going to give a Twitter lecture for them, "More Notes Toward a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism," tomorrow at 8:00 pm GMT, which means 3:00 pm for you East-Coasters and so on and so forth, according to your own timeline.

The Swedish Twitter University (or: Svenska Twitteruniversitet) is the brainchild of Marcus Nilsson (@ozonist on Twitter), who, partly influenced by the well-known TED talks (which aim to deliver, in brief precis form -- 18 minutes -- what the world's leading "thinkers and doers" are up to and thinking about at any given moment), and also by his own attempts to distill complex ideas via Twitter (and also receive feedback on those ideas), decided to launch a regularly-appearing lecture series on Twitter where "interesting speakers — scientists, academics, etc. — tweet about exciting ideas from their respective fields in a certain well-defined format." In exactly 25 tweets, each of which has a 140-character limit and each of which should also be a complete sentence/thought/question in and of itself, the so-called "lecturer" hopefully aims to throw out some provocative ideas and arguments, and also hangs out in the Twitter-sphere for at least an hour to entertain questions from other Twitterers. I love the idea, partly because it's so challenging to fit really complex ideas into such a constraining format, kind of like being asked to write a villanelle about Graham Harman's idea of vicarious causation or his quadruple object!

Over the past year -- roughly -- I've been trying to formulate some sort of coherent object-oriented, or better yet, speculative realist approach to reading literary texts, and I've taken a few half-baked stabs at that, which you can hear and see in print HERE, HERE, and HERE. At the next meeting of the New Chaucer Society in Portland, Oregon in July 2012, I will also be presenting further thoughts on this vis-a-vis the recent "descriptive turn" [as discussed, for example, in Leah Marcus and Stephen Best's special issue of Representations -- no. 108 -- on "The Way We Read Now"], and beginning next summer I will be plunging, with Jeffrey, into a new book project on the subject of reading medieval literature through various lenses made newly available [I think] in different strains of object-oriented ontology, post/humanism, and new ecological modes of thought. I'm hoping that preparing for this Twitter University lecture [today] will help me to take some of my scattered thinking and focus it more narrowly on some "principles" [such a forbidding term!] that I might advance for new reading modes in literary studies that, quite frankly, I'm very excited about.

If you follow the link to the description of my lecture on the Swedish Twitter University's website -- HERE -- you'll see there that, for those of you who are interested, we have provided links to .pdfs of the following "background reading" texts [you can also link to them from here, if you like]:

Interview with Levi Bryant on Fractured Politics weblog:
http://fracturedpolitics.com/2011/06/29/interview-levi-bryant.aspx

Eileen A. Joy, “Like two autistic moonbeams entering the window of my asylum: Chaucer’s Griselda and Lars von Trier’s Bess McNeill,” postmedieval 2.3 (Fall 2011): 316-328. (pdf)

Michael Witmore, “We have never not been inhuman,” postmedieval 1.1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 208-214. (pdf)

Timothy Morton, “Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones,” continent 1.3 (2011): 149-155. (pdf)

Ian Bogost, “Unit Operations,” from Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (M.I.T. Press, 2006). (pdf)

Heather Love, “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41.2 (2010): 371-391. (pdf)

Here's hoping I might see you on the virtual campus of the Swedish Twitter University tomorrow. Cheers.

Shakespeare and Ecology

2011-12-18T16:19:00.004-05:00

by J J Cohen

The latest volume of Shakespeare Studies (39) contains a cluster of essays on "Shakespeare and Ecology," edited by Julian Yates and Garrett Sullivan (Google books version here; Steve Mentz's post on the issue here). Despite the seeming narrowness of that designation (and the circumscribed ambit the journal announces through its title), the cluster offers a provocative set of meditations on literature, environment, ecology, theory, activism, historicism and presentism that scholars in many fields will want to read.

Yates and Sullivan frame their project using Bruno Latour's idea of the Parliament of Things, a democratic conversation about the future to which both humans and nonhumans have been invited (I wrote about the concept recently here, and connected it to the Icelandic Althing). Ecology is invited to do some speaking on its own, to tell "strange stories" that can "reframe" what scholars of Shakespeare -- but, really, humanists -- do. Many of the contributors begin their rumination via the etymological gateway that has become the standard trope for instigating ecological readings: "The German word [ökologie] took its root from the Greek word for 'house, dwelling'" (Feerick, 35); "At root 'ecology' designates the study, or discourse, of a house (oikos)" (Nardizzi 54); Mentz clearly has this derivation in mind when he writes of "Shakespeare's beach house"; "The eco- in ecology derives from the Greek oikos, house or dwelling" (Smith 104). Significantly, however, any such house is a place of fraught inhabitance. As Yates and Sullivan observe in their introduction, the authors prefer to remain "poised ... on a threshold" (30). Only Sharon O'Dair makes specific recommendations for the present, recommendations that align with data-obsessed scientific modes of ecology: deriving changes in animal size and populations from early modern texts, for example, to give biological studies a longer time span. She writes against what she calls the politically quiescent analyses aligned with Tim Morton, and finds in the "everything is related" school of analysis a surrender to inaction. Her essay ends by declaring "The present is too important to be left to the theorists. The present is too important to 'not act' or do nothing. We must act differently" (81). As far as this cluster goes, she is not in good company for assertion #1; Bruce R. Smith even argues systematically against it (without naming O'Dair) in his conclusion. But all the contributors, I think, agree with that last sentiment ... and yet believe that theory is part of the acting differently.

The essays vary in their subject matter; each is worthwhile reading. Jean Feerick looks at earth and humans as co-substantial bodies: made of dust, returning to dust, humans are "en-soiled" in ways that conjoin them to the earth as dual actors. Mary Floyd-Wilson gives a dazzling account of the powers of gems, vibrant actors in a world that typically saw only humans, God and demons behind materiality in motion (a diminishing of thing-power that Floyd-Wilson ascribes to early modern fear of the autonomous inhuman). Vin Nardizzi redefines ecology's house as the playhouse and demonstrates what the recycled timbers that were used to form the Globe signify at that time of severe wood shortage. Shakespeare's green spaces, materialized by the theatre itself, indulged an "evergreen fantasy," offering the audience a lost space as if it were not gone. It's a rich idea, and makes me wonder if the ecological turn in literary criticism doesn't accidentally replay that same fantasy. If it does, O'Dair's warning resonates even more ominously. Joshua Calhoun meditates upon the vanishing cover of his edition of Shakespeare's sonnets to examine paper production, textuality, preservation and sustainability. Sharon O'Dair, in quite a poetic piece, argues for data over sensibility inculcation, acting over theorizing. Steve Mentz in a typically provocative essay demonstrates what a blue ecology offers as it washes over and intermixes with green studies: inhuman and hostile spaces erupt within pastoral and balanced expanses. (I can't help wondering what other colors we should add to the mix...) Tribble and Sutton stretch ecology a bit to include embodied cognition and cognitive/affective distribution via tools and objects. Bruce R. Smith ends the cluster by thinking about world-making, openness, multiplicity and ecology.

No common agenda emerges from these pieces, yet the cluster possesses an admirable unity. Here, I think, is where the early modernist obsession with Shakespeare (or the demands of the current academic and cultural prestige system that pushes early modernists towards writing about Shakespeare) has its dividend: the common focus on a limited corpus does give the essays a communal feeling they might not otherwise possess. Medievalists don't possess any such figure; in a recent cluster on animals, for example, sponsored by Studies in the Age of Chaucer, I wrote on Marie de France. I wasn't alone. I also continue to believe that early modernists are far ahead of medievalists when it comes to ecological criticism, and look forward to the day when medieval studies possesses a cluster on the topic as lively as what Yates and Sullivan have assembled.

The Late Foucault, the One Who Got Away: Post/medieval Ascesis

2011-12-16T20:56:00.009-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

By spirituality, I understand -- but I am sure that it is a definition which we cannot hold for very long -- that which precisely refers to a subject acceding to a certain mode of being and to the transformations which the subject must make of himself in order to accede to this mode of being. I believe that, in ancient spirituality there was identity, or almost so, between spirituality and philosophy.
—Michel Foucault, Interview, 20 January 1984

The subject of ascesis, especially in relation to "techniques" of the self that Foucault believed might help us to invent "a new mode of being that is still improbable," occupied much of Foucault's thought and writing toward the end of his life, especially as he was working on his multivolume History of Sexuality project, never finished. I have long been fascinated by Foucault's late writings and commentary (typically found in the many interviews he gave) on the technologies and hermeneutics of the subject, especially his formulations on that by way of texts culled from the early Church, such as Gregory of Nyssa's fourth-century treatise On Virginity. In several very different, yet related, projects -- having to do with biopolitics, sovereignty, territorialization, affect, and post/human subjectivities -- I have been attempting to bring Foucault's late thought on ascesis into contact with medieval spiritual texts [such as hagiographic narratives] but also with contemporary queer work that draws upon certain premodern spiritual modes. This [my ongoing work in this area] is partly a cautionary tale [what happens when Foucault's late thought as well as contemporary queer theory goes "spiritual?] and also a "device" for more engagements with post/humanist thinking [what happens when Foucault's writings on ascesis and "a new mode of being that is still improbable" are approached from the angle of, say, object-oriented philosophy?].

I want to share with everyone here two recent fruits of these projects -- a book chapter-in-progress and a seminar syllabus recently proposed, with Anna Klosowska, to the Newberry Library's Center for Renaissance Studies -- both of which have grown out of my readings of Foucault's late writings, but which are tending in very different directions. The first is a draft of the talk I recently gave at the University of Western Australia, at a 2-day conference on "International Medievalism and Popular Culture," organized by Louise D'Arcens, John Ganim, Andrew Lynch, and Stephanie Trigg. This talk, "An Improbable Manner of Being: Medieval Hagiography, Queer Studies, and Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves," partly builds on my essay recently published in postmedieval's special issue on New Critical Modes, edited by Jeffrey and Cary Howie, "Like Two Autistic Moonbeams Entering the Window of My Asylum: Chaucer's Griselda and Lars von Trier's Bess McNeill," but plans to also delve [as the postmedieval essay did not] into the theological biopolitics negotiated, in similar ways, in medieval hagiography and von Trier's film [and for those interested in such a subject, I want to acknowledge my debt here to Emma Campbell's article "Homo Sacer: Power, Life, and the Sexual Body in Old French Saints' Lives, Exemplaria 18.2: 2006, as one initial starting point for my thinking in this vein].

This talk is offered to you pretty much as I delivered it in Australia [I plan to add another section, in the final version, relative to ascesis, bare life, and the Old English Mary of Egypt, and for those of you with any interest in the background to where this talk ends up, vis-a-vis its concluding commentary on new, speculatively-inflected reading modes, you can go HERE and HERE for informal talks I gave relative to that]. I'd love to have any comments and suggestions for revisions and/or additions to my bibliography; follow the link below to the text of the talk:

An Improbable Manner of Being: Medieval Hagiography, Queer Studies, and Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves

And here, also, is the graduate seminar course syllabus that Anna Klosowska and I recently submitted as a possible offering in Winter/Spring 2013 at the Newberry Library in Chicago; we would be extremely grateful for any suggestions for our readings and/or extended bibliography:

Graduate Seminar Proposal
Center for Renaissance Studies
The Newberry Library

Ascesis, Eroticism, and the Premodern Foucault: Revisiting Foucault's History of Sexuality through Medieval and Early Modern Sources

Instructors: Eileen Joy and Anna Klosowska

Short Course Description:
The course is focused on re-reading Foucault’s History of Sexuality (both the three published volumes as well as additional published materials intended for a fourth volume) in relation to hagiographic narratives from the Late Antique, Old English, and Middle English traditions (Eileen Joy) and to medieval and early modern literary texts on love in French (in translation) (Anna Klosowska). The central guiding concept for the course is Foucault’s notion of an “improbable manner of being” -- a notion that Foucault sketched, somewhat elliptically, in his late lectures and interviews in relation to his thinking on asceticism and techniques of the “care of the self” that he had explored in classical and early Christian texts, but had no time to more fully develop. This course will explore medieval and early modern texts to imagine what the inclusion of particular representations in these texts of “improbable” modes and techniques of the self would have contributed to Foucault’s history of sexuality, with an eye toward the consequences Foucault’s readings of these texts might have had upon his study of sexuality in the premodern period. This course will also interrogate some of the paradoxes inherent in Foucault’s attempts to provide a linear periodization of the development of the history of sexuality from the classical period to the present time—a periodization, moreover, which much work in current medieval and early modern studies of sexuality have called into question. The time is extremely ripe for such a re-examination of the premodern premises of Foucault’s work on sexuality and the care of the self.

Each of the 10 meetings pairs excerpts from Foucault’s works with readings in relevant medieval or early modern texts as well as in contemporary critical sexuality studies. The course dovetails nicely with the recent publication, for the first time in English, of the final volume of Foucault’s last lectures at the Collège de France on the birth of biopolitics, which is a direct outcome of his multivolume history of sexuality project (publication of these last lectures: hardback, April 2011, paperback, 2012).

Expanded Course Description:
One of the most important works undertaken in sexuality studies is Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, published in three volumes between 1976 and 1984. Part of Foucault’s project in volume 3, The Care of the Self, was to demonstrate the ways in which a certain aesthetics of sexual pleasure, developed in Greek antiquity, eventually gave way, in Roman moral philosophy and in an emerging scientia sexualis (“science of sexuality”), to a technology of self-regulation in which the sexual became “dangerous.” A fourth volume, never finished, was to take up the ways in which early Christian confessional modes intensified this self-regulation and also helped to produce sexualities as “truths” about selves that could then be disciplined and governed (and even punished). At the same time, in some of the texts of the early Church dealing with monks and saints’ lives and their extreme forms of self-discipline, Foucault saw a way out of this oppressive regime of disciplined sexuality and a way in to what he called “a manner of being that is still improbable”—a manner of being, moreover, that would offer us “an historic occasion to re-open affective and relational virtualities” that he believed would be emancipatory.

Revisiting Foucault’s thinking on early Christian saints’ lives is particularly timely in view of recent scholarship on what some scholars portray as the “exuberant erotics” of ancient and medieval saints’ lives—lives, moreover, that portray what one scholar has called the pleasurably “violent seduction of sacrifice.” In Virginia Burrus’s The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Robert Mills’s Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture (Reaktion Books, 2005), and Karmen Mackendrick’s Counterpleasures (State University of New York Press, 1999), just to name a few studies, the legends of desert hermits, militant martyrs, and self-mutilating mystics are held up as models of a sexualized asceticism and as sublime sites of freedom and sexual liberation. Most important is a common theme that runs throughout these studies—that the asceticism and self-mutilations dramatized in the lives of early saints and martyrs opens a possibility of a radical form of “love” that allows the protagonists of these narratives to give themselves over to the joy of various “divine” pleasures and abandonments.

Alongside this work on the (possibly emancipatory and politically subversive) erotics of asceticism, pain, and self-renuniciation in the hagiography of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, there has also been some recent work in queer theory that valorizes (if even unconsciously) certain forms of Christian and ‘saintly’ abjections, such as David Halperin’s proposal in his book What Do Gay Men Want? for a queerly “upbeat and sentimental” abjection that might help to “capture and make sense of the antisocial, transgressive” behavior of gay men without recourse to the language of psychoanalytic pathology or the death drive, and which relies for some of its inspiration on medieval Christianity’s rhetoric of humiliation and martyrdom. Drawing, especially, on the fiction of Genet, but also upon Foucault’s interest, late in his life, in technologies and care of the self, Halperin puts forward a model of queer solidarity built upon an embrace of one’s own social humiliation and abjection as an “inverted sainthood”—a ‘sainthood,’ moreover, that becomes an “existential survival strategy.” Most importantly, Halperin reminds us that Genet’s abjection was “an ‘ascesis,’ a spiritual labor, which blazes the path to sainthood. And, like sainthood, abjection is both martyrdom and triumph at once: it elevates even as it humiliates.”

The question is finally raised: What kind of “spiritual” work are all of these studies doing with regard to asceticism, saintliness, the sacred, queer relational modes, and love? And, as a scholars who work in both medieval and early modern studies, as well as in contemporary queer studies, should we be cautious about the supposedly emancipatory relational modes that some scholars, following Foucault, have argued are opened within the creative conjunctions between premodern religious practices, asceticism, self-sacrifice, and queer sexuality? In the first part of this course, we will read hagiographic and pseudo-hagiographic narratives in Old and Middle English alongside excerpts from Foucault’s and contemporary scholars’ writings on sexuality and queer studies in order to revisit Foucault’s thinking via the charged pathways and “sites” of extreme asceticism, self-sacrifice, and psycho-corporal-sexual transformations undergone in these narratives.

In the second part of the course, this revision and extension of Foucault’s narrative of scientia sexualis will further suggest modifications applicable not only to Old and Middle English hagiography but also to medieval and early modern French literary texts on the subject of love. As we continue to re-read Foucault’s final lectures and interviews, we will also reexamine medieval and early French contexts that constitute an exception to the field’s prevalent narratives about early modern modes of authorship and literary production. Among them, we will focus on some paradigm-altering cases where the woman author stages explicitly erotic, hybrid personae (human-animal, human-fairy, bisexual, and other unorthodox combinations), as well as on more conventionally covert same-sex erotic circuits, such as passionate friendship. Recent work on early modern sexuality by Gary Ferguson, Marc Schachter, Carla Freccero, Anna Klosowska (on France), and Will Stockton, Vin Nardizzi, Julie Crawford, Will Fisher, Laurie Shannon, and James Bromley (on England), will help us go beyond the “sex before sexuality” formula to arrive at a new Foucauldian optic on early modern texts.

Syllabus.

Week 1.

Michel Foucault, excerpts from The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction.

Michel Foucault, “On the Government of the Living (1980)” and “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette.

Anonymous, the Old English “Death of St. Mary of Egypt,” in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, Vol. 2.

Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, “Figuring the Body: Gender, Performance, Hagiography,” in Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England.

Week 2.

Michel Foucault, excerpts from The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure.

Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” and “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom” (interviews).

Ælfric, the Old English “St. Martin, Bishop and Confessor,” in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, Vol. 2.

Virginia Burrus, “Hybrid Desire: Empire, Sadism, and the Soldier Saint,” in The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography.

Week 3.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self.

Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude” and “The Battle for Chastity,” in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette.

Felix, Life of Saint Guthlac (Bertram Colgrave edition and translation in Anglo-Latin and modern English).

Robert Mills, “Of Martyrs and Men,” in Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture.

Week 4.

Michel Foucault, excerpts from Security, Territory, Population (lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78).

Michel Foucault, excerpts from The Hermeneutics of the Subject (lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-82).

Chaucer, “The Man of Law’s Tale.”

Robert Mills, “Invincible Virgins,” in Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture.

Week 5.

Michel Foucault, excerpts from The Birth of Biopolitics (lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79).

Anonymous, the Old English Andreas (online translation).

Leo Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 161-74.

Leo Bersani, “The Power of Evil and the Power of Love,” in Intimacies.

Week 6.

Michel Foucault, excerpts from The Government of Self and Others (lectures at the Collège de France, 1982-83).

Marie de France, Lais: Prologue, Guigemar, Equitan (ed. and trans. Glynn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, pp. 41-60).

Heather Love, “Feminist Criticism and Queer Theory,” in A History of Feminist Literary Criticism.

Heather Love, “Compulsory Happiness and Queer Existence,” new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics 63 (2008): 52-64.

Heather Love, “Emotional Rescue,” in Gay Shame, eds. David Halperin and Valerie Traub.

Week 7.

Michel Foucault, excerpts from The Courage of the Truth (The Government of Self and Others II) (lectures at the Collège de France, 1984).

Marie de France, Lais: Le Fresne, Bisclavret (ed. and trans. Glynn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, pp. 61-72).

Gary Ferguson, “Introduction: pre-modern (homo)sexuality: historical and theoretical issues,” “Homosexuality and gender: historical (trans)formations,” and “Mourning/scorning the mignons: represenations of heroism and favouritism at the court of Henry III,” in Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture.

Week 8.

Michel Foucault, excerpts from Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality, ed. Jeremy Carrette.

Marie de France, Lais: Lanval, Les Deux Amanz, Yonec, Laustic, Milun, Chaitivel (ed. and trans. Glynn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, pp. 73-108).

excerpts from Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, and Will Stockton, eds., Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate, 2009): Nardizzi, Guy-Bray and Stockton, “Queer Renaissance historiography: backward gaze,” Will Fisher, “A hundred years of queering the Renaissance,” Julie Crawford, “Women's secretaries,” and Madhavi Menon, “Period cramps.”

Week 9.

Michel Foucault, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act” and “Power and Sex” (interviews).

Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson.

Marie de France, Lais: Chervrefoil, Eliduc (ed. and trans. Glynn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, pp. 109-128).

Week 10.

Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life” and “The Concern for Truth” (interviews).

Madeleine l’Aubespine, Selected Poems, ed. Anna Klosowska (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007).

Ann Rosalind Jones, “Prostitution in cinquecento Venice: prevention and protest” and Will Fisher, “Peaches and Figs: bisexual eroticism in the paintings and burlesque poetry of Bronzino,” in Levy, Allison, ed., Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment.

Marc Schachter, “Introduction: Voluntary servitude, governmentality and the care of the self,” in Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France.

Extended Bibliography.

Ahmed, Sarah. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

l’Aubespine, Madeleine de. Selected Poems, ed. Anna Klosowska. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Bersani, Leo. “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 161-174.

Bersani, Leo and Adam Phillips. Intimacies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Burrus, Virginia. The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Carrette, Jeremy. Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality. London: Routledge, 2000.

Cassidy-Welch, Megan. Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Ferguson, Gary. Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. (lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Foucault, Michel. The Courage of the Truth (The Government of Self and Others II). (lectures at the Collège de France, 1984) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Foucault, Michel. Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001.

Foucault, Michel. Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989.

Foucault, Michel. The Government of Self and Others. (lectures at the Collège de France, 1982-83) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject. (lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-82) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vols. 1-3. New York: Random House, 1980-88.

Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Foucault, Michel. Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy Carrette. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population. (lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Freccero, Carla. Queer/Early/Modern. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Halperin, David. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Halperin, David. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Halperin, David. Saint=Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Halperin, David. What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Levy, Allison, ed. Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010.

Love, Heather. “Feminist Criticism and Queer Theory.” In A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gill Plain and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Love, Heather. “Compulsory Happiness and Queer Existence,” new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics 63 (Spring 2008): 52-64 (special issue, “Happiness,” ed. Sara Ahmed).

Love, Heather. “Emotional Rescue.” In Gay Shame, eds. David Halperin and Valerie Traub. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Mackendrick, Karmen. Counterpleasures. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Marie de France, The Lais of Marie de France, ed. and trans. Glynn S. Burgess and Keith Busby. London: Penguin Books, 2003 (2nd edition).

Marie de France, Les lais de Marie de France, trans. and notes Laurence Harf-Lancner, ed. Karl Warnke, Lettres Gothiques. Paris: Livre de poche, 1990.

Martin, Luther H., Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Mills, Robert. Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture. London: Reaktion Books, 2005.

Nardizzi, Vin, Stephen Guy-Bray and Will Sotckton, eds. Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009.

Schachter, Marc. Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

DON'T FORGET: Send in Your Session Proposals: 2nd Biennial Meeting of BABEL

2011-12-15T14:47:00.004-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

First, please read the provocative discussion here at In The Middle spurred by Mark Bauerlein's essay, "The Research Bust," in The Chronicle of Higher Education HERE, HERE, and HERE.

And THEN, don't forget that the BABEL Working Group is still looking for your session proposals for its 2nd Biennial Meeting in Boston, 20-22 September 2012, "cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university." We have an exciting lineup of featured speakers -- Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, David Kaiser, Marget Long, Lindy Elkins-Tanton and Sans façon [the dynamic duo Charles Blanc and Tristan Surtees] -- who cover a broad spectrum of disciplines and fields, from medieval studies to physics to planetary geology to political philosophy to architecture to public art to photography, and who have been asked to consider the possibility of new friendships [intellectual and otherwise] across and within local knowledges. We are hoping for a raucous and felicitous convergence of bodies of knowledge and singular voices to help us consider: what happens both deep within, but also, beyond and after disciplines? What happens when we re-sound our disciplinary wells, while also, inevitably, bumping into each other and occasionally hooking up, like Democritus’s atoms, with our disciplinary Others? Can we hold on to our disciplinary objects and methods and ways of knowing, while also keeping them open to futurity and the surprise of the stranger?

You don't need to have a session proposal in which you've already lined up a full panel of speakers -- just a proposal for a session is fine right now. Conversely, if you're keen to send us an individual paper proposal, please do so. We'll also be happy to accept session and/or individual paper proposals through next Monday, December 26th. Once we have assembled all of the session proposals, we'll post those in mid-January or so, and then have another call for paper proposals targeted to specific proposed sessions or to more general sessions [to be assembled later]. I might add that we've already received a good number of session proposals [including one structured as a drinking game on "Wild Fermentation: Disciplined Knowledge and Drink" and another on "Intellectual Crimes: Theft, Punking, and Rogueish Behavior" that involves sharing a ball of twine with the audience, just to share two!], but we're concerned to have as much creative input as possible, so please send us your proposal [title plus brief description of the session, and contact information for session organizers] at:

babel.conference@gmail.com

For more information on the conference's speakers, themes, and session structure(s), go here:

the 2nd meeting of the BABEL working group: cruising in the ruins

Cheers and Happy Holidays from BABEL!

Holly Crocker on Research Leave

2011-12-15T07:20:00.001-05:00

by J J Cohen

Following Karl's lead in calling attention to some of the excellent comments this post has garnered, I want to frontpage some words composed by Holly Crocker. She touches upon not only what was omitted from Bauerlein's "research glut" essay, but also the importance of the many intangibles that arrive with research support. Many of us teach at state universities and have been condemned by the elected representatives who should be supporting education as leading a leisurely life that leaves plenty of room for more teaching. Their argument is more blatantly anti-intellectual than Bauerlein's, more obsessed with bottom lines and value for the tax dollars expended (where "value" is simply hours spent in a classroom, as if teachers were pedagogical factory workers who turn on at 9 am and off at 5 pm). At a time when state legislators have been fuming against sabbatical leave, Holly gets (among many other things) at why research support of this sort is so necessary, and how it benefits everyone.

--------
Thanks, Karl, for calling attention to this comment, and thanks, Irina, for writing it. I’d like to endorse Irina's powerful articulation of the importance of subjecting ourselves to critical peer review, especially as that sentiment relates to the close of Jeffrey’s original post:

“But you know, even if seven or eight people in the world ever read the book I'm working on, that is OK. My life has been profoundly affected for the better for having worked upon the project. My students, colleagues, family, and university have benefited in ways tangible and invisible.”

I couldn’t agree more. Today is my last official day of research leave, and I find myself reflecting on the accomplishments and frustrations of this precious time. I believe it is extremely important for scholars to publish significant research projects, regardless of citation counts, since these make us responsive to the intellectual demands and offerings of others. And although this endeavor is thoroughly collaborative,(& the classroom shows the process of working through ideas better than anywhere else, probably), we should also continue to value the solitary struggles required of such work.

Sabbatical leave, research release, and fellowship time remain crucial to the intellectual/pedagogical process. While I know that I benefit directly from conversations and engagements with scholars and students, I also need time away to nurture my own intellectual investments. Really, I should say, too, much of this time is spent figuring out how *wrong* I am about many of my presuppositions (including those I might have trumpeted in my original application for research time). During the past year I’ve spent a lot of time reading philosophers, mostly women, whose work I really had only “survey class” knowledge of before now (including Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Marion Young, Martha Nussbaum, Bonnie Honig, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Annas, Elaine Scarry, and Seyla Benhabib). Many of these writers give me fits—I think some of them are deeply wrong about certain formations of politics and ethical life—but all of them make me confront my own assumptions with freshness and vulnerability (what Eve Sedgwick, with characteristic honesty and clarity, describes as being “pressed against the limits of my stupidity”). This confrontation, I believe, is most powerful for its terrifying, if somewhat fictive, solitude. Of course, I don’t labor alone (as my reading list—itself a compilation of reading suggestions from others—affirms). And I don’t intend to keep all this thought to myself, either. But time away to think, reflect, and revise is important to teaching and writing, too. If I ultimately do nothing citable with some of this reading, it will affect my students and colleagues, because it will have lasting influence over my thinking.

So, while I applaud the collaborative scholarship model that is being developed at present, I will always believe in the importance of the traditional monograph, or the long scholarly article, as well. Even if monographs or journal articles have little direct “impact,” they make better scholars, teachers, and colleagues. As we formulate new models of research, Bauerlein’s reductive article demonstrates, we also need to be precise about the values of scholarly research (at once personal, collective, intellectual, and pedagogical) that we are seeking to enrich and protect. Impact isn’t everything, and many scholarly virtues, Jeffrey and Irina rightly note, are conferred invisibly but tangibly, in daily interactions that are both profound and mundane.

-- Holly Crocker

Righteous Outrage from the Comments on the so-called Research Glut

2011-12-14T15:59:00.003-05:00

by KARL STEEL

There's a comment in response to Jeffrey's recent post that inspired me to write "if I could get away with it in my office, I'd stand on my desk and shout my approval." The blogging equivalent of shouting approval is front paging, that is, promoting--or, to put this in medieval ecclesiastical terms, translating--a comment from below up to the main page of the blog. Here it is, slightly edited, from our very own esteemed "I" aka Irina Dumitrescu:

I'm going to be less even-keeled than most of the folks on here and claim the following: only someone who is a stagnant and unreflective teacher could make the claims Bauerlein did in his article. I read it a while ago, so the details are not completely fresh, but aside from the problem of using only Google Scholar (heavily weighted towards science, in my experience) to track citations, there are serious problems with using citation tracking anyway.

In my teaching I:

- Regularly consult many books and articles by fellow scholars, both for material I am teaching for the first time and to gain new perspectives on material I've taught before. I do not cite this material anywhere in my published work (where would I fit a citation to Oscar Wilde into an article on Aelfric Bata? Oh wait...), but I read it, I condense the material for my students, and I give them references in-class to scholars they might read for their papers, general education, etc.

- Include secondary material in syllabi, especially for upper-level courses. This is cited nowhere but in my students' papers. This may seem to an anti-intellectual like Bauerlein as just me making students read my colleagues' work. But anyone who was present for my Medieval Violence classes last semester knows that the twenty-five students who read Esther Cohen and Jody Enders and Mitchell Merback and Allen Frantzen and Mary Carruthers were not carrying out some kind of abstract exercise-- my students were brilliant, insightful, and moving in discussing how these ideas applied to their own lives as well.

- Increasingly assign research papers. I don't know how many google scholar citations Albrecht Classen has, but I can tell you that my Medieval Epic students found, read, and used a lot of his work in their essays and presentations, to the point where they all had gotten to know his name through their own research. He didn't get a single Google citation out of it. If someone really wants to tell me that the ability to read, evaluate, and digest information is not an important skill for today's society, I call that person a doofus.

- Regularly discuss the process of writing and research I'm going through -- both so that they have a better understanding of how their knowledge is created, and so that they get a sense of writing, revision, and criticism being a lifelong process, one that goes beyond the term paper.

The thing is, students are not stupid. They know when you're teaching them the same thing that was taught 20 years ago, and they know when you're an active scholar. And my students mention on teaching evals that they appreciate being taught by someone who is working in the field. Research is good for teaching. Period.

I react angrily to this because I find the thoughtlessness of Bauerlein's argument fundamentally anti-intellectual. I also don't think that bad teaching and research practices should be used as a standard for measuring good teaching and research practices. Is too much scholarship produced? I'd say probably not, though the tenure stuff is often produced too early. But I would also argue against the claim that too much poetry is written, too many novels are published, or (no longer the case at all) too much journalism is in print. A healthy art culture is one in which a lot of material is produced, and it doesn't necessarily all have to be brilliant, as long as some of it is. Frankly, I don't even think too much television is produced; not every show needs to be "The Wire," and anyway, in a hundred years, "The Wire" will endure, and the Kardashians will be forgotten.

Now, please excuse me while I fan this steam away from my ears...

"Stop the Research Machine!" / "We need Shakespeare Book #16,772!"

2011-12-14T09:13:00.000-05:00

by J J Cohen

A short piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education has been making the rounds via FB, Twitter, and email: Mark Bauerlein on "The Research Bust." Bauerlein argues that, under the mistaken impression that the humanities will gain something substantial via research output, scholars have been cranking out essays and books doomed never to have an audience. He backs his argument up with Google Scholar citation searches, and insists that this imperfect methodology emphasizes a patent truth:

Yes, research is an intellectual good, and yes, we shouldn't reduce our measures to bean counting. But we can no longer ignore the costs of supporting research—financial costs (salaries, sabbaticals, grants, travel; the cost to libraries to buy and store material, to scholarly presses to evaluate, produce, and market it; and to peers to review it), opportunity costs (not mentoring undergraduates, not pushing foreign languages in general-education requirements, etc.), and human costs (asking smart, conscientious people to labor their lives away on unappreciated things).

The comments to this essay are well worth reading. Some cheer him on, while others take him to task for many of his suppositions (e.g., that universities uniformly value sheer output and ignore quality and impact; that his argument reflects the silent and commonsensical consensus of almost all academics). A frequent refrain is that good research can lead directly to better teaching. As a former department chair I'd have placed that as a patent truth: at GW, at least, a direct correlation exists between being an active researcher and an excellent classroom presence (as measured via class observations, student evaluations, and teaching awards garnered). So I do not understand how so many people got it in their heads that research somehow interferes with teaching, as if it must be one or the other. I also question Bauerlein's assumption that publication is such a misery-inducing obligation for faculty, a chore that renders them melancholic as they realize they are being asked at once to be brilliant and ignored. Better it seems to put that brilliance -- and those newly idle hands -- to work in classroom, because that is better university bang for the buck. Really?

My colleague Alex Huang sent a link to the department this morning to a recent essay by Geoffrey Galt Harpham, just out in a special issue of Qui Parle on "Higher Education on Its Knees." Harpham's piece is entitled "Why We Need the 16,772nd Book on Shakespeare" and argues that research is

an immense undertaking in which countless people performing the most tedious small tasks are able, collectively, to liberate the modern world from the grip of doctrine, authority, and myth. The value of each contribution can, he says, be measured only in the aggregate, and in many cases only much later: many scholarly or scientific projects are like abandoned mines, awaiting rediscovery by future generations. ... Redundancy is the price we pay for other, less measurable but very real benefits. But we should be concerned about the mind-set that sees the past as inert, the humanities as old knowledge, and scholarship as the problem.

Though not written in response to Bauerlein, Harpham offers what amounts to an eloquent response. I'd also add: time to move beyond the obsession with traditional books and essays that dwell behind journal-induced paywalls. There are many ways to disseminate research and new knowledge, including blogs and open access publication. Ventures like punctum books are a better future for scholarly publishing, and hold the promise of a much wider readership for research.

But you know, even if seven or eight people in the world ever read the book I'm working on, that is OK. My life has been profoundly affected for the better for having worked upon the project. My students, colleagues, family, and university have benefited in ways tangible and invisible. I wouldn't want to steal such a research opportunity from anyone by announcing to them that they should teach more, publish less, and be happier for the freedom from misery I just granted them by making them more cost-effective.

Gibbous moon

2011-12-13T08:43:00.002-05:00

by J J Cohen

So much to read here these days.

A brief, personal note. In a rather incoherent post composed on my iPad, I spoke about my son's experience of having been hazed two months ago by upperclassmen. His school failed him profoundly, and I failed him as well by insisting he attend that day despite his request to remain at home. The effects have stayed with Alex in ways we've only just realized. He is enrolled in two classes far enough above his grade level that the majority of his fellow students are significantly older. These are also two classes in which his grades have plummeted. Alex pieced together over the weekend the reason why: it is difficult to feel safe among people who for a day were given license to abuse you. We've met with a guidance counselor and she was wonderful. We've hired a study skills and organization tutor to assist him in feeling some sense of mastery when it comes to the classes. I'm sure that we're on the road to better things, but the path will be long and steep. Meanwhile my in-laws have moved back to the DC area, gravely ill. It has been stressful for my family to cope.

This morning I ran in clear, cold air, an eye on the gibbous moon. Its brightness overpowers most stars, but I could see something shining fiercely on the southeast horizon. I'm guessing it was a planet. Running, enjoying the cold and scanning the skies for astronomical signs, I thought about my family's time this summer in Australia. For a few days we rented an EcoLodge in the Grampians, a mountain range in Victoria. The lodges have minimal electricity from solar power, and are heated by a wood stove that you have to stoke during the night. There are drawbacks in luxury, I suppose, but you get to live in the bush in a very nice little cabin. One of my fondest memories is of waking up at two in the morning to put some more wood into the stove. Feeling restless, I went outside, knowing my family was comfortably asleep. I walked twenty feet or so away from the lodge and looked up at a sky so alien I was overwhelmed. The stars were extraordinarily brilliant and wholly unfamiliar. I could hear a kangaroo grazing nearby but could not see it. I was cold, but something about being there -- in a strange place, a place of great beauty, where nothing was ordinary and yet I felt so at home -- has stayed with me. Maybe it was also knowing that my family was together, safe, happy, warm, removed from the world of worries in that other hemisphere.

Running this morning, eye on that hunchback moon and the star or planet that wouldn't be outshone, I was thinking about being a world away.

Mise-en-Abyme in Boccaccio, Chaucer, Borges, and Auster

2011-12-12T16:27:00.005-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

As I have mentioned several times in various blog posts in the past, a few years ago my department revised our B.A. in English curriculum, partly to diversify and broaden our "major author" offerings/requirements, and also to turn away from survey and upper-division literature courses structured along perhaps overly-sterile and often unreflected upon periodization lines (in favor of survey and upper-division literature courses that would be structured according to themes, genres, and literary forms: we still offer a 400-level course called "Literary Periods," and instructors can fill that in any way they like). We still have stand-alone "major author" courses such as "Chaucer," "Shakespeare," and "Milton," but we also added one titled "Morrison," and then we invented two new courses, "Major Authors: Shared Traditions" and "Major Authors: Crossing Boundaries." These were particular "babies" of mine and a few other faculty who wanted to allow professors to get more inventive with what constitutes a "major" author (which could then, also, change over time) and to also include more than just one author. "Shared Traditions" stipulates that you teach 2-4 authors who can be seen, from whatever angle, to "share" a "tradition" (defined however the instructor wants to define that: it could be the Caribbean--a place; or Jewishness--an identity; or the long poem--a form; or the English Renaissance--a period; and so on and so forth). "Crossing Boundaries" (my personal favorite, and one I love to teach) stipulates that you teach 2-4 authors whose work would seem, at first glance, to be so distant from each other (in whatever terms: time period, genre, culture, form, etc.) you can't comprehend what they might have in common, but you devise something/anything that would pull them together. I see this as a beautiful opportunity, I might add, to keep medieval literature, especially, "in the mix."

Obviously, when my department was first ruminating these changes to our B.A. in English, the premodernists were justifiably nervous. Would students still take the Chaucer class, if they could take Morrison instead? Would they take Milton if they could take a "Crossing Boundaries" course instead? First, I have never believed that we will save medieval studies by forcing students to take Chaucer [by, for example, making the Chaucer course compulsory, or, as we did in the past, requiring a "major author" class and then only offering Chaucer once a year and Shakespeare each semester so that students will end up in the Chaucer class when they can't get into the Shakespeare class or because it just happens to fit their schedule better, or because: they think they will like Chaucer, anyway, and what other choices are there?!?]. But more importantly, as much as I love to teach our stand-alone Chaucer course [as I am doing this semester], I think it's important to teach medieval and other premodern authors in relation to other authors situated in other periods. For me, everything is always already dialogic and no author is really separated from every other author, cognitively, historically, aesthetically, culturally, however you want to describe the supposed partitions. Of course it's fun sometimes to jump into the deep end of the pool and study one author in depth -- it's an experience, for sure, and often an enlightening one -- but for B.A.-level courses, especially, I think it's vitally important that we demonstrate the ways in which literature serves as an important and valuable field of inter- and intra-temporal thought and play (especially play), and that medieval literature is not really a world apart from contemporary literature, or from anything inbetween, but remains a vital body of work that inheres deep within modern life, culture, and thought, and in often uncanny ways. So, a few semesters ago, I taught a "Crossing Boundaries" course that focused on the concepts of sin and the postlapsarian in Milton's Paradise Lost and Neil Labute's plays [go HERE to see the syllabus for that course]. And this coming spring semester, I'm teaching another section of this course on the narrative form of the mise-en-abyme in the work of Boccaccio, Chaucer, Borges, and Paul Auster, the description for which I'll share with you here:

ENG480 Major Authors: Crossing Boundaries: Mise-en-Abyme in Boccaccio, Chaucer, Borges, Auster

Achilles: That's quite a bit to swallow. I never imagined there could be a world above mine before--and now you're hinting that there could even be one above that. It's like walking up a familiar staircase, and just keep on going further up after you've reached the top--or what you'd always taken to be on the top!

Crab: Or waking up from what you took to be real life, and finding out it too was just a dream. That could happen over and over again, no telling when it would stop.

--from Douglas R. Hoftstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach

In this course, we will explore the literary device of mise-en-abyme, or "a story within a story" (also known as a "nested" and "hypodiegetic" narrative and in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, a story with "forking paths"), in the work of four major authors, two situated in the Italian and English Middle Ages, and two situated in the modern period, in South America and America: Giovanni Boccaccio (selections from the Decameron), Geoffrey Chaucer (Legend of Good Women and selections from Canterbury Tales), Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths: Selected Stories), and Paul Auster (New York Trilogy, Oracle Night, and Book of Illusions). In addition, we will examine a small slice of the oeuvre of the writer and filmmaker Charlie Kaufmann that masterfully employs the device of mise-en-abyme: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, and Synecdoche. In addition to exploring the significance of these artists' work, we will also examine the possible connections to made between them, while also gaining some expertise in narratological theory by scholars such as Thomas Pavel, Brian McHale, Jean Gennette, Paul Ricouer, Wolfgang Iser, Roland Barthes, and Umberto Eco.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be working up the more full syllabus and will also share that with everyone here, and please do send me any suggestions you might have for primary and/or theoretical readings for the syllabus!

And Happy Holidays! [Today being my last teaching day of the term, I'm a bit giddy with happiness.]

How to write a cover letter for a humanities doctoral program: a conversation

2011-12-11T15:43:00.007-05:00

by KARL STEEL

Some zombies creeping up below. Save your imperiled brain and read that first. Then come back here.

Consider what follows less of a guide than an opening to a conversation. If you're an undergraduate or MA student, look at the comments below (if any appear) for corrections to my missteps. But because of my own mistakes and those of my students, and because googling for how to write a graduate cover letter in the humanities gets me only hits guiding recent PhDs in applying for jobs, what follows fills a need, I think.

EDIT: I'd forgotten that they're also called statements of purpose. So: here is a nice set of guidelines with good links. Consider this post a supplement.

Caveat: (and slight edit) My department's graduate offerings are MAs or MFAs (CUNY PhD students all do their doctorates at the Graduate Center in Manhattan), and the only hand I've had in admissions to date was a volunteered afternoon of culling rejected MFA applicants to determine which might be suitable candidates for our MA program. Further caveat: in my four years at Brooklyn College, I believe only one student for whom I've written a recommendation letter has been accepted to a funded spot in a literature doctoral program, although I've had successes in placing students in other kinds of degree programs and in helping them win fellowships.

If you're still with me--and you've every right to have jumped ship by this point--here are two important facts:

as of this Fall, I now require students requesting recommendation letters to provide me with their application materials--particularly their cover letter--at least several weeks in advance;
every first draft of a cover letter I've seen has been...not very good, no matter how smart the student.

My first cover letter, back in 1997, was awful (too). Like all the inadequate cover letters I've seen since, it crowed about my enthusiasm for literature and my hope to teach, and that plus some good recommendation letters and stellar GRE scores cost me several hundred dollars in application fees and won me nothing but rejection from 8 or so doctoral programs and the offer of a spot in a very expensive MA program. I scurried to apply one last time to a local MA program, which--for unknown reasons--said yes, funded me, and taught me how to teach and, more importantly, how to be a graduate student.

So: A good cover letter for a doctoral program needs to express more than enthusiasm. It's kind of a Gerald Graff point, but I don't think graduate schools want students who they have to train to be students. And students must realize that a graduate degree is a professional degree: just wanting to be in the program is not enough. Enthusiasm is nice, but know that everyone applying to a doctoral program is presumed to be nutty enough to want to spent 8.2 years for a degree that could end in nothing but learning. Everyone's enthusiastic; but not everyone has focus.

Your letter needs more than a sense of enthusiasm, and it needs more than personal story, regardless of surmounted hardship or chance meetings with, oh, Jacques Le Goff. It needs to describe someone who does research, someone who chooses projects that matter (think, students, about the so what? factor), and someone who at least seems to have a research agenda tying together his or her various projects to date.

I tend to think, then, that a good cover letter has the following format. Two-pages, single spaced, with room for addresses, salutations, and signatures:

Paragraph 1: introduction (my name's blah blah, I'm finishing a degree at blah, and I'm applying to your program in blah blah and will concentrate in medieval/early modern/Vorticist/whatever literature)
Paragraph 2: here's what I've worked on so far and why it's so interesting/important
Paragraph 3: here's what I hope to work on in the future, and here's where I see my career going
Paragraph 4 (customized for each letter): how you hope to take advantage of the particular academic resources of each school, particularly its faculty
Paragraph 5: personal stuff

Thank you for time and consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Prospective Student

My 1999 letter, the one that finally got me into a funded PhD program, followed this format, and was edited mercilessly four or five times by a universally beloved medievalist, then at Western Washington University. In other words, draft your letter well in advance and expect to have it torn to pieces. If you follow the above format, maybe you can get by with only three rewrites instead of five.

My second paragraph described the medieval courses I'd taken at in my MA program (Chaucer, Medieval Drama, independent study on Medieval Women's Lit), and focused on the three conference papers I'd given by that point and on my MA Thesis. Paragraph three discussed my preference for noncanonical medieval texts and expressed my hope to one day edit a TEAMS volume. Paragraph four differed depending on the school, and graph five was the only place I talked about me as a human being rather than just as a scholar: that's where I sold myself as a first-generation working class college student blah blah blah. Everything else, though, did its utmost to present me as a kind of junior colleague.

I know this all sounds kind of dull, particularly given the kinds of work we champion and practice here. Correct me in comments, then.

zombies, zombies everywhere

2011-12-11T08:11:00.001-05:00

by J J Cohen

For a small speech I'm delivering somewhere or other, I've been collecting references to zombies. Or, rather, I've been noting that we have been so inundated with zombies over the past few years that attempting a comprehensive survey of the phenomenon and reducing it back into the stable parameters of a cultural meaning would be an impossible labor. That impossibility is what intrigues me, though, and has been the starting point for my thinking about the explosion of zombie apocalypse dreams. They, along with the Occupy movement,* seem to be among the few means we possess at the moment of thinking ourselves out of the stalemate of the present. Zombies are weirdly forward-looking -- relentlessly forward-looking, in fact. They are the monster through which our dissatisfaction with the immediate past and the stultifying present are expressed. They have to be multivalent: as enjoyable to imagine and inhabit as to fight against and destroy.

Despite their apocalypse-obsessed futurity, zombies carry with them much that is unspoken about the deep past. That complicated undead temporality, visible in what I am calling loosely a "zombie aesthetic," will be the focus of my Orlando keynote. I hope to use medieval revenants (especially the Old Norse draugr or aptrgangr, like Glam in Grettir's Saga) to think about contemporary siblings.

The epidemic of zombies has of course led to a proliferation of scholarly work on their signification. Much of this criticism argues that zombies are monsters indigenous to capitalism: aren't the ravenous undead, creatures of pure drive, perfect figures for the consumer? Ever since George A. Romero's ur-zombie film Night of the Living Dead, creditors and debts and the relentless creatures have been intertwined -- a knotting only intensified by the shopping mall action of Dawn of the Dead. That allegorical function makes a great deal of sense, but I've long suspected it is not the entirety of the revenant's story. I was therefore pleased to hear about Juan of the Dead, a Cuban film in which the zombies are socialists. From the wonderful NYT write up:

“Juan of the Dead” tells the blood-drenched tale of a slacker who decides to save the island from an invasion of cannibalistic zombies. As the zombies turn Havana into a gory circus of flying limbs and severed heads, the nightly news anchors continue to calmly assert the government line, that the attacks are not the work of the undead but dissidents in the pay of the United States.

The film is scattered with allusions to traumatic moments in Cuba’s recent history: Cubans flee the zombies in makeshift boats that recall the raft-borne exodus of 1994; the darkened, shuttered streets, one character says, echo the “special period” of economic hardship after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Cuban reality is so incredible that there are things in the movie that seem like you made them up, but in fact they are based on truth,” said Alejandro Brugués, the 35-year-old director, who was born in Argentina but grew up in Cuba. “I just put zombies in the scenario, instead of real people.”

Cannibalistic food for thought.

So, what about you? Favorite zombies? Notable undead?

------
*Occupy might be the affirmative antidote to the cynical, zombified future. I'm sure the two phenomena are connected, perhaps with the former as the possibility-laden and hopeful vocabulary that the latter (more prone to comic cynicism and ultimately, despair) lacks.

Radiance (The Force of Stone)

2011-12-09T10:01:00.001-05:00

by J J Cohen

[read Karl on Kadar Koli first]

So I've been working away on my book, making fairly decent progress despite two ongoing family crises and a barrage of other responsibilities.

Below is the draft opening of chapter two, called simply "Radiance," and glossed with the parenthetical "The Force of Stone." After this introductory section I have an explication of Merlin as an ideal or lapidary reader in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace, a section on Roger Caillois and the beauty of stone (as well as his theory of objective, universal and inhuman aesthetics) ... and that's the 10K of words I have so far. Next likely comes a movement the subterranean realms mapped by Marie de France in "Yonec" as well as the Breton lay Sir Orfeo.

---------

If physical things are described as firm andhard, this is clearly the case only for whatever tries to move them. (GrahamHarman, Prince of Networks 143)

miroir d'eau, emptied

Theworld is so full of stone that its vibrancy is only sometimes evident. Thebuildings that house our urban labors rise through collaboration with marble(metamorphic limestone, the skeletons of innumerable organisms), steel (ironalloyed with carbon), concrete (a composite of pulverized rocks, lime, clay andsand), and glass (the mineral sodium carbonate fused with lime, dolomite andother earthy substances). These buildings become streetscapes to which we payinfrequent heed. Lithic ubiquity leads to invisibility. Yet sometimes astartling edifice halts our walk. Pebbles line garden paths and when congealedin bitumen pave roads; we notice them only when they trip or puncture, orperhaps as the glint of rain or oil yields irresistible iridescence. Stone is ourpreferred material for the monuments, markers, foundations, walls and statuesthat arrest our progress, as well as for architectures to enable continued motion:bridges, staircases, walkways, highways. From my office in Foggy Bottom I cansee bulldozers working the rock-strewn ground where a laboratory rises. Nearbypedestrians tread a sidewalk that weaves cobblestones into its cement, but justas the construction site and its unearthed stones is ambient rather thangravitational, few seem to observe the differences in texture or color. Yet afew blocks away the white columns of the Lincoln Memorial rise, lucent in themorning sun. I suspect that this limestone edifice defies the disregard towhich its lithic siblings have been quietly subjected. The immense, neoclassicalmemorial is difficult to overlook. Its stone shines with a splendor notindifferent to human events: its affective power is certainly intensified byrecalling that Martin Luther King delivered a speech about unrealized dreams uponits steps. The marble’s radiance is, however, more than a historical effect.

This chapter exploresthe radiative power of stone, an inherent and inhuman force that medievalwriters called virtus. Modern Englishdoes not contain an adequate synonym for that powerful Latin word. I will use “aestheticpower” as a loose translation, though in a modified sense that brings the term aesthetics closer to its Greek root in aisthēta: “perceptible things,”that which is sensation-provoking, that which triggers extraordinary andperhaps unexpected affective and cognitive relation. Art and beauty have beencentral to aesthetics since its controversial launching as a science in eighteenth-centuryGermany, but mainly as static and inactive phenomena to be discerned, judgedand savored. Stone teaches us that even the most inert and mundane ofsubstances awaits its “postdisenchanted” reappraisal, revealing itself as temporallythick, relentlessly active and imagination-provoking.[i] A dynamic prod to action, emotion,memory and transformative confederation, aesthetic power must be as germane tothings that are repellent or commonplace as to that which is magnificent.[ii] Aesthetics in this formulationwill not be subjective (concerned only with individual or cultural matters oftaste), but object-oriented and disanthropocentric (following the paths and unfoldingthe powers of things and materialities themselves). It is a tool for mapping theradiative power of objects, their ability to connect, effect, impede andintensify in ways that are not simply historical or local. Such conjunctive andemissive ability becomes most evident in an interspace, in a meeting of human collaboratorwith a rock ready to divulge something of the unexpected exquisiteness of itssurface, the hidden artistry of its depths, its yearning to become monumental.

Yes, yearning. There will be many suchanthropomorphic turns of phrase in this chapter. Their aim is not to suggestthat stone acts just like a human. Itis not my intention to humanize the lithic, as if assimilation were thenecessary prerequisite to a more ethical mode of reading materiality or ofthickening human relations to the nonhuman world. Such a method assumes aprimal rift then builds what could be an environmental justice upon thepresupposition of human dominion, rather than interrogating how that chasmopened and through what exertions that power has been sustained. Cautiouslyanthropomorphic language estranges. The wonder it engenders enables an explorationof how things -- objects and substances -- sometimes deeply intertwinethemselves in human affairs, sometimes withdraw into unknowability, apathy, or indifference,but continually intimate that the exceptionality humans grant themselves is moreprecarious than patent. This power of things to re-orient the world can be describedas aesthetic. It might also be glossed as radiance. It always precipitates astonishment,the state of what in Middle English was written astoned. Thisubiquitous adjective derives from the Anglo-Norman French verb estoner, “to stun” or “to be stunned,”which in turn comes from Latin tonare,“to thunder.” Astonish is therefore aword with a sonorous etymology, and indicates the feeling of being outsideoneself that arrives at a sudden thunderclap. Yet for both medieval and modern Anglophoneaudiences “astonish” carries a lithic suggestiveness: a-stoned. Thus Chaucer describes a stunned Pandarus, shamed intosilence by Troilus’s rebuke, as follows: “ThisPandarus ... stant, astoned of thise causes tweye, / As stille as ston”(Troilus andCriseyde 5.1728-29). Astonishedpeople routinely fall to the ground, as the examples of astoned compiled by the MiddleEnglish Dictionary reveal. Heidegger’s designation of stones as weltlos (“wordless”) seems to designatethe same state, until we remember that astonishment is a movement, anoscillation. The astoned personreturns to consciousness – though perhaps, like Saul after the thunderbolt, nolonger quite the same.

Radiance aswonder-making or becoming astoned designatesa set of relations and qualities that are ineluctably ethical and aesthetic, withthat latter term understood as naming a nonhuman effectivity rather than a culturallyprojected quality to be applauded. Radiance is a potentially inconstant but nonethelessinherent, agentic, and affective force, the collective name for diverse powers possessedby objects to enable them at times to touch and form alliances with otherbodies and forces. Objects may withdraw completely from contact; contact may bewithdrawn completely from objects. Both this relation-making power and the abilityto recede have profoundly material consequences. Stone becomes at once aninexhaustible force and an entity the secrets of which can never be fully plumbed,no matter how many times or how accurately its possibilities are translatedinto human terms or assimilated into sustained alliance. Rock thereby opens upa world of things that cannot be reduced to history, use value, relationalsignificance, or a substantiality determined only by cultural incorporation. Thelithic possesses an anthropodecentric effect: it reminds that entities subsistregardless of human relations, independent of perception, and are therefore onthe same ontological plane as both humans and other objects. The philosopherGraham Harman uses this insight to argue for the integrity and autonomy of all things:

When thingswithdraw from presence into their dark subterranean reality, they distancethemselves not only from human beings but fromeach other as well. If the human perception of a house or a tree is foreverhaunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never becomes present, thesame is true of the sheer causal interaction between rocks or raindrops. Eveninanimate things only unlock each other's realities to a minimal extent,reducing one another to caricatures ... even if rocks are not sentientcreatures, they never encounter one another in their deepest being, but only as present-at-hand … The true chasm inontology lies not between humans and the world, but between objects and relations.[iii]

The material world, that is, cannever be constricted into a merely human frame. Rocks form more relations with nonhumansthan they do with architects, gardeners, and the pavers of roads. Harman’s aimis to bypass the “weary world/human dualism” not by affirming or overcoming thissupposed rift but, with Bruno Latour, “starting with countless actors ratherthan a pre-given duality of two types ofactors,” and thereby shifting “philosophy from its stalemated trench war towardthe richness of things themselves” (Princeof Networks 119). To the charge of panpsychism or animism that often arriveswhen a philosopher speaks of such intentional objects, Harman pointedly replies“Rather than anthropomorphizing the inanimate realm, I am morphing the humanrealm into a variant of the inanimate” (212). He is in surprisingly goodmedieval company.

Allrock potentially exerts a relation-making or impeding agency, as anyone who hasever built a stone wall, attempted boulder climbing, or beachcombed and foundthemselves drawn to a particular stone along a shore strewn with smooth stonesknows. Such lithic radiance is the trigger to the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz’sbook The Planet in a Pebble: A JourneyInto Earth’s Deep History. The compacted energy, mass, gravity and timewithin a banded fragment of the Welsh shore extends an invitation towonderment, enabling Zalasiewicz’s travels into paleogeology, a history in whichlandmasses crush against each other and mountains bulge. Zalasiewicz’s pebbleperpetually retains an ability to open stories about a world immeasurably vast,temporally as well as spatially. The medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouthdiscovered a similar potency in Stonehenge, the rocks of which have moved overtremendous distances and endure for spans that humans can only with greatdifficulty conceive. Of the structure’s megaliths Geoffrey has Merlin declare:

‘Mistici suntlapides et ad diuersa medicamenta salubres. Gigantes olim aportauerunt eos exultimis finibus Affricae et posuerunt in Hibernia dum eam inhabitarent. Eratautem causa ut balnea infra ipsos conficerent cum infirmitate grauarentur.Lauabant namque lapides et infra balnea diffundebant, unde aegroti curabantur.Misecebant etiam cum herbarum confectionibus, unde uulnerati sanabantur. Nonest ibu lapis qui medicamento careat.’ (Historyof the Kings of Britain 173)

[‘The stones aremagic and can effect various cures. They were brought long ago from thefarthest shores of Africa by giants, who erected them in Ireland while theylived there. Their purpose was to set up baths among them whenever they wereill. They used to wash the stones and pour the water into baths to cureillnesses. They also used to mix in herbal compounds to heal wounds. There isnot a stone among them that does not have some medicinal power.’ 172]

Merlin knows that the stones radiatepower, and that through alliance with them this force can be intensified forthe healing of wounds and the ensuring that the memory of those slain in battlenever fades. This potency is always there, innate to the stone itself, but canbe medicinally harnessed only through a water, herbs and fleshly contact. Thestructure’s efficacy can also be glimpsed in its ability to catalyze story, hereengendering a narrative of rocks moving from Africa to Ireland to Britainthrough the collaboration of giants, a prophet, ships and men. Stonehenge isagential, even restorative, but that power is known only through gregariousalliance.

[i]“Postdisenchanted” is Carolyn Dinshaw’s term from a roundtable on “TheorizingQueer Temporalities” (185), put to excellent use by Karl Steel in How to Make a Human 244.

[ii]Tim Morton makes a similar argument in EcologyWithout Nature.

[iii]The quotation is from Tool-Being 2.Kris Coffield composed the Wikipedia entry for “Object-oriented ontology” anddoes an excellent job of explicating objects and relations. Compare also thisaccount by Harman in Prince of Networks:“Objects are not defined by their relations: instead they are what enter intorelations in the first place, and their allies can never fully mine their ores.In Heideggerian terms, objects enter relations but withdraw from them as well;objects are built from components, but exceed those components … An objectstands apart – not just from its manifestations to humans, but possibly fromits own accidents, relations, qualities, moments, or pieces” (132, 152).

KADAR KOLI—THE VIOLENCE ISSUE: cfp

2011-12-09T09:18:00.005-05:00

by Karl Steel

David Hadbawnik has posted a call for submissions for a special issue of the journal Kadar Koli that engages "with the relation between violence and contemporary poetry." I'm enthusiastically amplifying this CFP for what looks to me like a great project. The journal wants poetry, short critical statements, longer essays, and visual arts, by JANUARY 15. Look here for more.

On the question of violence: at dinner the other day, my wife asked me why Zizek used the terms "subjective" and "objective" rather than, say, "personal" and "systemic" in his analysis of violence. The only answer I had--and it was a pathetically bad one--was that it might have something to do with Hegel. Any ideas, world?

EDIT: 10:40am. occurred to me that not everyone has read Zizek on violence. To help, see here and here for some screenshots of the appropriate pages from my How to Make a Human that might clarify matters.

Postal Systems, Affect, and Going Astray: Aesthetic Solidarity

2011-12-06T19:29:00.006-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

Not for the first time, I find myself stranded in an airport roundabout 8:30 am, Perth, Australia time [lightning storms in Perth on Tuesday grounded many flights, causing a cascade of flight delays today], and while I may get a flight out of Sydney later this evening, it is doubtful I will make it home to Ohio until Thursday [as opposed to the original arrival time of Wednesday evening]. Who can say? I'm happy because I'm still kind of high from the intellectual intensity and playful camaraderie of the International Medievalism and Popular Conference I just participated in here at the Univ. of Western Australia [a big thank you to the organizers: Andrew Lynch, Louise D'Arcens, Stephanie Trigg, and John Ganim], and thanks to the generosity of Stephanie , who gave me a card for a complimentary entry to the Qantas Club, I at least enjoy a comfy chair, wireless internet, and endless cups of espresso and food at no cost. To those who wonder why I have not already started drinking, well, contrary to the legends of Aussie alcoholism, the bar does not open until noon; if it opened earlier, I think things could get ugly in here [insert smile]. I'm weird; I'm actually enjoying myself [although I do miss home and family terribly]. As I've written here before, I love airports and the occasions they afford for mingling with so many people, and for thinking, reading, and writing in the midst of hubbub [which, yeah, I actually like to do]. So I set myself the task this morning of conceptualizing and writing an abstract for a conference happening next Spring. To whit:

My partner's university [Miami University, Ohio] is hosting a really nifty conference from 20-21 April 2012 on Network Archaeology, featuring some eminent network and media theorists, such as Alan Liu, Jussi Parrika, Richard John, and Lisa Gitelman, and what really caught my eye about this conference was its emphasis on polychronic historicities and the re-orienting the temporality of network studies:

This conference will bring together scholars and practitioners to explore the resonances between digital networks and “older” (perhaps still emergent) systems of circulation; from roads to cables, from letter-writing networks to digital ink. Drawing on recent research in media archaeology, we see network archaeology as a method for re-orienting the temporality and spatiality of network studies. Network archaeology might pay attention to the history of distribution technologies, location and control of geographical resources, the emergence of circulatory models, proximity and morphology, network politics and power, and the transmission properties of media. What can we learn about contemporary cultural production and circulation from the examination of network histories? How can we conceptualize the polychronic developments of networks, including their growth, adaptation, and resistances? How might the concept of network archaeology help to re-envision and forge new paths of interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and scholarship?

I myself do not really do media or network studies, but the editing of our next issue of postmedieval, Becoming Media, has taught me a lot about it, and of course I've done some reading in this area over the years -- nevertheless, it's an area in which I have pretty much no real competence. But I see this conference as a wonderful opportunity to have some engaged conversations between modernists and premodernists over the historicity of networks, communication technologies, media, and the like, and it would also allow me to write about something which I've been very fond of and devoted to over the years but have had no occasion to write about -- Tiny Mix Tapes -- and to also keep thinking about a perennially favorite subject of mine: affective communities. Finally, I'd like to have an essay that I could turn into a "dead letter" for punctum books's Dead Letter Office book series, and this just seemed too good to pass up. So, I've written a paper abstract, which I share with everyone below, and I would really appreciate everyone's help with any references you might have for me, whether relative to media and network studies, or the role of the genre of the envoi in medieval poetry.

I should also say here that a big impetus for this paper idea, as well as the Dead Letter Office book series, has been the current situation of the U.S. Post Office, which, thanks to the internet and other shipping competitors, appears to be an institution on the wane, and while I myself have [like many people, I'm sure] stopped writing and mailing handwritten and typed letters and cards, and pay my bills online, etc., I don't want to see the Post Office go under. I think it would be sad not to have a U.S. Post Office or traditional "mail" and stamps, etc. [and that's pure nostalgic thinking], but this also got me thinking about the ways in which supposedly outmoded forms of communication might re-appear as possible mechanisms for subversive communities, and also about the ways in which older and newer communication forms might combine and give rise to new post/al networks.

Postal Systems, Affect, and Going Astray: Aesthetic Solidarity

I’m pretty sure my therapist is going to give up on me soon, and it’s my fault. I need some songs to listen to while resigning myself to being depressed forever.
—theme for a tiny mixtape, requested by James

Somethings that you pretend to like so a boy will love you end up giving you more than that boy ever could.
—anonymous postcard sent to Frank Warren at PostSecret

This paper will examine (or raise) the question of network affects, specifically in relation to (re)turns to outmoded communication technologies, such as the postcard and the mixtape, as seen especially in the hybrid media ventures of Tiny Mix Tapes, where semi-anonymous users request “cassette” music mixes through invented themes such as “unrequited love, 1980-1988,” “I made you fall in love with me but now I’m not sure what I want …,” and “I feel disconnected from my friends, families, and even body: the world is an interesting place,” and also PostSecret, a “community art project,” where people anonymously mail in their somewhat shameful or embarrassing secrets on hand-made postcards. This paper will argue that both Tiny Mix Tapes and PostSecret serve as important switching stations or branch offices for affective-communitarian postal systems that participate in what Derrida would say is both a lack and an excess of address (The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond), similar to the medieval envoi, which was very prevalent in medieval troubadour lyric: a short stanza or set of brief stanzas appended to the end of a poem to address an actual or imaginary person outside of the poem itself, which poem then became a sort of postcard as well as a static-ridden telegraph machine (because split between two registers of address).

Ultimately, what I want to explore here is both the historicity of the “postal system” and its relation to affect, through the medieval envoi, as well as the ways in which the mixtape and the post-secret (as intra-temporal envois) engage in what Derrida termed “postal maneuvering,” where we see the entangled operations of “relays, delay, anticipation, destination, telecommunicating, network, the possibility, and therefore the fatal necessity of going astray” (The Post Card, p. 66). This paper will also explore how the specific, networked engagement with older communication technologies (pre-Internet and even premodern) enables a valuable “virtual” space for what the social theorist Scott Lash calls “aesthetic reflexivity,” whereby it is possible to critique (through play) various power/knowledge structures, while also allowing oneself to be spontaneously traversed by others’ emotions, which traversal then becomes a valuable form of queerly im/personal solidarity.

Roger du Plessis gives Antoine Arnaud the What-For: A Vivisection Anecdote meets its match

2011-12-05T15:41:00.006-05:00

by KARL STEEL

During November and early December I briefly attained Jeffrey- or Eileen-like levels of speaking engagements. First the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then, the following week, at Ann Arbor, and then, finally, at a GW MEMSI symposium on my How to Make a Human. Thanks, eternal thanks, to Rob Barrett, Charlie Wright, the Animal Studies Interdisciplinary Workshop at the University of Michigan, and, of course, Jeffrey and the other symposium participants: Peggy McCracken, Tobias Menely, and Julian Yates.

Over the few weeks, as I try to finish both my semester AND preparations for next year's relocation to Paris, I hope to share portions of my (colon-heavy) talks and seminars: “Yvain's Herdsman, A Lion, and Several Dead Dogs: Rules for Being Human, and Some Ways Out"; “Unmaking Humans: Several Medieval Nonhumanisms”; and "Thanks Unending: Dindimus with the World."

An excerpt to start:

Works on animal rights very often uses the following description of later 17th-century French scientists of the school of Descartes, who:

administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but the whole body was without feeling. They nailed poor animals upon boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see the circulation of the blood which was a great subject of conversation.

I don't know who first ran across this passage (an original), but this very translation appears in more than 300 works, per Google books; if we imagine other translations--though perhaps we shouldn't be so generous--the actual account of the anecdote's retelling probably number much, much higher.

So far as I know, however, virtually no one in animal rights (see the link for the one example I've turned up, unscientifically, through Google Books) cites the following story, also about Antoine Arnaud, le grand, and also, like the other, from the Memoirs of Nicolas Fontaine:

Mais puis-je oublier le plaisant entretien, où ce bon Seigneur ferma la bouche à M. Arnaud, tout savant qu'il étoit? On parloit de la philosophie de M. Descartes, qui étoit alors l'entre[c]ien de toutes les compagnies. M. Arnaud qui avoit un esprit universal & qui étoit entré dans le sistême de Descartes sur les bêtes, soutenoit que ce n'étoient que des horloges, et que quand elles crioient ce n'étoit qu'une roue d'horloge qui faisoit du bruit. M. de Liancourt lui dit: 'J'ai là bas deux chiens qui tournent la broche chacun leur jour. L'un s'en trouvant embarasse se cacha lorsqu'on l'alloit prendre, et on eut recours à son camarade pour tourner au lieu de lui. Le camarade cria, et fit signe de sa queue qu'on le suivît. Il alla dénicher l'autre dans le grenier et le houspilla. Sont-ce là des horloges?" dit-il, à M. Arnaud qui trouva cela si plaisant, qu'il ne put faire autre chose que d'en rire.

But can I forget the pleasant conversation when this good lord closed the mouth of Monsieur Arnaud, as sophicated as he was? They were speaking of Descartes' philosophy, who was then the subject of everyone's conversation. Monsieur Arnaud, a true renaissance man, had joined with Descartes' system on the question of animals, holding that they were nothing more than clocks, and that when they cried out, it was nothing more than clockwork making noise. Monseiur de Liancourt [Duke Roger du Plessis] said to him, "Down there [in the kitchen] I have two dogs who daily alternate turning a spit. One of the dogs constrained to do this hid himself when they where going to put him to it, and he had recourse to his comrade [another dog] to turn the spit in his place. The comrade cried out and signalled with its tail that he should be followed. He turned up the other in the attic and reprimanded him fiercely. Are these clocks?" he said, which Monsieur Arnaud found so pleasant than he could do nothing else but laugh at it.

I'll just note that even here, under Descartes, human confidence could go awry: I'll leave it to you to decide how we should take Arnauld's laughter, whether he's tickled or nervous or unsure about what to think.

The ironies are almost too obvious to describe: though the Duke kept his dogs as machines, he knew them as having a sense of justice; though Arnaud beat and crucified his dogs, though he used them to study life itself—or to liberate “life,” whatever that is, from the body—he considered them, at best, puzzles to be solved.

[feel free to intervene on this translation, which is, admittedly, clumsy (and I hope at worst clumsy). There is, by the way, a recent edition (Champion, 2001) of the Fontaine, which I've been unable to consult]

Debt and the Job Market: Two Links

2011-12-01T09:19:00.001-05:00

by J J Cohen

I'm preoccupied today with this little event, but want to call your attention to a blog post and an article that will give you some food for thought.

First, an eloquent little piece at Queer Urban Ecologies about why student debt matters, even for those who have paid off their own loans. We ought to live in a world in which attending a college or university does not severely circumscribe one's future. We don't live in that world, but a system that encourages, even mandates, that a student incur debt of tens of thousands of dollars (and sometimes a hundred thousand dollars, or more) and then spend ten years paying off that sum is deeply, deeply flawed. To put it bluntly: such incursion of debt is ruinous. Education is a fundamental right, not some kind of merchandise one enters a kind of indentured servitude in order to purchase.

Second, Rosemary G. Feal, the executive director of the MLA, has some eloquent words about the lack of tenure-track jobs at colleges and universities, a state that is rapidly becoming the new normal. I love the closing paragraph of this IHE piece, because Feal gets it exactly right:

True coalitions may have the best chance at changing things, she said. "All the Occupy movements taking place on campuses lead me to think that if tenured professors, administrators, students, faculty members from all ranks and job-seekers join together, then we have a chance for solving some of these huge problems facing us," she said. "We should be one faculty serving all students, and every member of the academic community must do our part to make this happen."

pierreux

2011-11-28T08:21:00.001-05:00

by J J Cohen

We've just returned from a trip to Bordeaux,where over the Thanksgiving holiday we visited the family with whom Alexstayed last year at this time, courtesy of an exchange program at his school. MeetingNathalie, Salomé, Augustin and Félix --people we knew only through descriptions (Alex is an unsentimentalteenager; he neglected to take photographs) -- was affirming. Their cordiality,and their obvious affection for Alex, inaugurated a tremendouslyenjoyable visit. I won't pretend that family travel lacks challenges: themeltdowns that jet lag and other fatigues trigger, the work required to keep agroup of four united despite their differences, the moments of tedium orhomesickness. Yet all in all this trip provided the best Thanksgiving we'vehad. It helped, of course, to be in a country indifferent to the day, and toeat a meal of galettes bretonnes and crêpes (and for two us, cidre)on a holiday when most of our friends devour a roasted animal without appeal for us four. And, for reasons not to be dwelt upon here, being away from extended familywas also welcome.

Just before departure I finished the draft ofthe first chapter of my book, sixty pages of rumination upon fossils lithic andtextual, and the invitation to deep time they extend. Today I am supposed tobegin work on chapter two, "Radiance," on the forces stones unceasinglyemanate. My heart is not in it. Or maybe I distrust my thesis. My mind is pulled back (by inexorable lithic gravity? an abidingrocky magnetism?) to the stones that intruded into our journeys of the last week,unlooked for but recurrent incursions into what was supposed to be familytime. And maybe that repeated inhuman presence that surfaces near the heart ofwhat is intimate, enclosed, and profoundly human has always beenthe spur to this book I have been writing for six years, or perhaps for morethan forty years. Perhaps it is even, quietly, its subject.

-------------

Bordeaux is a city of stone, but not ametropolis a medievalist would call old. Its buildings are 18th century intheir splendor. Their regal heft rose by pulverizing the precedingcityscapes. Numerous fountains, the swirl of the Garonne, and a recent mirroir d'eau help to counteract their ponderousness, bringing somefluidity to an architecture that can seem overly decorous. The Atlantic crashes not too distantly. Bord’eaux: intimacy to waters is in the city'sname. Yet like the precisely crafted wine for which the region is famous,something feels artfully producedabout Bordeaux's historic spaces: the balance of water and stone measured and executedfor optimal aesthetic effect. A perfection, yes, but perfections are diffident.

The historic center of Bordeaux is not whattheorists call an "urban palimpsest," or at least it isn't much ofone. An ultramodern tram courses the square in front of the majestic Grand Théâtre (c. 1780), andthough some hundreds of years might separate the two they seem comfortablecompanions, alike in their gleam. You have to walk to the city's edge to findthe tower where Eleanor of Aquitaine lived. The ruins of a Roman coliseum arehidden by some apartment buildings and generally unlisted among touristattractions. The ruins are cordoned from the life of the city, at the terminusof a narrow cul de sac: a nice viewfor some apartment dwellers, but there is no possibility of nearing the stones.

It surprised me, therefore, to wander the Jardin Publicand encounter a Neolithic circle. We'd been searching only for the carousel,yet there it was: ancient rocks, some of them incised, in a classic ringformation. An imitation of a cromlech from Brittany? A model meant to addatmosphere to this park not even a few centuries old? I wasn’t sure. The circleis certainly easy to miss. Mentioned in no guidebook and marked only by a signthat lost its words years ago, the structure inhabits a shady slope not far from asee-saw. On nearby benches the Bordelais eat lunch. Some researchlater revealed that the circle is authentic – and had in fact been transportedfrom Lesparre-Medoc in 1875, partly as a historical curiosity, partly to add apicturesque element to the gardens.

Does the relocation of this architecture suggestthat even though its builders vanished long ago, the stones continueto exert some power? The ring was not, as many cromlechs have been, fragmentedso that the site could be used for another purpose. It was carefully measured, movedand restored. It did not suffer the fate of the Roman city that these gardensare built atop. Deracinated, dislocated, the ring is now nearly silent in itspark. On an autumn day in 2011 it pulled me into its orbit, made me happy thatit had not been consigned to the far side of metal fence on an obscure streetlike Burdigala's former amphitheater. And yet a cromlech in a city's midst,where trees undermine its solidity and air pollution wears its stones and theoil of human hands stains and children mistake it for a playground is anarchitecture that will not be offering its invitations to the contemplation of historyand lost peoples indefinitely. The Cromlech de Lervaut in the JardinPublic in Bordeaux is a disintegrating time capsule, an archive crumbling into quiet.Yet there I was photographing the ring, feeling the joy of unexpecteddiscovery, wondering about the hands that shaped it and the hands that moved itand the lives that have been and are being lived around its center.

Later in the week we traveledto Saint-Émilion to visit the église monolithique, a subterraneanchurch carved from a single block of limestone. We arrived just in time to makethe only tour of the day, which was in French. "I can't possibly translatefor you," the guide stated with annoyance, irked as well atKatherine’s sudden need to use the toilet when the tour was about to begin.Since a guide is the only way to enter the church, we were happy to go with her all the same. HerFrench was precise and lucid; I had little trouble with it, nor did Alex ...and eventually she even warmed to Katherine, whose pleasure at the church'scentaur and dragon transcended language. By the end of the visit the guide washappily speaking in English to her youngest entourage member. It is possible that the églisemonolithique is a crusades-era inspiration, the idea of a cave-likebuilding brought back to France from Turkey with some itinerant knights. Orpossibly its excavation was a convenience: hollow out the hill as you quarrystone for the town's buildings, and use the space for worship. We can’t know,because there are no documents: the church’s history is in the church’s stone alone.

There is a power within this hill become aplace of worship. It is difficult not to feel the weight above you as youregard the pillars soaring into darkness. A cathedral promises sky on its otherside; this church only more stone. Yet this power has not always been perceived. Duringthe French Revolution the church was sold and its furnishings stripped. Acooper set up shop in a chapel. The soot from his curing of wine barrelsaccidentally preserved the ornate murals on the walls. The church is now privatelyowned and little used. Some tourists come to see it as they visit nearbyvineyards and stop at Saint-Émilion for lunch. If this sacred space carved fromsingular stone has any transhistorical assertiveness, it seems a power thatwaxes and wanes. Most pilgrims to Saint-Émilion would, I think, rather dine ata café with a view of the orderly grape vines than explore such a dim interior.

Another day trip from Bordeaux took us toArcachon. We were pulled, for reasons I can’t fully explain, by the Atlantic:my family is united in its love of oceans. I was thinking about that gravity agreat deal during this trip, especially as I was contemplating how at the ageof fourteen Alex is a young man I don’t always know. He has unpredictable moodsand desires that come from strange places. He is becoming his own person. Andyet the ocean brings out a contemplativeness in him that he shares with his sister,mother, father.

A quotation from Jean Cocteau stenciled onthe glass of a café near the beach at Arcahon helped me to understand howwaves, stone and imagination form a unity of time, again and again.

And then to Paris. We walked around theplaces we know, and found others to explore – like the catacombs, l’empire de la mort, that pass beneathmuch of Montparnasse, and where bones have become a decorative and endless wall.After all, calcium is stone. “How long does it take,” I asked, “for a body tobe no longer a person or a life, but material that can be moved, that can be usedto construct a place like this?” Not long.

Later we crossed the Pont des Arts and were amusedby the rows of love locks that have been affixed there. Steel clasping steelabove ceaselessly flowing water, they well capture the passions that we want tomake last, the ardor we have to stay bound to this earth and to each other, aswell as the anonymity that ultimately swallows such acts that feel to ussingular. It was hard not to see a convergence of sorts in the beauty of thelocks clasping the bridge and the beauty (why not?) they share with thearchitectures of bone beneath the streets of Montparnasse.

We’d never stayed in Montparnasse before, andenjoyed the way its busy streets yield quickly to everyday neighborhoods. Oneof these is a community of the dead, the crowded and stony and weirdly lively Cimetièredu Montparnasse. Alex and Iwent there together, and remarked how some graves stood in what seemed tobe eternal splendor, while others had already been obliterated. We were movedwhen we came upon a cenotaph, its occupant “disappeared to Auschwitz.” We lefta pebble upon it, observing how strange it was to find a Jewish memorial amongso many crosses. Yet the more we wandered the more familiar the Magen Davidbecame. We placed a pebble upon each grave, until the number of them grew so overwhelming that we knew we could never accomplish this task we’d assumed. Thedead profoundly outnumber the living. Memorialization brings despair. I askedAlex how long he thought the lifespan of grief might be. When do the dailyvisits to the cemetery cease? At what point does one say, I’ll go weekly. I’ll go once a month. I’ll go for the anniversary. Iused to go …

Our final morning in Paris was spent walkingto the Arènes de Lutèce, the remnants of a Roman amphitheatre uncovered in thenineteenth century. A few summers ago we’d lived not far from the ruins on theRue Claude Bernard. I’d enjoyed going to the Arènes, especially in the morning.In the semi-circle where people died to amuse an audience, young men now practicesoccer and older men play bocce. I’d never photographed the place. This iswhere Alex and Katherine’s patience gave out. They were tired of living in mydocumentary about stones and the human lives that unfold beside and within them.They were weary of being human content for my lithic ruminations. They did notwant their pictures taken around the Arènes. So they walked off together, and Iwandered with Wendy or by myself and took photographs that make the place seememptier than it is.

I like that the Arènes de Lutèce are nothing like thecoliseum in Bordeaux. They are part of the city’s life, a lived space. They arealso, like many stone monuments that survive into the present day, restored tothe point of being almost a recreation – but nothing lasts as long as we desire,not even the stone in which we encase our yearnings for an eternity.

On the plane back to DC I watched the Larsvon Trier film Melancholia. Had Iseen it anywhere else I might have been annoyed by its heavy-handed allegories.A blue planet called Melancholia is headed towards an earth inhabited by melancholiacsand those whom they suck into their orbits. You might think that you can escapethe sadness (at first it seems that the Weighty Symbolic Planet is going tomiss earth), but you cannot (Melancholia swerves back and crushes our world).The final scene features a feeble “cave” made not of stone but of severalsticks inside which three of the protagonists huddle. One of them is a childwho is told that he will be safe. He is incinerated like his mother and aunt.The End.

Blunt, perhaps, but maybe that is the frank lessonof stone. It is possible that the moon was created when a planet called Theiasmashed us long ago, causing the liquefied earth to reform. We don’t know. Wecan’t know. It is possible that the makers of the Cromlech de Lervaut thoughtthat what they built would always endure, that no one would forget what theirstone ring means and dismantle it to bring to a park. It is possible that thosewho cheered in Latin in the stone theaters of Bordeaux and Paris assumed thatRome would never fall, that the language of their shouts would be the languageof that space for all time. It may well be that those who affix love locks toParisian bridges believe their passion will not abate, that their inscribednames will signify their ardor endlessly. The builders of Saint-Émilion could not haveknown that the church would become a barrel maker’s workspace, or that theeffigies upon its stone tombs would lose their faces. The particular is alwaysrendered anonymous, like bones taken from graves to fashion whimsical arches inan Empire of the Dead. Those still in graves or those exhumed from them have nomessage to bear other than that time erodes memory, time unhooks substance. Thecontinents we cross on airplanes are plunging slowly into sea. In the cemeteryat Montparnasse someone’s grave had a baby in a shroud atop a mother in a shroud.Could anything speak loss – of memory, of love, of history, of everything thatmatters – more eloquently?

And yet someone else, nearby, hadcommissioned for their funereal sculpture an angel that is probably arriving totake a soul to heaven, but accidentally resembles an incubus embracing hishuman lover. I left a pebble here, too. I don’t think this statue will bearound in a millennium. It isn’t the Cromlech de Lervaut. Someone will clearthe cemetery for an apartment complex when no one remembers who is buried beneaththe stones. But there is something defiant in that incubus or angel love(carnal or spiritual, I can’t in the end tell which), a love that also speaksof some artist’s passionate collaboration with stone.

I do not believe that anything, lithic orotherwise, will still speak ten thousand years hence. I do havesome hope that a few messages might endure for centuries, and that sometimes,but only sometimes, stone forms an alliance with quick paced humans and thatalliance holds force for millennia. That, in the end, must suffice. To livelong enough is to disbelieve the power we once thought we possessed to keep thethings we love. This is sad knowledge, melancholic knowledge, but it does notend the world. No Blue Planet or second Theia is in the telescope. Yet. Weinhabit an ephemeral landscape.

Stone intrudes and intrudes not because it isso different from we who build families of whatever kind against the cataclysmsof the world, but because of its deep affinity, its desire for apermanence that no thing can hold, its strangely inhuman (I don’t know whatelse to call it) love.

[photographs mine]

Latest Issue of postmedieval Now Out: New Critical Modes

2011-11-25T16:28:00.006-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

The idea for ‘New Critical Modes’ was born in the good company of a bottle of sauvignon blanc in Kalamazoo. It burgeoned through e-mail exchanges that became blog posts. The project was from the start gregarious: of and for flocks (and, inevitably, the occasional shepherd or wolf). We structured this collaboration as a communal experiment, a textual laboratory for intensifying creative strains within contemporary academic writing, even as we have tried not to lose sight of the precariousness of both creativity and community, both of them so easily taken for granted as objects of knowledge. (In other words, we have never really believed in the well-worn modernist imperative to make things new, even as we have never really abandoned our sense that things are always -- always -- in the process of being made new.) We therefore encouraged the resuscitation of outdated forms, experiments in voice, manipulations of genre and ruminations upon the possibilities yielded by new media. We wanted this issue of postmedieval to examine and embody some of the novelties (flavors of the week, even) that have been emerging among contemporary medievalists. Just as importantly, we wanted this issue. It was – and is – an object of no small desire.
--Jeffrey J. Cohen and Cary Howie, "Editors' Introduction: Novelty"

Myra Seaman and I are thrilled to announce the release of Volume 2, Issue 3 of postmedieval: a special issue on New Critical Modes, co-edited by Jeffrey and Cary Howie. I'm particularly happy about this issue because of its experimental nature: the authors gathered together herein -- Brantley Bryant, Catherine Brown, Jeffrey, Cary, myself, Anna Klosowska, Karmen Mackendrick, Carl Prydum III, and Daniel Remein -- have endeavored to either try out different [not necessarily new but not necessarily conventional] forms of so-called "scholarly" writing [the abecedarium, the antiphon, the interview, the confessional essai] or to think about and propose new modes of reading [manuscript-thinking, vicarious causation, "evential" hermeneutics, literature as transport, break, and reprieve, criticism-as-flirting], or even to ruminate what "novelty" itself supposedly means. The issue also includes a book review essay by Sharon Kinoshita, "Re-Viewing the Eastern Mediterranean," that reviews books that challenge "the grand narratives of nationalist histories and Western Civilization alike," revealing "the unruly multiplicity of eastern Mediterranean texts, artifacts, and cultures in the very period usually taken to epitomize the east-west, Muslim-Christian clash of civilizations. For readers interested in cross-cultural and cross-confessional relations, they make clear that the kinds of political negotiations, cultural dynamics, and accommodationism long ascribed to Muslim Iberia and Norman Sicily find ready counterparts in the eastern Mediterranean, in ways that could not be more relevant to ‘contemporary events, issues, ideas, problems, objects, and texts’."

It should also be said that this issue has been an endeavor of friendship -- between Jeffrey and Cary, but also between the contributors, and between the contributors and the editors. Another way of putting this would be to say that this has been an experiment in a public form of amity, of wanting something together, which can only be an ambivalent desire at best. Or as Cary writes in his essay, with reference to that striking act in Chretien's "Knight of the Cart," when Lancelot does the unthinkable by stepping into a horse-cart, normally reserved for thieves and murderers, in order to have a "means of transport" for pursuing the kidnapped Guinevere,

It may be useful, on the one hand, to think about how Chrétien's text disorients our sense of everyday verbs, most crucially ‘monter,’ to climb, to mount, to board: an ordinary thing – think of the stairs you may have climbed today – but suddenly a world-changing one, a world-shattering one. If to become univocally visible, to become visible as a knight of the cart, is to have climbed up onto something, an ascent that is also, socially, a more striking descent, are there ways of transfiguring that movement so that it opens onto other figures? Can we ride this out together?

Three of the essays in "New Critical Modes" [by Brown, myself, and Remein] will be open-access for a limited time, and you can access those plus see the full Table of Contents here:

New Critical Modes, eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Cary Howie (postmedieval 2.3: 2011)

Here, you will find whales and projective verse, a rumination on the "time" of the academic, a conversation about medievalist blogging, flirting as a "critical mode" that looks "over the shoulder" of the writer, the four elements [water, air, fire, and earth] as methods of thinking, speculative vitalism, reading as an inhuman adventure, the medieval as a sign and excuse for "getting carried away," the idea of the new as "the same as the old without a first," and the "flex-point" of manuscript space-time. It may be that each and every essay contained in this issue is something like a failure in the sense of "omitting to perform something due or required," and maybe also because, in the most faithful attempt to try something out --literally, to essay -- we faltered a bit, and also given the length restraints of the short essay, we ran out of time. Or as Catherine writes in her essay,

Before a paper's ready, you have to do a lot of prep work. Afterward, you can ignore it or destroy it or file it away. But for now, the point is: Get the ideas where you can put your hands on them. Use the back of an envelope, a bar napkin, a blackboard. Leave yourself a voicemail, use an app, just get it out, get it down, in a form that can be touched, seen, heard – even smelled or tasted, if you can make that happen. Even if you lose the notes, your hands will remember the writing.

The twist here is: we put the ideas where you [the more general "you" that lies outside of the more intimate 2nd-person "you" Catherine invokes in her essay] -- our readers -- can put your hands on them, and perhaps "ride this out" with us. And please do.

A Medievalist Leads the Charge of the English Department at UC-Davis Rally

2011-11-25T11:27:00.000-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

As our readers know, Karl and Jeffrey have both recently posted on the student protests and police brutality at UC-Davis, HERE and HERE. I learned yesterday, happily, that the English department at UC-Davis made a collective statement about the brutality and the need for the Chancellor of the University, Linda P.B. Katehi, to step down, and they chose Seeta Chaganti, a medievalist well known to many of us [she will, in fact, have an essay appearing in postmedieval's special issue on Becoming-Media and recently participated in our experimental crowd review with us] to make that statement publicly at a rally on campus this past Monday [November 21st], and you can see the video of Seeta reading that statement here:

You can also read the statement HERE, and if you are at all interested in signing Nathan Brown's letter to Chancellor Katehi, asking for her resignation, go HERE.

Incubus-Demons, Magic, and the Space Between the Moon and the Earth: Jeffrey Cohen and Ben Woodard @Speculative Medievalisms

2011-11-24T10:53:00.008-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

Erratic angels, like the incubus-demon, the Fairy King and Merlin, are the vicars or intermediaries who make possible the world's vibrancy by enabling contact and relation. They allow the emergence of transformative textualities, even while they themselves are left behind at that luminous advent.
--Jeffrey Cohen, "Sublunary"

Perhaps then the sublunary, as the way-point between the lunar madness of speculation and the coruscating solar death of the real, stands as a universalism emphatically weird in which, and of which, a properly metaphysical system can be cast.
--Ben Woodard

Somewhat belatedly, and following not closely enough on the heels of sharing audiofiles of the talks and responses from Speculative Medievalisms 2: A Laboratory-Atelier, held at The Graduate Center, CUNY on September 16th [go HERE and HERE and HERE for digests and audiofiles of the talks and responses by Kellie Robertson + Drew Daniel, Julian Yates + Liza Blake, and Graham Harman + Patricia Clough & Nicola Masciandaro, respectively], I now share with you the audiofile of Jeffrey's talk, "Sublunary" [a talk Jeffrey also shared the text of HERE] and Ben Woodard's response, "Casting Speculation."

In Jeffrey's initial talk, which put Geoffrey of Monmouth's Merlin (from the 12th-century History of the Kings of Britain) and the Breton lay Sir Orfeo on a collision course with each other (much like subatomic particles in an accelerator-corridor), he charted the cartography of a middle space between the moon and the earth: "Aerial and moonlit, this middle realm is knowable only at second hand." Provocatively connecting Merlin's status as the progeny of two "oblique realms" that can never really touch (the lunar and the terrestrial) with Graham Harman's invocation of an "autistic moonbeam" in his essay on "vicarious causation," Jeffrey sketched the possibilities of communication and relation between realms (angelic-demonic and human) that otherwise could not touch each other. Jeffrey then also commented upon the Fairy-underworld that Sir Orfeo travels to [in order to rescue his kidnapped wife: Heurodis/Eurydice] as a realm of speculative adventure in which forms of both inviolable solitude and objectal relation are possible. But what was really interesting about Jeffrey's talk [for me] was how he also asked us to think about what the lunary [or sublunary] also obscures from sight: what figures and objects [angels and demons in the parlances of the medieval texts Jeffrey examined in his "laboratory"] recede from our view at the very moment they give birth to the vibrantly material possibilities of our world? What is the fate of the intermediary "vicars" who are the agents of Harman's [and the world's] causation? And therefore Jeffrey's conclusion that,

Though these figures open new worlds for and bestow unexpected futures to others within their texts, their shared fate is silent abandonment. Speculative awareness comes through the labor of those reduced to mere go-betweens, those who move from one place to another in order to change both. These mediators are literally sublunary angels, messengers who in their erratic flights refuse reduction into narrative or philosophical order. Perpetually conveyed, traveling without necessary destination, these disordered angels remind us that a retreat into tidy heaven leaves too many abandoned on the rubbish heaps of the earth.

In his response, Ben decided to take Jeffrey's "sublunary" and add some madness to it, in an attempt to bring some "lunacy" [i.e., "fanciful" imagination] to speculative realism's vicarious endeavours, where lunacy might operate as a sort of "third space" between the vital material and the speculative thought. As Ben himself put it,

The issue becomes that of how to parse the traction of thought on the real with thought's limitation, with the utility of speculation and the need of a formal distinction between the metaphysical and the non-metaphysical. Or, in other terms, how do we explain the ingenuity of Merlin, where his seemingly ungrounded thinking leads to feats of engineering, without overselling the power of thought or de-galvanizing the effect of materiality?

Ben usefully turned to the philosophy of Liebniz [and even the steampunkish Neal Stephenson] for some possible answers to that question, and if you want to know how that turned out, you can listen for yourself here:

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Sublunary" [with response from Ben Woodard]

If you prefer to download audiofiles and listen to them on a portable, mobile device, go HERE.

It's Already Tomorrow in Australia: Two Upcoming Talks

2011-11-21T19:48:00.003-05:00

Figure 1. Luna Park, Melbourne

by EILEEN JOY

Don't worry about the world coming to an end today; it's already tomorrow in Australia.
--Charles Schulz

This coming Sunday, just after Thanksgiving, I'll be heading to Australia [first to Melbourne, and then to Perth], and while I'm a little nervous about the long flight, I'm terribly excited over the opportunity to visit this beautiful continent which heretofore has only existed in my imagination of it, inspired by books like Bruce Chatwin's Songlines, movies like My Brilliant Career, and the stories of one of my best friends who grew up on Kangaroo Island and in Adelaide (in south Australia). It will also be nice to depart for a place where summer is just beginning at the very moment the American midwest slips into its winter chill.

I'll be attending and giving a talk in Perth at a 2-day conference (Dec. 4-5) on "International Medievalism and Popular Culture," sponsored by the Australian Research Council (as part of a funded multi-year project on medievalism and cultural memory, directed by Stephanie Trigg, John Ganim, Louise D'Arcens, and Andrew Lynch) and the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Western Australia, along with other medievalists who will be in attendance, such as Louise D'Arcens, Helen Dell, John Ganim, Stephen Knight, Clare Monagle, and Stephanie Trigg, among others. I'm very excited about this conference, and also about the time I will get to spend in Melbourne for about a week before this conference starts, thanks to the gracious hospitality of Stephanie Trigg, who has also asked me to give a talk at the University of Melbourne.

So, as I am packing things like valium, noise-canceling headphones, melatonin, and kimonos (kidding about the kimonos), let me wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving or whatever kind of holiday you might be celebrating if you have any part of this coming week off, and I'll share with you as well (below) the abstracts for my two upcoming talks. They both feature Lars von Trier, but in very different ways (hmmm . . . how did that happen?):

[1] University of Melbourne

Thursday, December 1^st

it would be hard to say exactly what I felt: vibrations in the archive

It would be hard to say exactly what I felt when I read these fragments and many others that were similar. No doubt, one of these impressions that are called “physical,” as if there could be any other kind. I admit that these “short stories,” suddenly emerging from two and a half centuries of silence, stirred more fibers within me than what is ordinarily called “literature,” without my being able to say even now if I was more moved by the beauty of that Classical style, draped in a few sentences around characters that were plainly wretched, or by the excesses, the blend of dark stubbornness and rascality, of these lives whose disarray and relentless energy one senses beneath the stone-smooth words.

—Foucault, ‘Lives of Infamous Men’[1]

The aim of this talk will be to share how, over the past two years, I have tried to take seriously Foucault’s question, repeated by the medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw in her essay, ‘Temporalities,’[2] of how the ‘vibrations’ of the dead Others felt in the archives might not ‘enter into the orders of reason at all,’ and how then, are we to analyze these ‘feelings, these experiences’? Is this a spiritual experience (Dinshaw herself hints that it is, in another essay, ‘Are We Having Fun Yet?’),[3] and therefore beyond rational analysis? Or could it be analyzed hermeneutically, and also phenomenologically?[4] It has been my hope for some time now that certain new trajectories of thought -- Claude Romano’s ‘evential’ hermeneutics as well as Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (especially his theory of ‘vicarious causation’) -- might point us in certain fruitful directions with respect to this question, and with respect as well to how we might begin to investigate new modes of reading (beyond, but also in combination with, the modes of reading most prevalent in the humanities at present: new historicist, psychoanalytic/symptomatic, and skeptical) that would pay better attention to the unruly ‘aliveness’ of texts. Related to all of this, and also raised most urgently in the oeuvre of Dinshaw, is the question of whether or not it is possible to ‘touch’ and be ‘touched’ by the figures and objects of the past -- for me, the question becomes: how can we reckon the ‘weird realism’ of textual figures and objects that refuse to cede completely to the grasp, or touch, of any hermeneutics we might apply to them, and yet, are still available for ‘relations’ (but what kind)? Through a reading of Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’ alongside Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves, I experiment with some of the ways we might get closer to this ‘weird realism.’

[1] Foucault, M. 2000. Lives of Infamous Men. In The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1974: Power, Vol. 3, ed. J.D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley et alia, 157–175. New York: The New Press.

[2] Dinshaw, Carolyn. 2007b. Temporalities. In Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. P. Strohm, 107–123. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

[3] Dinshaw, Carolyn. 2007a. Are We Having Fun Yet? A Response to Prendergast and Trigg. New Medieval Literautures 9: 231–241.

[4] It might also be an experience of embodied cognition related to the collision of cognitive objects (texts and readers), but I leave that route of investigation to those more interested than I am in cognitive literary studies.

[2] Australian Research Council Symposium: International Medievalism and Popular Culture

4-5 December 2011

University of Western Australia

An Improbable Manner of Being: Medieval Hagiography, Queer Studies, and Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves

In a planned fourth volume to his multi-volume History of Sexuality, never finished, Foucault planned to take up the ways in which early Christian confessional modes intensified certain classical models of self-regulation and also helped to produce sexualities as ‘truths’ about selves that could then be disciplined and governed (and even punished). At the same time, in some of the texts of the early Church dealing with monks and saints’ lives and their extreme forms of self-discipline, Foucault saw a way out of this oppressive regime of policed sexuality and a way in to what he called ‘a manner of being that is still improbable’—a manner of being, moreover, that would offer us ‘an historic occasion to re-open affective and relational virtualities’ that he believed could be emancipatory.

Foucault’s thinking on early Christian saints’ lives has ‘returned,’ in a sense, in some scholarship on the ‘exuberant erotics’ of ancient and medieval saints’ lives—lives, moreover, that portray what one scholar has called the pleasurably ‘violent seduction of sacrifice.’ In Virginia Burrus’s The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (2004) and Karmen Mackendrick’s Counterpleasures (1999), just to name two studies, the legends of desert hermits, militant martyrs, and self-mutilating mystics are held up as models of a sexualized and ‘queer’ asceticism and radically sublime sites of freedom, and even love.

There has also been some recent work in queer theory that valorizes certain forms of Christian and ‘saintly’ abjections, such as David Halperin’s recent proposal in his book What Do Gay Men Want? (2007) for an ‘upbeat and sentimental’ abjection that would help us to ‘capture and make sense of the antisocial, transgressive’ behavior of gay men without recourse to the language of pathology or the death drive, and which relies for some of its inspiration on medieval Christianity’s rhetoric of humiliation and martyrdom. Halperin puts forward a model of ‘queer solidarity’ (between gay men) built upon an embrace of one’s own social humiliation and abjection as an ‘inverted sainthood.’

The question is finally raised: what kind of ‘spiritual’ work are all of these studies doing (including Foucault’s) with regard to certain ‘medieval’ modes of asceticism, saintliness, the sacred, self-sacrifice, the abject, violence, and love? In my talk, I will explore these questions in relation to Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves, part of his ‘Gold-Heart’ trilogy (also including The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark) in which he sought to portray and even pay homage to the role of the female martyr ‘in its most extreme form.’ As is well-documented, the two primary sources for von Trier’s film were Sade’s novel Justine (1791) and Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. The fact that the film both puts its primary female character, the ‘holy fool’ Bess McNeill, through a series of terrifyingly self-willed sexual degradations (that ultimately kill her) while also sanctifying her (Bess is, quite literally, turned into a miracle-performing saint at the end of von Trier’s film, escaping the Hell her Scottish village’s Presbyterian elders consign her to at her death) has vexed and troubled critics, who remain distressed over the ways in which the stories’ themes of sadism, masochism, inhuman suffering, self-negation, violence, religiosity, and death are ineluctably enmeshed with what it supposedly means to love, to have ‘faith,’ and more importantly, to be ‘good.’ Ultimately, my talk will aim to highlight the troubling and vexed ways that medieval hagiography inhabits both contemporary queer studies’ interest in the abject and also Lars von Trier’s enduring interest in the supposed ‘sublimity’ of female sexuality, abjection, and sacrifice.

Students triumph over UC Davis Police: "Cops are leaving"

2011-11-19T10:19:00.006-05:00

by KARL STEEL
Read Jeffrey below on Stones and Time, and also let me join Jeffrey in asking you to read this letter by UC Davis Assistant Professor (let this be a call to tenured profs!) Nathan Brown, who is justly demanding that UC Davis chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi resign.

Watch the video posted with Brown's letter, but watch it to the end. You'll see UC Davis police pepper spray a line of students, and you'll see the faces of the police: watch how they make themselves impassive, doing as much as they can to pretend not to be horrified or pleased by what they do. They imagine themselves subjects of the Law, and--perhaps not being readers of Žižek--they imagine themselves untainted by the inevitable excess of the Law's obscene underside. Auto-reifiers, they want to imagine themselves things, as if they hadn't made a decision to make themselves things, as if things do nothing other than react.

But watch to the end and see the students retake the space. They move from chanting "Shame on you!" to a human-microphoned negotiation, to the chant "You can go!" The cops waver over whether to pepper spray the lot of them, but then back off.

The students win. The students win.

(edit: Nov 20 9:34am, a beautiful and chilling interview with one of the pepper-sprayed students)

=====

(this wasn't the post I had intended to write. Things got me carried away. Maybe tomorrow or Monday you'll hear what I have to say about Descartes)

Nathan Brown's Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

2011-11-19T10:08:00.001-05:00

by J J Cohen

Worth your time to read, think about, act if you are so moved.

Prehistory and Geohistory: Stone and Time

2011-11-17T10:39:00.001-05:00

by J J Cohen

I know: I never blog any more. Seems like the only social media I allow myself are a few quick tweets every day and the occasional FB post. The reason is simple enough. I'm in that terrible portion of a teaching leave where you realize that no matter how much you've accomplished it isn't enough, that the clock is ticking, and that abject book failure is staring you down. Luckily I react to such situations not via paralysis at what's ahead but by composing a calendar of obligations, breaking my work into accomplishable chunks, and plowing through. Sometimes this method even works.

My objective was to have the draft of the my book's first chapter finished before tomorrow, and I am fortunate to be right on schedule. My family departs for Bordeaux on Saturday, so that's given me quite good motivation. We are going to spend some time with the family that hosted my son as an exchange student last year at this time, as well as flee the ritual slaughter of the turkeys, and I don't want to bring writing obligations with me.

Below is the (very rough) beginning of the chapter. Let me know what you think.

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Time is inhumanly vast. Were the 13.7 billion years that have elapsed since the Big Bang expressed as a single earth year, with time commencing on January 1, then the Milky Way arrived on May 1, the solar system on September 9, and earth’s oldest rocks October 2. Bacterial fossils come on October 9, followed by cells with nuclei November 15. Dinosaurs appear on December 24 and depart four days later. Hominids evolve on December 30, while recognizably modern humans make their belated appearance late on New Year’s Eve. The last half hour of the last day of this cosmic year is a hectic one for homo sapiens: Neolithic civilization and the earliest cities erupt at 11:59:35 PM, the Roman Empire flourishes around 11:59:57, the Crusades unfold at 11:59:58, the European arrival in the Americas at 11:59:59. The present moment is the stroke of midnight. Happy new year, but enjoy the champagne quickly, since a human life endures for less than two tenths of a second within the cosmic scale. (n1)

As this boundless sweep compressed into a mundane year suggests, to render time comprehensible we must measure its abyssal depths in human terms, parceling eons into small segments like generations, the life-units of mere organisms. When the biblical Methuselah endures for an extraordinary 969 years, almost to the Flood against which his grandson builds an ark, he becomes a figure for impossible longevity, domesticating temporal extensiveness into a comfortable frame. Even through displacements into myth and metaphor, however, we have immense difficulty rendering the millennium a conceivable unit of measure (Methuselah dies just short of a thousand years). Even more difficult is to grasp the procession of epochs in what geologists call deep time, “the unimaginable magnitudes of the prehuman or prehistoric time scale.”(n2) The Cambrian era is remarkable for its proliferation of multicellular creatures, but its watery lifefields did not contain anything like human beings, so we have difficulty thinking of the period as distinguishable from the Permian, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. Painting a caveman into our portraits of dinosaurs is nearly irresistible, even though we know such creatures never coexisted. Although temporal spans are better measured through the lives of rocks than of animals, we yearn to insert a familiar observer to make their depths more intimate, to render time a persisting, living and knowable impingement rather than a distant and dissociated realm. We employ whatever conceptual tools we have at hand in this process of fashioning a convergence for human and inhuman scales of time. In this difficult undertaking we inevitably find ourselves challenged by temporal profundity to the invention of new narratives. Such provocation to story typically arrives through stone.

To touch stone is to place a hand upon a substance alien to human duration. Medieval writers trained in the study of the bible knew this fact with the same certainty as contemporary scientists and philosophers. Geologists tell us that stone was the earth’s first solid, the planet’s most venerable denizen. In the Hebrew bible dry earth appears on the third day of creation, while humans arrive on the sixth. After their expulsion from the circumscription of perfect Eden, these ambulatory latecomers will take some time to overspread their new terrain. They are compelled to begin their colonization anew after the purging Flood. Stone, however, endures indifferent to human catastrophes. Recent volcanic creations aside, stone’s origin stretches back millions to billions of years according to cosmological reckoning, and between four and seven millennia according to Genesis-based accounts.(n3) Much of the scholarship on deep time and geohistory takes as a founding assumption that the discovery of temporal profundity – of the vast prehuman spans that were to be measured in stone rather than flesh – marks a revolution, creating a formidable rupture in human relations to the past. On one side of this temporal chasm stand those whose relation to prehistory is comfortably mediated by myth; such peoples are assumed to be happy in their confident ignorance. On the other are the moderns whose awareness of temporal depth alienates them from history, troubles their relationship to the world they inhabit, and activates their imaginations. Thus Martin J. S. Rudwick, the foremost historian of the scientific mapping of deep time, narrates the discovery of geohistory by stressing that science and religion are complicated partners, yet provides as his illustration for life before deep time’s challenge to human self-assurance a moment “back in the seventeenth century” when Thomas Browne declares “quite casually” that “’Time we may comprehend, ‘tis but five days elder than ourselves.’” Rudwick contrasts Browne’s glib assertion of time’s brevity – so cheerful in its literalmindedeness -- to the prehistory that for us stretches almost infinitely backwards. Our imaginations are strained as we are called upon to envision remote epochs filled with dinosaurs, the migration of continents, and an oxygen-deprived world in which “comets or asteroids crashed catastrophically into our planet” (Bursting the Limits of Time 2). Contrary to such “rupture narratives” (as Kellie Robertson labels such enthusiastic and tidy periodizations), medieval conceptions of prehistory are not nearly so casual, and almost never unperturbed.(n4) Historical frames may have stretched back millennia rather than eons, but ancient eras were envisioned through rich and multiplex narratives filled with lively, often startling content. Time’s vastness was capable of taxing the medieval imagination in ways just as anxious and innovative. Every historical period works with the conceptual tools it inherits but is never bound to mere replication of that which is already known by those tools. Living before the scientific and social revolutions Rudwick details, medieval people did not populate their prehistory with pterosaurs and mammoths, but they knew well through these creatures’ bones the archaic lives of dragons and giants. Even the frameworks of “universalizing” and “short chronologies” like the Genesis story have their strata, fossils, provocations to dreaming the inhuman, and unexpected depths. (n5)

Geology and Genesis differ substantially in their time scales, but both convey the elemental primordiality of stone, as well as its inhuman perseverance. Something potentially combustive therefore unfolds at the moment of contact between mortal flesh and lithic materiality: the advent of a disorienting realization, no matter how inchoate or dimly perceived, that stone’s time is not ours, that the world is not for us. We grasp the antediluvian, figuratively or literally, and realize that we are fleeting, that this place supposed to be a home is too ancient and enduring for comfortable domestication. In a simple gem, for example, is condensed an inestimable temporal extension. For a medieval author, a ruby or emerald might compact a history that stretches to Paradise, the rivers of which wash primal jewels from its gardens.(n6) For most readers of this book, diamonds and amethysts compress an epochality that demands the imagination of prodigious monsters and migratory continents indifferent to apes yet to come. Both temporalities are vast enough to make human lives seem meager. Rock resists our accustomed anthropocentricity. As solitary years accrete into eras, the still earth becomes vibrant, inhabited by impressive materialities that are also forces, moving and creating. That which was static springs into life. Rock slides, seeps, grinds, infiltrates, engulfs, transforms. Rising as mountains, gliding as continents, stone accrues as aeonic strata, tumbles with glaciers, plunges deep under the sea in sheets and ascends later as peaks veined with marine souvenirs. Mineralizing what had been organic life, compressing traces of multiple times into heterogeneous aggregates or metamorphic novelties, rock also bends like plastic so that ephemeral humans may sculpt a lithic whorl or devise a temple of a thousand years’ duration.

Such durable building projects are possible only through human-lithic alliance. They intensify the architectures that geological forces fashion on their own. The baleful Green Chapel of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may or may not be the work of human hands. Perhaps a decrepit church or ruined shrine, its description also suggests a pre-Christian holy place, possibly Thor’s Cave, a limestone cavern in Staffordshire used in the late Neolithic for burials, or Lud’s Church, a mossy gorge that also possesses a long human history.(n7) In a way it does not matter if human builders or geology fabricated the haunting structure since humans and rocks have a habit of imitating each others' work, of creating homologous and shared spaces. All stonework is a collaboration between human hands and inhuman forces. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem obsessed with landscapes, animals, and other manifestations of the nonhuman. No wonder then that the Green Chapel is at once a dire mound or hillock where the grinding of a lethal axe echoes, a crag or cave where red blood trickles onto white snow, and the climactic locale where terror at the prospect of impending death yields to an invitation to celebration and the affirmation of humane connection. “Make merry in my house!” Bertilak declares once Gawain has completed his testing (2468), and the verdant half-giant reveals himself also to be an ordinary man.

This chapter explores the lithic as a kind of temporal portal, the trigger to an affectively charged encounter that opens up a geological conception of time, a history far more extensive than that for which mortal years can account. To grasp such an inhumanly vast history entails imagining unknown worlds, usually through a record written with stone. Few objects can cross such temporal distance. Rock as substance, as architecture, as force and as a geological archive invites us to the contemplation of durations exceeding human comprehensibility, immensities before which our certainties – and our interpretive tools -- founder. Whether thousands or millions of years, such spans beckon us to populate as best we can the distant past and far flung future, the temporalities in which stone abides, before and beyond transient organic creatures. Yet stories of stone are always more intimate and affective than such differences in endurance imply.

We too often assume that the only history that counts is textual. Anything human that endures from the millennia before writing likely survives because its substance is rock (an axe, a statue, a windbreak), or because it has been petrified (bone or footsteps). The Stone Age which these lithic traces define therefore often functions not so much a chronological period as a time without real history. Thus Europe had its long ago Paleolithic period, and yet contemporary peoples discovered by the descendants of these Europeans can be described as inhabiting a Stone Age. Both terms indicate through rocky reference a time without text, and thereby a time without narrative. John Lubbock coined the term “prehistory” in 1865 to describe this distant past, the archive of which is readable only through objects and architecture. Lubbock observed that “memorials of antiquity have been valued as monuments of ancient skill and perseverance,” but not as “pages of ancient history.” (n8) Yet the history he reads from these monuments is rather timeless: all primitive peoples everywhere end up versions of the same savage state. The problem with separating prehistory from history is that one becomes rather homogenous and wholly nonlinguistic, the other an enterprise built too narrowly upon the analysis of written documents. Within such a documentary methodology other kinds of archives have trouble being heard.(n9)

Recently historians have begun to argue that when we assume such temporal partitioning is natural we divide the world into noncommunicating segments and disallow a potentially transformative conversation between the two periods. Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail have demonstrated how considering deep time alongside smaller scale history leads to innovative analytical practices. Deep history opens historiography to the “realm of the imagination,” creating a “shift in sensibilities” through which “intellectual endeavors” are not “prematurely sorted into separate boxes.”(n10) Shryock and Smail insist that this shift in scale towards a single and more capacious temporal frame enables us “to reconceive the human condition as the hominin one – that is, one that includes all the species in the genus Homo that are ancestrally as well as collaterally related to Homo sapiens” (p.15). This temporality might be pushed even further, though, to the point at which the neatly arrayed stages of the Paleolithic yield to the eons of the geologic time scale, to include prehistories with and without humans, a lithic rather than anthropocentric orientation.

It could be objected that no medieval writer would speak of prehistory since, strictly speaking, a time before writing did not effectively exist. All history was recorded in Genesis, and it begins with a divine speech act: “And God said: Be light made. And light was made” (Genesis 1:3). Even though the Genesis narrative is routinely disparaged by contemporary scholars as offering a chronological scale that is “shallow” and “short,” medieval writers found its millennia extensive enough to roil with uncertain depths, a temporal immensity that required new “narrative and reconstructive story-telling.”(n11) Such stories arise in collaboration with objects “actively engaged” in time’s production. Shryock, Trautmann and Gamble argue that deep history requires a focus on the agency of objects like the famous biface (hand ax) discovered in Amiens in 1859 “in the same geological stratum as extinct animals” (“Imagining the Human” in Deep Time p. 24). With its resounding declaration that humans are a species of longer than biblical endurance, the stone tool assisted in bringing about the “Time Revolution of the 1860s” through which brief chronologies featuring Eden and the Flood opened into an unsettlingly deep past. Held by human hands or not, the ax is an actor:

If objects have no agency, then these men would not have been visiting the gravel pit, and we would not be scratching our heads about deep time and history. That simple biface was both the source of and target for human agency because it stood in a network of social relationships … Hominins [humans and their ancestors] have always been constituted by the agency of persons and things. Our history is a material history, not just a succession of thoughts or speech acts. If deep time is to figure in our histories, then we need narratives that can triangulate between agents and materials. (“Imagining the Human” in Deep Time p. 30).

This networked and distributed agency is just as evident – and just as lithic -- when the prehistory being imagined involves time spans measured in the quadruple digits rather than sextuple. Such objects may not be embedded tools, but they will still be familiar: fossils, tombs, Stonehenge.

No matter what the adopted scale, the eons of deep history or the supposed temporal shallows of Genesis, the stories to which such objects invite authors will feature the same strange protagonist. Viewed in its proper duration, rock acts: as catalyst, summons, cogency, force. Stone in action is as disconcertingly strange as it is uncomfortably familiar, an astonishingly lively materiality that invites us quite literally to gigantic temporal frames: to spaces populated by vast figures who seem monstrous but reveal the intimacy of their connectedness. The lithic causes us to ponder our brevity, our inability to send messages far into the future. It thereby incites creativity and spurs art. From such lithic inducement arrive our stories of stone, aesthetic efflorescences created by and with rock, our constant companion. This chapter argues that medieval people were just as capable of responding to stone's provocation to deep time, to dreaming the prehistoric and the inhuman. Whether as fossils, as ancient architectures, or as a primal element, the lithic elicited wonder, ingenuity, and intimations of lost realms.

To lay hand upon stone is to press against time in material form, a kinetic and disorienting experience. Medieval romance developed the perfect word for this fraught catalysis: aventure, literally an advent – an appearance, coming-into-being, visit -- but also an adventure, an irruption, a marvel, a disruptive arrival, a queering, an unexpected conveyance across unsettling horizons that might once have seemed as if they could never be traversed. As the writers of medieval romance knew well, aventure engenders narrative. Whereas contemporary stories of stone spur visions of an ancient earth in constant motion, seas that inundate continents, and beasts that were it not for the fossil record and the assurances of paleontologists would scarcely be believable, medieval people used the historical frame provided by the bible to envision an ancient earth in constant motion, inundating seas, and beasts preserved in stone that were it not for the assurances of theologians and authoritative texts would scarcely be believable. In both cases, stone is a trigger to story, a material of nonhuman duration, a vivacious substance, and an unfolding of the profundity of time.

Such triggers to lithic adventure often arrive in the form of fossils or architectures from time out of memory. (n12)

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(1)This “Cosmic Calendar” was famously calculated by Carl Sagan in his book The Dragons of Eden, 13-16.

(2) Martin J. S. Rudwick takes the phrase “deep time” from John McPhee’s Basin and Range, remarking upon its analogy to astronomical deep space (Scenes from Deep Time 255). He also employs the earth science term geohistory, “the immensely long and complex history of the earth, including the life on its surface (biohistory), as distinct from the extremely brief recent history that can be based on human records, or even the somewhat longer preliterate ‘prehistory’ of our species” (Bursting the Limits of Time 2).

(3) An origin date of 4004 BCE for the earth is the most famous calculation based on the Genesis narrative, but this was the number derived by James Ussher in the seventeenth century. Medieval reckonings varied widely. The fourteenth century Middle English poem Piers Plowman, for example, has creation take place “seuene thousand” years ago, while the Middle English Gospel of Nicodemus places the span at 5500 years. Bede calculated the time between Adam and Jesus as 3852 years; others calculate the figure to be much higher. See Stephen A. Barney, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman volume 5, p. 69. Nor was it necessarily the case that the seven days of creation were interpreted as human days, especially because three of these days preceded the creation of the sun. On the endurance and adaptability of the Genesis “short timescale,” see Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time 116-17. Though Genesis was the primary narrative through which the writers of the Middle Ages understood their earliest history, a coexisting tradition deriving from Hesiod and Boethius described a Golden or Former Age. Like Eden, it was both better than the current era and irredeemably lost.

(4) Kellie Robertson, “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto” 108. Robertson is speaking specifically of the chasm that is supposed to separate the Middle Ages from the early modern period, but her rich essay is generalizable beyond this specific focus. See also the work of Daniel Lord Smail, who traces how the Middle Ages and the Paleolithic are both put to work to maintain such unnecessary gaps.

(5) As Andrew Shryock and Daniel lord Smail point out, these short chronologies are also not true to the bible itself, which does not contain calendar dates. Later interpreters “retroactively imposed” such a frame to harness the narrative to differently organized contemporary chronicles, giving the Genesis story a “brittle precision” that snapped in the nineteenth century (“Introduction,” Deep History 6).

(6) G. Ronald Murphy traces this paradisal origin for gems back to Augustine’s commentary on Genesis. See Gemstone of Paradise 41-48.

(7) See Ralph Elliott, “Landscape and Geography” 116. Elliott writes that the cave was once called Thurse Cave, “the giant’s cave.” The poem does not locate its action precisely, however, suggesting that the location is a composite of several architectures and landscapes.

(8) Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages 1.

(9) See especially Andrew Shryock, Thomas R. Trautmann and Clive Gamble, “Imagining the Human in Deep Time,” in Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History, 21-52, esp. 29-30.

(10) “Introduction,” in Deep Time 15. Shryock and Smail go on to argue that this shift in scale – deep time with shallow time in a single field of analysis – enables us “to reconceive the human condition as the hominin one – that is, one that includes all the species in the genus Homo that are ancestrally as well as collaterally related to Homo sapiens” (15). I want to push this frame even further, though, to include time without human (or hominin) content, lithic aeons.

(11) I am quoting from Shryock and Smail on the mission of paleohistory (“Introduction” to Deep History, 14), but believe the words hold just as true for the temporal spans imagined by medieval authors.

(12) Fossil is an early modern Latin term for anything dug up from the ground; Martin J. S. Rudwick traces its narrowing of signification in “Fossil Objects,” the opening chapter of The Meaning of Fossils. There is no medieval word for fossil in the precise sense we use it today (the petrified remains of an organic creatiure). Fossils, gems, stones, and lithic architectures will often be treated as separate objects in my analysis but they are deeply interconnected as manigfestions of a singular, stony materiality.

3 Kids, 3 Suits of Armor, and a Request/Dare

2011-11-16T07:36:00.004-05:00

by KARL STEEL

On a lighter note, here's a photo of 3 boys in armor. Someone, please!, someone who's writing on enfances in the Chansons de geste or the ineradicable nobility of isolated noble children (Octavian, Perceval, and others wherever they are): use this picture. Ashgate and Phyllis Gaffney, Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Narrative (Feb 2011), you missed out! congrats on the book though.

I'm tempted to write a paper to order just to squeeze this photo in someplace.

"Violence"

2011-11-15T08:39:00.007-05:00

by KARL STEEL
Not exactly a medieval post, which means this isn't really my métier...

Horrified to wake up today to see that Bloomberg has ordered an overnight police raid on Occupy Wall Street. The 5,000 books in the OWS library: dumped. Destroyed [edit at 4:15pm Nov 15: actually, not destroyed. The City really screwed up in not making this information public as soon as possible edit again at 12:21 PM Nov 16, actually mostly destroyed]. Bloomberg gave (is giving?) a press conference, not so much to justify his decision (since, for the powerful, as we know from Marie's fables, the act itself is the justification) as to offer the public the proper narrative. Here, he is saying, is how we must understand. Here is what we must know. Hail to/from the Chief!

He is saying this (which I learned about via here):

At one o’clock this morning, the New York City Police Department and the owners of Zuccotti Park notified protestors in the park that they had to immediately remove tents, sleeping bags and other belongings, and must follow the park rules if they wished to continue to use it to protest. Many protestors peacefully complied and left. At Brookfield’s request, members of the NYPD and Sanitation Department assisted in removing any remaining tents and sleeping bags. This action was taken at this time of day to reduce the risk of confrontation in the park, and to minimize disruption to the surrounding neighborhood.

To reduce the risk of confrontation. Shades of "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it," no? I'm put in mind, too, of the appalling narrative offered by University of California Police Captain Margo Bennett, whose forces, acting with the at least implicit approval of UC Chancellor Birgeneau, assaulted students and professors. Captain Bennett (caput! yet another head!), had this to say for/to us: "I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest."

Right. On the question of confrontation and violence, here's some material from my book, edited a bit:

Slavoj Žižek's Violence: Six Sideways Reflections distinguishes between subjective, objective, and symbolic violence. Subjective violence, violence as it is typically understood, is committed by a “clearly identifiable agent” an individual murderer, an anthropophagous pig, a 70-year-old poet, and so forth whose act disturbs the supposedly peaceful relations of the status quo. Objective violence is the systemic and generally unacknowledged violence by which the status quo sustains itself, committed as a constitutive element of the “objective” status quo itself. Finally, symbolic violence is the violence of language, which distinguishes one subject from another (and thus renders a nonnarcissistic relation between subjects possible). My thinking with Žižek’s terms could, in fact, start with his own work. When he asserts that, because they possess language, “humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence,” he decides as confidently as any humanist that animals lack language, and, like any humanist, he sustains that difference by ranking human lives above animal lives: through the subjective violence of his own carnivorousness (exemplified by his notorious assertion that vegetarians are “degenerates . . . turn[ing] into monkeys”); through the objective violence of exercising the privilege of being human in a system that fundamentally values human life more than anything else; and finally through the symbolic violence by which he not only articulates a distinction between subject and world (a necessary activity for any thought capable of acknowledging others as others, for better or worse), but also posits an abyssal difference between animals and humans. All these violences work in concert to generate the human and the animal.

Later in the book, I consider Ratramnus of Corbie's Letter on the Cynocephali (treated by me here some years ago). Ratramnus proves that the Cynocephali, the monsters with human bodies and dogheads, are human, because they domesticate animals. Though they wear hides, the flayed skins of their dead animals, and though "suisque cogant imperiis subjacere" (they compel them to submit to their rule), Ratramnus explains “At vero cenocephali, cum domesticorum animalium dicuntur habere multitudinem, eis minime convenit bestialis feritas, quorum animalia domestica lenitate mansuefiunt” (but since the cynocephali are said to keep a multitude of domestic animals, then animal fierceness does not fit them, because they tame their domestic animals gently).

Gentle Compulsion! Here's what I said:

No matter how gently Ratramnus claims it is enforced, Ratramnus has not purged violence from the subjugation of animals: he has in fact preserved its aspects of mastery for his newly named humans, while attempting to displace the violence from the enactors onto the “fierce” victims. To recall Žižek’s distinction again, Ratramnus’s attention to the subjective violence of the domesticated animals masks the objective violence of cynocephalic—and, by extension, human—ascendancy. Typically, the mask is a symptom, in this case, of Ratramnus’s wish to elude his own knowledge of the impossibility of being human. The cynocephalic head, terrifying, carnivorous, yet in the place of reason, materializes the ineluctable and dehumanizing violence of the human condition. Like any human, the cynocephali must dominate animals; but to do so, and thus to claim reason for themselves and deny it to animals, requires violence; but to be violent means acting like a beast. Without “bestialis feritas” there is no claim to possess reason, and thus no claim to be human; but neither is there a human with it.

The cynocephali? They're just avoiding confrontation. If their animals try to keep their hides on, they're the ones being violent. If one of their beasts fights back, they're the ones being a ferox, ferocious, an animal.

Hail to the chief with a dog's ravening head!

(image via here)

Symposium on How to Make a Human

2011-11-14T05:32:00.001-05:00

by J J Cohen

Lowell Duckert composed this for the GW MEMSI blog. I'm cross posting it here to invite anyone in or near DC to come, and to annoy those who cannot attend with what they will miss.
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Please join us on Thursday December 1 and Friday December 2 for two events centered around critical animal studies.

On Thursday December 1 we will hold a symposium on Karl Steel's important new book How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Ohio State University Press, 2011). The book is available for $40 in hardcover via Amazon, and $10 for an e-version on CD. If you plan to attend, please try to read the book ahead of time; but reading the book is NOT required to come. The symposium features Julian Yates, Peggy McCracken and Tobias Menely, as well as Karl Steel. The event will take place from 4-6 PM (note change of time) in GW's Academic Center, 801 22nd St NW, Rome Hall 771. The symposium is free and open to all who wish to attend. It will be followed by an informal vegetarian dinner. The cost is $15 exclusive of beverages. If you would like to join us for dinner, you must register by Tuesday November 29.

Friday December 2 at noon is the date of our last seminar of the year, on Critical Animal Theory, with all the guests from the previous night's symposium speaking about the field. You do not need to attend the Thursday symposium to participate in the Friday seminar. Some short readings will be distributed ahead of time. Lunch will be served. If you would like to attend, you must reserve a spot and secure the readings by emailing Lowell Duckert (lduckert@gwu.edu) no later than Tuesday November 29. If you RSVP please come: we pay for every lunch reserved, and it is a shame when people hold a spot but do not attend the seminar.
Meet our presenters:
Karl Steel is Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he specializes in medieval literature, intellectual history and social practice, and critical animal theory. How to Make a Human joins his impressive list of publications on animals, including an article written for the new collection Shakesqueer (2011) and a thematic issue of the journal postmedieval (co-edited with Peggy McCracken) called "The Animal Turn" (2011).

Peggy McCracken is Professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Her areas of expertise include medieval French and Occitan literature, gender and sexuality, and women's studies. Her most recent book is The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature (2003). She is currently writing two books: one on Marie de France and the other on animality and embodiment.

Tobias Menely is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University, focusing on such diverse topics as eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, animal studies, climate and weather, time, and ethics and community. He recently published an article for the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies: "Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal, from Leviathan to Windsor-Forest" (2010). Right now he is finishing his book, The Community of Creatures: Sensibility and the Voice of the Animal.
Julian Yates is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. His areas of expertise are medieval and Renaissance British literature, literary theory, material culture studies, and ecocriticism. His latest book is Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (2003), and he has published extensively on all things post/human: for instance, "Counting Sheep: Dolly does Utopia (again) (2004) and "It's (for) you; or, the tele-t/r/opical post-human" (2010).

call for sessions: the 2nd biennial BABEL meeting

2011-11-13T14:01:00.004-05:00

by EILEEN JOY

Thus I propose an abandonment of disciplinary grounding but an abandonment that retains as structurally essential the question of the disciplinary form that can be given to knowledges. This is why the university should not exchange the rigid and outmoded disciplines for a simply amorphous interdisciplinary space in the humanities (as if we could still organize knowledge around the figure of “Man”). Rather, the loosening of disciplinary structures has to be made the opportunity for the installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question. . . . [which would] keep open the question of what it means to group knowledges in certain ways, and what it has meant that they have been so grouped in the past.

—Bill Readings, The University in Ruins

The time draws near -- December 15th, to be exact -- for session proposals for the 2nd biennial meeting of the BABEL Working Group, "cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university," to be held in Boston from 20-23 September 2012, and co-hosted by Northeastern University, Boston College, and M.I.T. If you are interested in submitting only an individual paper, don't worry -- shortly after we have assembled all of the finalized sessions, we will issue another call for individual papers, to be submitted to organized sessions or just as individual papers [the next deadline for submissions will likely be in mid- to late March].

We've gathered an exciting line-up of featured speakers -- Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, David Kaiser, Marget Long, Lindy Elkins-Tanton and Sans façon [the brilliant duo Charles Blanc and Tristan Surtees] -- who cover a broad spectrum of disciplines and fields, from medieval studies to physics to planetary geology to political philosophy to architecture to public art to photography, and who have been asked to consider the possibility of new friendships (intellectual and otherwise) across and within local knowledges. We are hoping for a raucous and felicitous convergence of bodies of knowledge and singular voices to help us consider: what happens both deep within, but also, beyond and after disciplines? What happens when we re-sound our disciplinary wells, while also, inevitably, bumping into each other and occasionally hooking up, like Democritus’s atoms, with our disciplinary Others? Holding on to our disciplinary objects and methods and ways of knowing, while also keeping them open to futurity and the surprise of the stranger, let’s cruise each other. Let’s swerve, without steering, through the movement-filled “void” that is the university, cyberspace, society, the world. And while we're at it, let's consider (and dream) together what the “uni-” in “university” and “universe” might mean; what the “after” in “after inter-disciplinarity” might portend; what misfit heterotopias might be possible in a new multiversity; what the “cruising” in “cruising in the ruins” might invite.

For more details about the meeting, and where to send session proposals, go here:

the 2nd meeting of the BABEL working group: cruising in the ruins

Please join us in Boston: we would be delighted.

UVA

2011-11-11T14:14:00.001-05:00

by J J Cohen

I've never felt so pressured to write.

There are days I dream of not finishing my book, of maybe taking up another project and forgetting this Stories of Stone craziness. I dismiss my current endeavor as something that is impossible, or something I'm bored of, or something I simply don't want to have albatrossing round my neck. I know this ambivalence arises because of anxiety. I feel like expectations for the book (mine, those of imagined future readers) are high, there are so many looming commitments to make good on, the year is going by so swiftly, insufficient progress has been made ... well it's just like dissertation days all over again.

So, I was happy to have been invited out of my routine by the Medieval Studies Program at UVA, from which I've just returned from presenting work in progress. Two events were scheduled yesterday: an intense lunchtime seminar on posthumanism with 18 graduate students, followed by a public lecture with some of the most serious, provocative, and engaging questioning the project has elicited to date. These presentations arrived at just the right time for me: I have been too close to my book, and they compelled me to gain some distance, to see the work anew in order to defend its founding principles. I'm grateful. And energized.

Also: we had excellent Chinese food afterwards together, I was able to reconnect with friends, and to make many more. My deep gratitude to Will Rhodes, Paul Broyles, Bruce Holsinger, Elizabeth Fowler, Deborah McGrady, John Parker, Claire Waters and all those who made the visit such a rich one.

I've visited many PhD programs over the past couple of years, and can usually read the vibe of a program immediately from the way graduate students treat each other. UVA is fortunate to possess a community where students and faculty take each other very seriously, possess a good sense of humor about their shared endeavors, and do not let an unproductive sense of competitiveness get in the way of humane collaboration. A good day, and a good trip.