Collective Nouns and Medievalist Collectivity: A Poem

by JONATHAN HSY

Briefly noted: If you haven't already, fill out MARY KATE's online survey about BABEL and "Creating Alternative Communities" (she's accepting responses until July 10). Check out KARL's recent posting as well!

I just got back from the amazing Gower-fest (i.e., Third International Congress of the John Gower Society) at the University of Rochester! Expect a blog posting about #JGS2014 very soon.

During the conference banquet, some of the conference participants were wondering if there's a collective noun for Gower scholars, and Brian Gastle joked that it should be called a "recension of Gowerians." On the last day of the conference I expanded Gastle's joke on twitter and Facebook and other people began submitting their own suggestions for other collective nouns for medievalists.

Culling from these discussions, I've composed this poem (taking my lead from KARL's earlier posting about medieval collective nouns):

Medievalist Collectives: A Collaborative Poem

A troop of Anglo-Saxonists
A roundtable of Arthurians
An orientation of cartographers
A compaignye of Chaucerians *
A gathering of codicologists
A circle of Dante scholars
A pageant of early drama scholars
An underappreciation of Early Middle English scholars
A garter of Gawain-Poets
A recension of Gowerians *
A rabble of grammarians
A tempest of Kempists *
A regiment of Hoccleveans *
A fair field of Langlandians
A reduction of Lydgateans *
A tournament of Malorians
A peregrination of Mandevilleans
A massacre of Martinists #gameofthrones
A Pandaemonium of Miltonists
A wonder of monster-theorists
A choir/quire of musicologists
A raze of Ockhamists
An orthography (ormography) of Ormulists *
A necklace of Pearl-Poets
An errant (errancy) of romance scholars *
A Swerve of Shakespeareans
A fellowship of Tolkienists
A torture of Websterians

* ALTERNATIVES: A parliament of Chaucerians; a pride (or romp) of Gowerians; a roaring of Kempists; a Series of Hoccleveans; a tedium of Lydgateans; a quadriga (or flamboyance) of Ormulists; a quest of romance scholars; a moot of Tolkienists. Collectively authored by H. Barbaccia, R. Barrett, @Exhuast_Fumes, A. Farber, C. Fitzgerald, B. Gastle, @GrammarRabble (note the GR tumblr feed and new blog!), J. Hsy, M.K. Hurley, A. Mittman, C. Perry, S. Rajendran, R. Rouse, C. Thomas, R. Utz, A. Walling, R. Wakeman, and M. Worley.


[EDITED July 6: adding Early Middle English scholars, Ormulists, romance scholars]

On Empathy and What We Do ... Together

by JONATHAN HSY

Hello ITM readers! I'm just on my way to the BABEL symposium in NYC (#cla2013) by way of Oceanic New York (#ony2013)—of course more about this on ITM after this weekend. But first, in this posting, I'd like to quickly comment on a few buzzworthy online items that might at first seem unrelated—but are actually intertwined by an important common thread.

On Contingency: Earlier this month, MARY KATE returned to ITM with this thoughtful blog posting entitled “On Contingency.” In a large part “giving props” to her medievalist community during her time teaching at Yale, Mary Kate offers one positive example of professional experience as an adjunct, and she illustrates the importance of working in an environment in which one is valued as a peer and well supported on all fronts (emotionally, intellectually, and materially). I found it so striking that soon after Mary Kate’s posting, this truly devastating “counterpoint” began to circulate regarding the experience of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a dedicated teacher and adjunct professor of French at Duquesne University for 25 years (see “Death of an adjunct” HERE). This story has been picked up and re-circulated by the NPR, Huffington Post, CNN, BuzzFeed (and I’m sure many other outlets) generating righteous outrage—and sincere discussions about the adjunctification of higher education continue to reverberate online and in the corridors. The inherent pathos in this story of the suffering of Margaret Mary Vojtko is not without a certain literary (almost hagiographical) tinge: in some respects she becomes a kind of modern-day “martyr” for the case against our profession’s increasing dependence upon (or even exploitation of) contingent faculty. This concern about the adjunctifation of higher education is something we've been thinking about quite a lot on ITM: Jeffrey and Eileen, most noticeably, have attended to issues relating to what Jeffrey has called the “precariat”; and see the comments on Mary Kate’s posting by Ben Tilghman and Myra Seaman on their own experiences as adjuncts and the need to find a “home” as a scholar, teacher, and fully valued peer. 

On a related note, read Rebecca Schuman’s excellent posting on “Horrible Job-Market Platitudes and How to Retire Them,” which provides some tips for mentors and job placement officers on avoiding well-intentioned but ultimately unproductive words of “comfort” for people who haven't landed tenure-track positions. Many of us who act as academic mentors are products of a culture that still codes non-TT status itself as “failure” and this posting goes one step toward changing some of these attitudes and sentiments.

Declasse Academics: You may have seen this posting making the rounds over the past week on "declasse" academics, a link I first saw posted by KARL on Facebook (see the link by @WernherzBear HERE). In this list, this blogger reveals a certain implicit assumption that all academics come from a privileged (and Northeastern US) background. I feel many items on this list don't quite apply to people of color and/or folks who grew up outside of the US, but what this posting suggests is that unstated social codes (i.e., the implicit norms of WASP culture) still underpin many aspects of (North American) academia. Everyday interactions can make even TT-faculty “insiders” feel like perpetual “outsiders,” people who don’t “belong.” There are many ways in which people can feel “othered” in the profession beyond class of course (gender, race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, disability), but the posting draws attention to something we can be so reluctant to discuss openly.

Serious Literature (No Women or Chinese): This is a much newer story (really only “broke” yesterday and last night). I’m closely following the ongoing reaction to a recent interview with David Gilmour—an author and apparent literature instructor who (now notoriously) reveals he doesn’t “love” literature by women or by “Chinese” (?!) and is instead most invested in teaching works by “serious, heterosexual guys”—and the apology/interview making up for the original interview didn’t help matters. I’m not linking to the original interview or follow-up here, but you can see that the posting has swiftly generated both online rage and mockery, with this spot-on parody HERE and response HERE, an awesome open letter by Anne Thérault HERE, and a devastating point-by-point takedown HERE. The comments on the Facebook event page for Serious Heterosexual Guys For Serious Literary Scholarship (created by Miriam No, on twitter @imposterism) are pure COMEDY GOLD (and track #SeriousReads and #GilmourReadMore on twitter RIGHT NOW for the ongoing University of Toronto community response).

On Empathy

So what ties together all of these items? In his very insightful response to the Gilmour story, early modern literature professor Holger Syme offers these remarks on the importance of empathy:

Good teaching requires empathy — an effort to understand things, ideas, and people totally unlike you. Some of those people are your students. Some of those things are of the past. Some of those ideas are the ideas of authors from different cultures than yours, and yes, shockingly, even of a different gender. Engaging with those people, things, and ideas is not just what research means, and why research is necessary, it’s what reading is. 

This statement beautifully showcases how empathy is not only the key to good teaching but also a feature of research and scholarship, including (as is the case in medieval studies) people who seek to understand a culture or worldview that is distant and “alien” to one's own. I would extend things to say that empathy is, of course, a key part of human interaction in general -- which includes one's treatment of students, mentees, and coworkers of all kinds (regardless of rank, social affiliations, or employment status).

I will end by stating why I believe that online communities like the ones cultivated here at ITM and the BABEL Working Group—and other forms of social media—are so very important. In a lot of cases, being a medievalist means being “the only medievalist in the village” (so to speak), and in these instances many turn to online venues a way to stay engaged with a broader community of people who share their scholarly and intellectual interests. Moreover, the field-specific isolation one might feel as a medievalist can certainly be compounded and complicated by so many other factors (most noticeably, contingent status). What I hope ITM and BABEL can continue to foster is this genuine sense of community and support for people who might physically be far apart, and I hope (collectively) we can create non-hierarchical forms of community that not only think beyond discrete academic disciplines but also break open the very idea of “the university” and the world that surrounds and sustains it.

These Are the Tiny Engines That Power the Sails of Our Adventure: Friendship as a Way of Life (Again, and Again)

by EILEEN JOY

It is now 2 days since returning from the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group in Boston last week, and I am still trying to recover. Following this blog post I am going to share with everyone the notes of the first-ever "think tank" of BABEL, held the Sunday after the conference, in which a group of us engaged in some strategic planning for the future of our conference, but also for BABEL as an organization that is getting larger and larger in terms of its activities and membership. WE NEED HELP. To that end, in the next day or two, I will share what we discussed at our day-long retreat and also invite everyone here to please pitch in ideas regarding the next meeting, to be held in Autumn 2014 at UC-Santa Barbara.

In the meantime, I would like to share with everyone here the edited and slightly expanded version of the presentation that I and my partner Anna Klosowska delivered in Boston as part of Brantley and Sakina Bryant's "Impure Collaborations" panel, which they described this way:

This panel explores collaborations that challenge the customary professional expectations of academic being-together. What kinds of shared work beckon beyond the sanitized templates for “objective” (“pure”) and “professional” academic collaboration? How can we best make visible the ways in which that affinity, friendship, eros, identity, political engagement, and other off-the-CV connections give us ways of working outside of often constrictive and normative academic hierarchies and working conditions?

Friendship, and also "work" motivated by personal intimacy and love, was the topic Anna and I chose, and we understand the mine-field in which we tread. It is hoped that it is understood that we do not take our project of friendship [which we believe is deeply political and radical] as some sort of monolith: "we are all friends now! isn't that groovy?" As if that "group" or whatever it is would not be striated by all sorts of differences, internal dissension, mixed motives, lopsided attractions, asymmetrical power dynamics, and the like. The project of friendship, in relation to the academy, is, for us, very much a Derridean and even Foucauldian working through of what is to-come, to-arrive. It is a project of radical hope, not a *thing* that already exists. It is not one specific group that insists on a sort of membership or set of rituals or personality types for being "in" or "out." It is not a collective that absorbs nor threatens to absorb otherness and difference; it is an activity of clearing ground so that anything might happen, so that specific persons can feel safe to be exactly who they are, even if what that is might embody the wish to be "left alone." It requires courage, because you have to be willing to allow yourself to be changed through your encounters with others. And without further ado, here are our remarks:

These Are the Tiny Engines that Power the Sails of Our Adventure: Friendship As a Way of Life

The contemporary intellectual likes to think of himself as the successor of aristocracy. While aristocracy derived every possible competency from blood, intellectuals derive from the brain the right to speak of everything to everyone.[1]

for Michael O’Rourke, the bearer of the virtual, invisible raspberries, cupped in his palms, that brought Anna and Eileen together

I. Mothers and Sons, Sisters and Brothers

If, in Plato’s Phaedrus, the “flourishing of the lover and his beloved through narcissistic mutual recognition, through the cultivation of sameness”[2] is a good thing, in practice we have found that such Platonic intimacies awaken in some bystanders a worry that the critical faculty will be missing, that we will go soft. This is not our worry, though -- we both think that there is entirely too little softness in the work of the mind, not too much. Let’s examine some examples of extreme sweetness in a couple of historical collaborations, a sort of “Hello Kitty” tour of collaboration.

            In Camera Lucida, Barthes meditates on a photograph of his mother, Henriette, whom he called “his inner Law” (“elle, si forte, était ma Loi intérieure”).[3] They lived together for most of his life. Her death, two years before his own, induced in him a condition he called “Abandonitis.” What seems singular about Barthes’s mother is her sweetness: she was never exacting or critical: “Nullement inquiétante” (68). She never made him the vaguest reproach: “une seule observation” (109). This made us think of another Henriette, a century before, who had the same delicate sensibilities and a similarly maternal role, although she did, without any doubt, pester her brother quite a bit more than Henriette Barthes did her son. 

            Ernest Renan, 19th-century French historian of Ancient Middle Eastern languages, is notorious for his theories of religion, nation and race. Reviled during his lifetime for his anti-clericalism (beginning with the scandal of his Life of Jesus, 1863, the biography of an “exceptional man”) and philo-semitism, later his work became the favorite reference of right-wing nationalists, anti-semites and white supremacists. Franz Fanon denounced his racism and Edward Said, his Orientalism. Less known is Renan’s relation to his sister Henriette, twelve years his senior, who preceded him in the study of German,[4] if not also inspired his interest in “Oriental” languages, and whose biography he published the year after her death as an homage to one who was only known to a small circle because of her “shyness, reserve, and her firm conviction that a woman must live privately” (Renan, Ma soeur Henriette, 1), a character condensed in a favorite saying she borrowed from Thomas A Kempis: in angello cum libello (‘in a nook with a book’; 26).[5] A propos of Henriette, the critics evoke Sainte-Beuve’s mot that the sisters of great men are often superior to them.[6] Renan says of himself: “I am the end point of a long and obscure lineage of farmers and sailors. I'm using up their reserves of thoughts.”[7] The family had a tenuous foothold in the middle class and, after their father’s death, Henriette was unsuccessful in running a girls’ school in their hometown, Tréguier. She became a tutor in Paris, then in Poland. She published travelogues and historical mysteries, and died from malaria during Renan’s archaeological expedition to Syria (1861).

            Renan speaks tenderly of his sister’s charms as a young woman, which procured her a rich suitor, rejected because his condition was separation from her family. He describes the misery of her life in Paris and Poland, a life she chose to pay off the debts left by their father, so that their mother may continue living in their home while the creditors, their neighbors, agreed to wait.[8] In 1850, having settled the debts, she rejoined her brother in Paris at his prompting (her health was compromised). He promised to involve her in all of his work: “I will give you as much material as you wish, Greek, German, Latin, Hebrew, philosophy, philology, theology if you must; I give you the ownership of all my work; only, come back.”[9] She contributed anonymously to the Journal des jeunes personnes (1833-68), run from 1847-57 by Sophie Ulliac-Trémadeure (1794-1862), a children’s book author, friend, and Breton compatriot of the Renans: “it was for her friend, old and infirm” that Henriette wrote (26-7). She researched, as well as copied and edited Ernest’s work, imparting to it a style different from his own, because less ironic: “I got used to writing counting in advance on her remarks . . . this thought procedure became, since she’s no more, the cruel feeling of an amputee, who constantly moves the limb he has lost. She became an organ of my intellectual life, and it’s truly a part of my being that went to the grave with her” (23). She disliked his irony and he “abandoned it little by little” (24). An anecdote from Renan’s biography of his sister provides some more insight into that:

At a pardon in Basse-Bretagne, in which we participated in a boat, our vessel was preceded by one filled with poor ladies who, wishing to make themselves beautiful for the festivities, embraced sartorial arrangements of little worth and in poor taste. Our companions made sport of them, and the poor ladies noticed. I saw her face dissolve in tears. To mock the good people who forgot their misfortunes for a moment to blossom [s'épanouir] and who, perhaps, ruined themselves out of deference for others -- that seemed barbaric to her (27-8).

She was given to brooding; she was jealous; Renan gave up his marriage plans for her; the very next morning, she run to his fiancée to set things right (33-4). During the mission to Syria, sponsored by the Emperor (1860), she served as the accountant and manager. Able horsewoman, she followed her younger brother to “the steepest peaks of Lebanon, in the deserts of Jordan” (37-8). She disliked Beirut and enjoyed living in tents. It is during that expedition, in August-September 1861, that she copied Renan’s Life of Jesus, which she greatly enjoyed. They both suffered from malaria, to which she succumbed in mid-September. As he said, a part of Renan followed her to the grave.

II. Friendship As a Way of Life

What would it mean to imagine one’s career, one’s writing, as a sort of devotion to another, to a beloved, whether mother, sister, lover, or friend? Or even to a set of friends, those already met and those still unmet, a kind of ceaseless love-as-talking? Or as Leo Bersani once put it, to “a life devoted to love as a lifelong devotion to philosophical discussion -- or, to put it not quite so dryly, to spiritually liquefying speech.”[10] Foucault once asked us to consider friendship as a “way of life,” and also queerness as an “historic occasion” that, through a special sort of ascesis that would not renounce pleasure as such, might open us to “improbable manners of being.”[11] We believe that one of the crises that faces us now, and not just in the university, is that we have not yet begun to take up or to really practice what we are going to call Foucault’s imperative. The import of Foucault’s thinking on this subject, bequeathed to us in an interview in 1981, seems to have gone missing among us.

            One very important aspect of what we would call the politics of friendship is that friendship itself can not just be the actual amicable and “sweet” relationships that already inhere between those of us who prefer some bodies over others, some personalities over others, but rather, is a sort of space, or field, that one cultivates with the hope that others will arrive and join you in that cultivating: the production of friendly spaces in which new friendships are always taking root even while others might be withering away, or breaking apart rather more violently, shattering in our hands: our friendships, of necessity, are ephemeral and all the lovelier for that, more precious and more dear to us even as we are losing them, even through our own neglect. Friendship can be a positionality, a leaning-toward, a form of expectation, of a hospitality that tends, not toward just one body in particular, but toward the possibility of all bodies being together, and yes, talking to each other, and sometimes -- this must be said -- just to certain others. These are the sweetest hours and delights, when we are together like this. This is somewhat after the work, but is also the ground of all the work we do after we meet.

            It has been mentioned more than once, and even in print, that the BABEL Working Group risks insularity because some of us appear to only be writing with and for each other, organizing conference sessions with the same persons over and over again, inviting the same speakers to multiple events, publishing each other’s papers, etc. The first time we heard that, Eileen bristled with anger and started formulating all sorts of arguments with which she could crush that criticism and blast it to pieces. "It isn’t true that it’s always the same people talking to the same people, and by god," says Eileen, "I’m going to smack the next person who says that to my face." Typical overreaction, especially for Eileen. Then she calmed down and realized: actually, that’s kind of true. Lesson number one: embrace your supposed insularity: it’s warm in there and the windows glow with the light of friendship. But remember, too, our walls are permeable, and permeability is the métier in which we hope and strive to work. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold reminds us, “life will not be confined within bounded forms but rather threads its way through the world along the myriad lines of its relations.”[12] Or, as Aranye Fradenburg has argued, “It is difficult to understand other minds; but if it is difficult to understand the meanings of their transmissions, it is also a species of arrogance to think we could stop them from changing us.”[13] We’re open to being changed; we’re willing to risk that, and that is also an important aspect of friendship. This will also require bravery.

    This recalls us as well to the ways in which some of us also write for mentors, whom we might adore, whether in direct relation to their presence or distance from us, and with whom we might also have complex and even dark relationships: mentors, in other words, who, a bit like bad mothers, scold us too much, or maybe don’t really understand us, who insist we be something we are not, who neglect us, and whether through death or forgetfulness, leave us behind altogether. Relationships can be antagonistic, and even melancholically lopsided, and still be loving.

     Where did we get this idea that there is work, and there is life, that there is “being serious” and there is having “having fun”? Either you want to do “real” scholarship or you’re just playing around. If we have to, we’ll embrace conviviality over this thing called “work” which is supposedly impersonal, and which supposedly outlasts us and points to what is outside of us: the not-us. If pushed, we’ll choose pleasure over work, friends over professionalization, silliness over seriousness, and Hello Kitty over Heidegger. But in all honesty, we never purchased the inside/outside stock options. We simply reject the notion altogether. And we might well ask: why can’t work and conviviality be conjoined: is one really at odds with the other? Con-viviality: con = with, viviality = the mode or mood or atmosphere of liveliness or aliveness, undertaking our work with liveliness and aliveness, enjoying being lively and alive with others while working together, working on liveliness and aliveness. Shouldn’t increasing the opportunities for “aliveness” be part of our work? Isn't seriousness, also, its own sort of pleasure? Is this not a question of well-being? Isn’t part of our job, as teachers, to enhance our students’ awareness of the complex aliveness of this world, and maybe even to take pleasure in that aliveness, even when it’s scary?

        Renan once wrote, “The man who has time to keep a private diary has never understood the immensity of the universe.”[14] Renan was in touch with the insistence of the world’s immensity pressing upon our attention, and he wanted to write about the languages and cultures of the distant past -- this is to say, there was a sort of exteriority to the objects of his scholarship, a desire to know something about the not-just-us, and a gorgeous instinct for voyaging -- but most of all, he wanted to know what his sister thought of all that, he wanted his sister to be his fellow-voyager. He needed her to always be beside him and he gave her “ownership” of all his work if she promised not to abandon him at the head of their migrating tents.

            When Henriette died, he wasn’t sure how to even think or write, since he always wrote with her future possible remarks in mind. This is both selfish and unselfish simultaneously, isn’t it? Both intensely needy and personal, but also a giving up of one’s identity in the act of submitting it to another, to be ‘written over’ by them, or in Barthes’ case, of always carrying the beloved other inside of you as a miniature ‘rule,’ like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s epipsychidion: literally, ‘a little soul,’ enclosed by the materiality of a lover’s body -- your little soul enclosed, wrapped around, by my body, by my materiality. This can only ever be partial, of course.

            We are only ever partial, and no one is really ever captured in anyone else’s body, anyone else’s person. But our affects are conductible, like electricity, along the lines of our relations: we can “charge” each other, while also hurtling in different directions. This is the metaphysics, the co-mattering, which is also the co-poiesis of friendship, and of love. As one of the “couples” on this panel, we’re also asking, then, for an intensification of soft couplings, of soft triplings and quadruplings and even amorously playful and also melancholic splittings, bluings and purplings, which could also be intensifications of remaining attuned to, and trying to love, what remains permanently unsettled in all of us.

       As quantum physics demonstrates, all bodies -- of thought, of persons, of moods and atmospheres, of things, etc. -- in the universe are simultaneously close to and distant from each other in a continual dance of entanglement. As we are already inextricable from one another,[15] what is the point of retreating to our studies to produce work that is supposedly rigorous in that it is uncontaminated by the personal, which is to say, by the foibles of our loves? A scholarship that follows those foibles, wherever they may lead, might not last, and sometimes might not even be good. But it will be honest. It will follow Auden’s hope that we might be those figures who shine lights in the dark wherever we exchange our messages, who “show an affirming flame,” even when beleaguered by “negation and despair.”

    What we’re trying to say here is: as it turns out, we simply can’t live, nor work, without our affections. We’re still writing even for those mentors who neglected us or left us behind, bereft of their company, for the friends who departed from us, and those still in view, for those just beside us, or far away, close but not known to us, or even imaginary. And what do you know? Our affections are always in and around our work, even necessary to it, even when partially hidden from view. These are the tiny engines that power the sails of our adventure.

---

[1] “L’intellectuel moderne n’a-t-il pas tendance à se penser comme l’héritier de l’aristocratie? Quand ce dernier tire de son sang toutes les compétences possibles, le premier tire de son cerveau le droit de parler de tout à tout le monde”: Claude Coste, Roland Barthes moraliste: amis, amour, compassion, connivence, conversation . . . (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1998), 66.

[2] Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 111.

[3] Roland Barthes, La chambre claire: Notes sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1980), 113.

[4] Henriette refers to German as “the language of Kant, Hegel, Goethe and Schiller” (Ernest Renan, Lettres intimes, 110, letter from Henriette to Ernest, October 30, 1842).

[5] That first edition, rare today, is Ernest Renan, Henriette Renan: souvenir pour ceux qui l’ont connue (Paris: J. Claye, September 1862), 100 copies not sold but distributed among friends. See also: Victor Giraud, Soeurs de grands hommes: Jacqueline Pascal, Lucile de Chateaubriand, Henriette Renan (Paris: G. Grès, 1926).

[6] Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l’Empire: cours professé à Liège en 1848-1849 (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1872), Vol. 1, 97. On the sisters of Pascal, Arnauld and d’Andilly and Port-Royal see 97-8, note 1. Cited in Renan, Ma soeur Henriette, vii.

[7] “Je suis l’aboutissant de longues files obscures de paysans et de marin,s Je jouis de leurs économies de pensée.” Text of the “speech delivered by M. Renan at a “dîner celtique.” given to him at Quimper, on August 18” 1885, in: “M. Renan in Brittany, The Academy 695 (August 29, 1885), 135, cited in Ernest Renan, Ma soeur Henriette, ed. William F. Giese (New York: Henry Holt and co., 1907), Giese’s preface (vi).

[8] She spent a decade in the family of Andrzej Zamojski in Klemensow, on the Bug river, some 60 miles from Warsaw; the youngest of her three charges was future princess Cecylja Lubomirska.

[9] Ernest Renan, Lettres intimes, 1843-45, précédées de Ma soeur Henriette (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1896), 362 (Ernest to Henriette, letter of November 5, 1845).

[10] Leo Bersani, “The Power of Evil and the Power of Love,” in Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies, 87.

[11] Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnson (New York: Semiotext(e): 1996), 310.

[12] Tim Ingold, “Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather,” in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 124–25 [115–25].

[13] L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 45 [41–64].

[14] Apropos of Henri-Frédéric Amiel's Journal intime, “160,000 manuscript pages,” to which Renan would prefer “five hundred years to complete [his] Semitic studies” (Ernest Renan, “Introduction,” in Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, ed. and intro. Irving Babbitt [Boston: D. C. Heath, 1902], xxx).

[15] See Cary Howie, “Inextricable,” in Occitan Poetry, eds. Anna Kłosowska and Valerie Wilhite, special issue of Glossator 4 (2011): 21–32.