In a talk he gave in 1995 at a conference at Georgetown University, “Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Post-Modern Contexts,” Paul Strohm asserted that “postmodernism is preoccupied with history, endlessly obsessed with history, and with the nature of the claims the past exerts upon us; it might almost be called a way of thinking…[Read more]

In a talk he gave in 1995 at a conference at Georgetown University, “Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Post-Modern Contexts,” Paul Strohm asserted that “postmodernism is preoccupied with history, endlessly obsessed with history, and with the nature of the claims the past exerts upon us; it might almost be called a way of thinking…[Read more]

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that, when certain medieval and contemporary cultural texts are placed alongside each other — such as a fourteenth-century penitential handbook and the reality television show “Survivor,” or early fifteenth-century Lancastrian statecraft (Henry IV) and the stagecraft of George W. Bush’s presidential…[Read more]

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that, when certain medieval and contemporary cultural texts are placed alongside each other — such as a fourteenth-century penitential handbook and the reality television show “Survivor,” or early fifteenth-century Lancastrian statecraft (Henry IV) and the stagecraft of George W. Bush’s presidential…[Read more]

Although widely beloved for its playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer’s poetry is also subtly shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom, scenes and events where everything could possibly go horribly wrong or where e…[Read more]

This essay offers a consideration of Levinas’s philosophy of hospitality in relation to the terroristic figure of Grendel in the Old English poem “Beowulf,” in order to raise some questions about the vexed connections between ethics, violence and sovereignty, as well as between ethics and politics, both in the early Middle Ages and in our own t…[Read more]

This essay argues that literary narratives can serve as ideal sites through which to explore the emergence of time’s dissonant conjunctions and surprising forks, arising as they do from minds that are both transhistorical and rooted in particular times and places, and because literary texts are also objects that, as Jonathan Gil Harris has a…[Read more]

“Liquid Beowulf” serves as the Introduction to “The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook” (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2006), and makes an argument for the Old English poem as a richly inter- and cross-temporal cultural response to historical traumas that still haunt our present moment and which also poses always important (and…[Read more]

This essay serves as the Preface to “Still Thriving: On the Importance of Aranye Fradenburg,” a collection of critical reflections on the career and paradigm-shifting scholarship of medievalist and psychoanalyst L.O. Aranye Fradenburg.

The essays, manifestos, rants, screeds, pleas, soliloquies, telegrams, broadsides, eulogies, songs, harangues, confessions, laments, and acts of poetic terrorism in these two volumes — which collectively form an academic “rave” — were culled, with some later additions, from roundtable sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies…[Read more]

The work of L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, especially her psychoanalytic criticism of Chaucer, and her formulations of discontinuist historical approaches to the Middle Ages, has been extremely influential within medieval studies for several decades. More recently she has been focusing on more broad defenses of the humanities, especially with regard to…[Read more]

The work of L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, especially her psychoanalytic criticism of Chaucer, and her formulations of discontinuist historical approaches to the Middle Ages, has been extremely influential within medieval studies for several decades. More recently she has been focusing on more broad defenses of the humanities, especially with regard to…[Read more]

Module Summary: Using the aftermath of 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq as a case study, this module asks why states engage in torture, giving particular consideration to why liberal states euphemise, conceal, and downplay this practice. We will examine the ramifications of 9/11 across multiple legal domains, domestically within the US and…[Read more]

¿Es posible construir otras imágenes del pensamiento en América Latina? Esta invitación nos llevó a proponer una excavación hacia el pasado y, almismo tiempo, una apertura hacia el porvenir. Antes que una “filosofía de laliberación”, invitamos a una liberación de la filosofía; antes que orígenes ocánones, artesanías que nunca tocan fondo o sujeta…[Read more]

Se analizan los textos de Rafael Gutiérrez-Girardot sobre F. Nietzsche en torno a latragedia y el pesimismo. Esta aproximación se elabora a partir de tres temas: estilo,nihilismo y estética. Se argumenta que la interpretación de Gutiérrez-Girardot sobreNietzsche impide que este sea visto solo como un crítico literario. Asimismo, estetrabajo brind…[Read more]

Actuality is a border between the world that is and the future worlds that could be. Science- fiction stories look across the border, into the frontiers of ‘the future’. William Gibson did his part in the 1980s to invent cyberpunk fiction as a slick, stylish view into a bleak dystopian future, but by the turn of the century, much of what he’d…[Read more]

The link between asimovian universe and Sherlock Holmes