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]

Proceedings from the two Speculative Medievalisms symposia, held at King’s College London (Jan. 2011) and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (Sep. 2011), and organized by The Petropunk Collective (Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O’Rourke). These interdisciplinary events were dedicated to dialogue and cro…[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 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]

This short essay, co-authored with L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, in the edited 2-volume collection BURN AFTER READING, eds. Eileen A. Joy, Myra Seaman, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Oliphaunt Books, 2014), ruminates the importance of the humanities as an important space for the artfulness of living, for enriched environments, and real-time experimental…[Read more]

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]

What can be said about the “style” of academic discourse at the present time, especially in relation to historical method, theory, and reading literary and historical texts? Is style merely supplemental to scholarly substance? As scholars, are we “subjects” of style? And what is the relationship between style and theory? Is style an object,…[Read more]

This Prelude to L.O. Aranye Fradenburg’s book STAYING ALIVE makes the case for Fradenburg’s career as comprising a critically important dossier relative to the relationship(s) between desire, enjoyment, groupification, signification, and disciplinarity, especially with regard to techniques of living, the care of the self (and others), and the…[Read more]

Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts fiercely defends the liberal arts in and from an age of neoliberal capital and techno-corporatization run amok, arguing that the public university’s purpose is not vocational training, but rather the cultivation of “artfulness,” including the art of making knowledge. Humanist pedagogy and resea…[Read more]

In this free-wheeling back-and-forth conversation (or, rhizomatic duologue), originally presented at Trinity College Dublin in September 2014 as part of the School of Education’s “Pedagoics of Unlearning” conference, and now published as a chapter in THE PEDAGOGICS OF UNLEARNING, eds. Eamonn Dunne and Aidan Seery (punctum, 2016), L.O. Aranye…[Read more]

An overview of the “state of the field” of critical posthumanist studies that also argues for the important intervention of premodern studies into contemporary critical posthumanism studies, and which serves as the Introduction (with chapter summaries) to “Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism,” eds. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (Ohio…[Read more]

Recent forms of realism in continental philosophy that are habitually subsumed under the category of “speculative realism,” a denomination referring to rather heterogeneous strands of philosophy, bringing together object-oriented ontology (OOO), non-standard philosophy (or non-philosophy), the speculative realist ideas of Quentin Meillassoux and…[Read more]

This mini-manifesto takes a firm and unwavering stand against any and all metrics that might be devised to measure scholarly productivity, “outcomes,” and the value of scholarship in the humanities. Regarding the notion of a “humane” or “humanistic” metrics for scholarship produced in the Humanities, we don’t need more “humane indicators of excell…[Read more]

This pamphlet was published in a series of 7 pamphlets as part of the Radical Open Access II conference, which took place June 26-27 at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, UK. More information about this conference and about the contributors to this pamphlet can be found at: http://radicaloa.co.uk/conferences/ ROA2. This…[Read more]