In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the origi…[Read more]

Lightning Talk from Session 393: Keywords and Keyimages in Graphic Medicine

We are hosting a happy hour to celebrate our podcast “High Theory” in conjunction with the MLA conference.
We cannot buy you a drink, but we will charm you on Zoom with silly games like theory Pictionary.
Please join us on Saturday, January 9, any time between 7 and 8 pm EST.
RSVP to info@hightheory.net or visit http://www.hightheory.net to learn…[Read more]

Paradjanov poetics of the minor – From Deleuze to Georges Bataille

High Theory is a podcast that takes on difficult ideas from the academy with irreverence. We invite you to join us for a MLA happy hour on Saturday January 9, from 7-8pm. We would love to hear your podcast ideas! Email us at info@hightheory.net or RSVP for a Zoom link on our website hightheory.net

This presentation introduces ways to use MLA Commons and Humanities Commons to curate your online presence, increase the impact of your scholarship, and tell the story of your work. It introduces profiles, sites, groups, and the CORE repository, highlighting the ways members can use these networks for collaboration, discussion, and experimentation…[Read more]

In 1879, Scots-Canadian biologist George Romanes suggested a physiological defense for working outside one’s discipline. In his essay on “Recreation,” Romanes theorized that different activities use up nutrients and energy in different muscles and parts of the brain. According to Romanes, a historian practicing science and a scientist study…[Read more]

This essay draws on formalist cultural studies and material feminism to argue for a new approach in modernist studies, which I call formalist materialism, an approach that reads ecological forms alongside aesthetic forms. Such an approach may have distinct advantages. Formalist materialism illuminates a new direction for formalists by connecting…[Read more]

This is a copy of my presentation for Session #140: Bodily Persistence: Curating Better Medicine through Posthumanism. The presentation considers the posthumanism of pregnancy representation in the Ovia pregnancy app and the short story collection _With Animal_.

In Disability Theory (2008), Tobin Siebers theorizes the “ideology of ability,” or the default sociocultural desire for able-bodiedness, that governs our conceptions of bodily norms, health, and wellness. The ideology of ability “defines the baseline by which humanness is determined, setting the measure of body and mind that gives or denies human…[Read more]

In Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Snow Country, the protagonist Shimamura refers to an “old book” which gave him in-depth knowledge about the region known in Japan as the “Snow Country”. The name of the book is not disclosed by Kawabata, but it is now known that the “old book” is Hokuetsu Seppu (first published in 1837), written by Su…[Read more]

In Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Snow Country, the protagonist Shimamura refers to an “old book” which gave him in-depth knowledge about the region known in Japan as the “Snow Country”. The name of the book is not disclosed by Kawabata, but it is now known that the “old book” is Hokuetsu Seppu (first published in 1837), written by Su…[Read more]