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]

One of a number of leaves in the manuscript to have been badly damaged in the sixteenth century, folio 89 of the Glastonbury Miscellany reminds its modern readers of the fragmentary nature of the medieval textual record. Work began on this paper manuscript in the middle of the fifteenth century at Glastonbury Abbey. Transported to London in the…[Read more]

In this article we argue that the comics grid, the array of panels, can be understood as a specific technology of ‘revealing’ through ‘enframing’ and as such is the key element in comics technology. We propose Martin Heidegger’s conceptual framework (Gestell: literally, ‘the framework’), primarily discussed in his 1954 essay ‘The Question Concer…[Read more]

“Nonsense rides piggyback on sensible things”, declares professional sceptic and questioned-document analyst Joe Nickell concerning graphology. This chapter examines graphology’s enduring allure and reach, despite its controversies, and considers its relationship with other types of handwriting analysis. It first asks: is it possible to metap…[Read more]