This essay explores the gap between the abstract ideal of fairness and the bodily materiality of retribution. My aim is to suggest how some current cognitive science affords a helpful way of talking about the breaks between abstractions, or thoughts of fairness, and the judgments and punishments produced by actual legal systems. It is remarkably…[Read more]

The pastoral genre provides cognitive literary historians a clear example of how genre cooperates with and enacts the most basic cognitive tasks of the imagination, namely the ability to toggle between concrete sense data and abstractions. This essay discusses the predictive processing hypothesis and suggest that it offers a usefully revisionary…[Read more]

In her introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Lisa Zunshine, scholar in the field and its best historian, describes cognitive literary critics as working “not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms in literary and cultural studies” (2015). Scholars from m…[Read more]

A Companion to World Literature. John Wiley and Sons, 2020. Available in Wiley Online Library, https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118635193

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a c…[Read more]

This essay analyzes contemporary politics of truth across overlapping contexts: the predicament of whistleblowers, the proliferation of digital disinformation, the extractive imperatives of data economies, and the impossibility of exposing the truth when exposé becomes itself a game. The essay reads the recent cultural and political interest in…[Read more]

Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh (2011) catalogs the activities of a humane pest expert as she discovers, on an estate under construction outside Cape Town, how human and insect actors undermine the spatial expectations of post-apartheid South Africa. Rose-Innes advances a vision of interspecies connection by recasting controversial themes…[Read more]

a bibliography-in-progress for cognitive literary, film, theater, and media studies

The Oulipo has claimed that foreign member, Italo Calvino, was a key proponent of the clinamen, a purposeful deviation from the strict constraints in which the group specializes. However, upon closer inspection, Calvino’s Oulipian production during his Paris period does not seem to advance a formalized definition of this tool of constrained w…[Read more]

Would you like to get better at mindreading (i.e., at inferring people’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, based on their behavior)? As it turns out, all you would have to do is lower your relative social status. Studies have shown that people in weaker social positions engage in more active and perceptive mindreading than do people in stronger s…[Read more]

From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontolog…[Read more]

A reading of Shakespeare and Deleuze on the subject of Anthropocene air. Keywords: endurance, climate change, fossil capitalism, carbon ghosts, Hamlet.

From 1756 until his death in the early 1790s, Primus Fowle, an enslaved African American, performed typographical and press work involved the in the publication of The New-Hampshire Gazette and other materials printed at the press owned by Daniel Fowle. With the archive of print Primus Fowle created as its object of study, this essay historicizes…[Read more]

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactua…[Read more]

Online at: https://screen-queens.com/2020/04/14/listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed t…[Read more]

Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

The book publishing industry is an important social, cultural, and economic institution whose records deserve to be preserved for the public good. Books.Files was an exploratory project funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at assessing the archival value of digital assets in the contemporary publishing industry for stakeholders…[Read more]