Although there were many handwritten, often informal catalogues of Sir Robert Cotton’s manuscripts and books during his lifetime and in the years afterwards, the desire for an official printed catalogue which could be circulated in the public realm did not really bear fruit until the late 1600s. And when two versions finally did appear — the…[Read more]

Although there were many handwritten, often informal catalogues of Sir Robert Cotton’s manuscripts and books during his lifetime and in the years afterwards, the desire for an official printed catalogue which could be circulated in the public realm did not really bear fruit until the late 1600s. And when two versions finally did appear — the…[Read more]

This essay comprises four parts, each by one of the co-bloggers at In the Middle (http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com). Karl Steel argues that the benefits of academic blogging outweigh its potential humiliations, and that academic conferences should post their papers publicly and allow for comments so that conferences, in a sense, never end.…[Read more]

This essay reads Ivan Efremov’s “Andromeda Nebula” (1957), Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris” (1961), and Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s “Andymon” (1982) in order to explore the relationship between biological evolution and dialectical materialism, as it was negotiated through the trope of the alien in the context of the cultural politics of Eastern E…[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]

This essay is an attempt to think about melancholy as a shared creative endeavor, as a trans-corporeal blue (and blues) ecology that would bind humans, nonhumans, and stormy weather together in what Tim Ingold has called a meshwork. In this enmeshment of the “strange strangers” of Timothy Morton’s dark ecology, “[t]he only way out is down” a…[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]

My poetic Preface to Kathleen Biddick’s book, “Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties” (punctum books, 2016), which is indebted to and adapted from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” which sketches out the exploratory soundings of a sea-wreck of forgotten histories that bears uncanny resonances with Kathleen Biddick’s own acediou…[Read more]

This essay argues for the consideration of energy and an energy-based humanities model in the study of water in the Middle Ages. It also proposes that ‘energy’, when discussed in the context of the Middle Ages, is in fact a study of ‘energies’, derived from technology, material culture, and intellectual culture in equal measure. It propose…[Read more]

The introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory, edited by Eileen Joy and Christine Neufeld, on “Premodern to Modern Humanisms: The BABEL Project.” This essay sketches out a blueprint for pursuing new “critical humanisms” in a post/human age.

This special issue of the “Journal of Narrative Theory” represents one of the BABEL Working Group’s first forays into a collaborative and “baggy” humanistic scholarship between medieval studies, more contemporary humanistic studies, and the sciences, with the objective of interrogating together the open terms, “human,” “humanity,” “humanism,”…[Read more]

This special issue of the “Journal of Narrative Theory” represents one of the BABEL Working Group’s first forays into a collaborative and “baggy” humanistic scholarship between medieval studies, more contemporary humanistic studies, and the sciences, with the objective of interrogating together the open terms, “human,” “humanity,” “humanism,”…[Read more]

This essay considers Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of hospitality in relation to the “isolated and heroic being that the state produces by its virile virtues,” through an analysis of female Chechen suicide terrorists in contemporary Russia and the figure of Grendel in the Old English poem “Beowulf,” in order to raise some questions about the relat…[Read more]

This essay considers Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of hospitality in relation to the “isolated and heroic being that the state produces by its virile virtues,” through an analysis of female Chechen suicide terrorists in contemporary Russia and the figure of Grendel in the Old English poem “Beowulf,” in order to raise some questions about the relat…[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]

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]