Critical Anthology Research Articles

Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives eds. by Alberto Ribas-Casasayas, and Amanda L. Petersen

Reviewed by: Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives eds. by Alberto Ribas-Casasayas, and Amanda L. Petersen Sandra García Sanborn Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives. Ribas-Casasayas, Alberto, and Amanda L. Petersen, eds. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2016. Pp. 260. ISBN 978-1-61148-736-7. A consistently illuminating collection of essays, Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives is the first critical anthology about the figure of the ghost and the aesthetic of haunting to focus on narrative, film, and photography produced in Latin America, Spain, and the Latino Diaspora. The twelve chapters that make up this volume take on the challenge of exposing the disruptive power of spectral theory, anchored in the Derridean concepts of the specter and hauntology, while reconsidering traditional readings, providing new concepts and associations, and reassessing cultural production. The collection begins with an introduction by Ribas-Casasayas and Petersen that establishes a lucid and persuasive theoretical foundation, which moves away from solely Euro-American conceptualizations. Organizing their discussion around principles elaborated by prominent specialists in Hispanic cultural studies, such as Nelly Richard's aesthetic of the fragment and rupture, Cristina Moreiras's theory of interstitial residues, and Jo Labanyi's aesthetic of haunting, they effectively elucidate how these approaches offer a platform to assess spectrality in the specificity of the Transhispanic context by challenging the limits of politics and symbolic representation. Following the general introduction, the volume is divided into four sections. The first section, "Ghostly Encounters: Haunted Histories," examines the various ways in which the traumatic past of post-dictatorial societies haunts their present. In chapter 1, Megan Corbin studies the powerful presence of the brutal past in contemporary Argentina through objects—several shown in photographs—left behind by prisoners in illegal detention centers. With the same sensitivity and critical insight, she also analyzes the Chilean documentary film Nostalgia de la luz, showing how the haunting presence of material objects interpellates any attempt at forgetting. In a similar vein, in chapter 2, Isabel Cuñado describes how Javier Marías's novels unveil the politics of memory in relation to justice and ethics through the presence of the ghost, the double, and the particular objects haunting these narratives. In chapter 3, Susana S. Martínez examines the impact of trans-generational trauma in two novels about the Guatemalan civil war, which put emphasis on absence as a source of a ghostly presence. Martínez complements her readings with a poignant analysis of Jonathan Moller's black and white photographic collection about mass-graves exhumations. The inclusion of several of these images underscores the terror of the past, the overwhelming need for justice, and the enduring bond between the living and the dead. The second section, "The Persistence of Violence: Trauma as Haunting," addresses the concept of "retraumatization," as past trauma affecting a second generation in relation to the theme of los desaparecidos. With keen perceptivity, in chapter 4, Karen Wooley Martin assesses [End Page 309] the figure of the phantom as a metaphor for the missing and the psychological wounds of those searching and grieving in two novels: Perla and Purgatorio. In chapter 5, Charles St-Georges discusses the film Aparecidos, stressing how its cinematography borrows from the aesthetic of horror films to develop an allegory of the Dirty War. In chapter 6, Sarah Thomas exposes a theme often neglected, as is the systematic abuse of children of Republican families during the Franco dictatorship, by studying the trope of the child, the orphan, and the ghost in two films: El espinazo del diablo and El orfanato. Disclosing a shift in aesthetic practices, in chapter 7, Juliana Martínez explains how two novels by Evelio Rosero and two recent films avoid violence as a mere spectacle and, instead, resort to strategies that emphasize a topography of ambiguity and desolation, a "spectral spaciality," that brings to the forefront the predicament of the disappeared in Colombia. The third section, "Still Images: The Living and the Dead," is composed of two chapters and discusses the interaction between photography, death, and narrative. In chapter 8, N. Michelle Murray deconstructs Ramito de Hierbabuena calling attention to the trickery a spectral representation grounded in the paradoxical field...

A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson

The ever-expanding field of Harlem Renaissance studies has offered challenges as well as opportunities for anthologists of literary and critical works. In 1997, for example, editors Victor A. Kramer and Robert A. Russ set out to “re-examine” the movement in Harlem Renaissance Re-Examined, while in 2001, Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey “revised” its canon in Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson’s new critical anthology, A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, attempts to do both. Its contributors not only expand the parameters of the movement by revealing significant interactions between concepts such as modernity, modernism, internationalism, liminality, performativity, and queerness (to name a few), but they also put formerly marginalized “New Negro” figures in a well-deserved spotlight. Like The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (2007), edited by George Hutchinson, A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance includes sections on the movement’s foundations (part 1), authors and works (part 2), and broader outcomes and implications (part 5). To this basic structure, Sherrard-Johnson adds an ambitious twist with two other sections: part 3 on “Salon Culture: The Visual, Performative, and Expressive Arts” and part 4 on “Interracialism.”

Fritz Neumeyer

In June 2017, Ana Tostões interviewed Fritz Neumeyer, reference expert on Mies van der Rohe, in order to discuss the importance of Mies’s legacy. Neumeyer conducted a deep research on Mies's writings and intellectual activity that has resulted in the worldwide renowned publication Mies van der Rohe. Das kunstlose Wort. Gedanken zur Baukunst [The Artless Word: Mies Van der Rohe on the Building Art] (Berlin, 1986; Cambridge/London, 1991; Madrid/Paris/Milan, 1996; Seoul 2007 — see p. 93) offering a precursor critical anthology of Mies theoretical corpus.

Survey Review of a Year’s Essays on Stevens: “Ideas of Remoteness”

Survey Review of a Year’s Essays on Stevens“Ideas of Remoteness” Thomas Gould Survey Review of a Year’s Essays on Stevens “Ideas of Remoteness” Dean Rader’s essay on Stevens’s various hauntings of contemporary American poetry features some new remarks by the poet Terrance Hayes, which will furnish me with the main theme of this survey of recent Stevens criticism: “I don’t believe he thought black folk could write poems, comprehend poems, care for poems. But that’s not what both scares and influences me most about Stevens. It’s the remoteness his brand of imagination engenders. He champions the kind of imagination that makes all else secondary.” Throughout this review, I want to consider such an idea of “remoteness.” The unfavorable perception of Stevens as a “remote” poet is not new, nor are the efforts of Stevensians to dispel or disprove it, to collapse the distance it implies. A reputation for remoteness is self-fulfilling, likely to ensure that a poet remains distant from readers. In this sense, collapsing remoteness, surely, has to be one of the primary tasks of contemporary literary criticism. It is such a task that Helen Vendler seems to be motivated by in the opening pages of Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, when she writes of her attempt “to present the Stevens I know to the public eye, which still too often finds Stevens remote and distant from the common life” (3). Presumably, Vendler is referring to the usual—whether misconceived or not—complaints that Stevens presents a poetics of privilege, that he isolates himself in a showily obscure and rarefied vocabulary, that his poetic extemporizations are willfully, inaccessibly cerebral and abstract. [End Page 299] But to be remote is, nevertheless, to be in relation. Remoteness is, as it were, a mode of intentionality and, if we look to the poems themselves, we often find attempts to measure the distance from something, a measuring that always implies an activity of reconciliation. In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stevens asks, “Not to be part of the sun? To stand // Remote and call it merciful?” (CPP 138); here, in a way that clearly resonates with Hayes’s ambivalence, the intentionality of Stevens’s remoteness is more concerned with an aesthetic remoteness from things or “things as they are” than it is with a social or political remoteness from people, or from a “common life.” My aim is to show how this past year’s essays tackle this problem by demonstrating how remoteness and its various spatializations are an immanent concern of the poems themselves, and how remoteness might thereby be critically recuperated. I want to set Brian Brodhead Glaser’s essay “Wallace Stevens and Racial Melancholy” in the context of Hayes’s comments on the implied interlinkage between Stevens’s private prejudices and his supposedly remote “brand of imagination.” Hayes is one of what Lisa Steinman calls Stevens’s “unanticipated readers” in her contribution to the critical anthology Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, published this year by Bloomsbury and reviewed in this journal’s Spring 2017 issue. Theorizing the legacy and influence of Stevens on African American poets, Steinman writes that “Stevens’ poems . . . self-consciously look forward to ‘unanticipated’ readers” (225). Glaser’s argument instead offers something like the exact temporal opposite of this idea, suggesting that Stevens’s poems (or at least “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery”) self-consciously look back, and look back to a loss they are incapable of fully comprehending and representing. Glaser’s argument has two central points. First, he borrows Anne Anlin Cheng’s notion of racial melancholy to contend that Stevens’s “coldness” was a means of affecting and reflexively incorporating “his inability to mourn a figure, the Africanist victim of violence, who was always already lost to him” (388). Melancholy names the affective process of situating the intentionality of an experience of remoteness. Eschewing a redemptive account (and, to be clear, he does not pull any punches), Glaser suggests that the poem is haunted by a pervasive and oblique awareness, rather than an absolute ignorance, of its own remoteness, the kind that Hayes would decades later ambivalently ascribe to Stevens...

Towards a Critical Anthology of Pre-Modern Bosom Serpent Folklore

We present a preview of our work for a critical anthology of medieval and pre-medieval fantastic folklore narratives about animals in the human body. These are generally referred to among English-speaking scholars as ‘bosom serpent’ legends. In particular, we provide here two of the most ancient texts from the section of the anthology on medieval Scandinavia. We also offer two little-known narratives, a medieval Latin saint’s life and one from the Byzantine Greek world.

Victorian Classical Burlesques: A Critical Anthology / The Golden Age of Pantomime: Slapstick, Spectacle and Subversion in Victorian England

A common refrain: ‘The pantomime is not what it was’. It is sometimes wearily uttered now when panto has become the preserve of gin-soaked telly stars of yesteryear and an unlikely flotsam of Austr...

Writing Peace out of Conflict: Nancy Cunard, Carole Satyamurti, Frank McGuinness

In recent years, and more especially since 9/11, the way in which wars are carried out, spoken of, justified and (re)presented has changed significantly. Language plays a crucial role in the construction and consolidation of the rhetoric of war as exemplified by the concept of a ‘just war’ and the phrase ‘War of Words’. Yet, the implications of language use in peace-making processes remain somehow largely underestimated or undervalued, when recognised. Faced with political and cultural intransigence, literature can create models for a co-operative culture enabling both writers and readers to contribute to the development of alternative peace discourses. Accordingly, this paper proposes a reading of pacifist works by Nancy Cunard, Carole Satyamurti and Frank McGuinness. Written out of conflict, and despite their different historical and cultural milieux , these texts demonstrate the power of the creative word to promote a new culture of peace based on intercultural dialogue and encounters . DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-30 Bibliography Cunard, Nancy. 2005. Poems of Nancy Cunard. From the Bodleian Library . Edited by John Lucas. Nottingham: Trent Editions. Cunard, Nancy ed. 1937. Authors take sides on the Spanish War. The Left Review. London. Bobbio, Norberto. 1984. Il problema della guerra e le vie della pace. Bologna: Il Mulino. Donaldson, Kayleigh. 2013. Hecuba: Dundee Rep , Theatre Review . http://www.femalearts.com/node/795 (accessed on 05/08/2015). Dowson, Jane ed. 1995. Women ’ s Poetry of the 1930s. A Critical Anthology . London: Routledge. Gordon, Lois G. 2007. Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist . NYC: Columbia University Press. Kent, Jonathan. 2004. Review: Euripides’ Hecuba , http://www.theaterpro.com/hecuba.htm (accessed on 05/08/2015). Jervolino, Domenico. 2004. ‘Cultura della pace e filosofia della liberazione’. Guerra e pace . A cura di Giuseppe Prestipino. Napoli: La Citta del Sole. 283-292. McGuinness, Frank. 2004. Euripides ’ Hecuba . London: Faber. Panikkar, Raimon. 2002. Pace e interculturalit a . A cura di M. Carrara Pavan. Milano: Jaca Book. Qwipp, Edward. 2013. Dangers and Insights: Auden’s Spain. The Spanish Civil War: Exhuming a Buried Past . Anindya Raychaudhuri ed. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 171- 187. Salis, Loredana. 2014. ‘The root of all evil’: Frank McGuinness’ Translations of Greek Drama. Studi irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies , 4: 145-160, http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS- 2239-3978-14674 . Satyamurti, Carole. 1991. ‘Striking Distance’, reprinted in Peter Forbes. 1999. Scanning the Century. The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry . London: Viking, 477-478. Walzer, Michael. 1977. Just and Unjust Wars . New York: Basic Books.

Ben Parsons and Bas Jongenelen, eds. and trans., Comic Drama in the Low Countries, c. 1450–1560: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2012. Pp. ix, 297; 5 black-and-white figures. $99. ISBN: 978-1-84384-291-0.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsBen Parsons and Bas Jongenelen, eds. and trans., Comic Drama in the Low Countries, c. 1450–1560: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2012. Pp. ix, 297; 5 black-and-white figures. $99. ISBN: 978-1-84384-291-0.Elsa StrietmanElsa StrietmanMurray Edwards College, University of Cambridge Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 91, Number 1January 2016 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/684472 Views: 47Total views on this site Copyright 2016 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell

.

Xiaojing Zhou, Cities of Others. Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American

For readers acquainted with the field of Asian American studies, Xiaojing Zhou’s name comes across as familiar, as she is the co-editor of one of the most pertinent critical anthologies published over the first decade of the 21st century—Form and Transformation in Asian American literature—engaging with Asian American writers’ positioning in respect to Euroamerican literary traditions. With this first book-length study on Asian American writings about Chinatown and about the city in general, ...

Book Review: Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970

Book Review: Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970

Architectural Magazines and the Concept of Design in Croatia 1945–1980

April 01 2015 Architectural Magazines and the Concept of Design in Croatia 1945–1980 Alen Žunić, Alen Žunić Alen Žunić earned a Masters degree in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb (summa cum laude), and is now a post-graduate student at Harvard University GSD with a major in theory and philosophy of design. He has published scholary papers on modern and contemporary architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Anthological Architectural Guide to Zagreb (co-author with Z. Karać, 2012) and (Con)Text of Architecture (2015). He has participated in several international conferences and attended architectural workshops (e.g., ETH, AA, etc.). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Fedja Vukić Fedja Vukić Fedja Vukić is associate professor of design theory and history at the Graduate School of Design, Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Vukić got his PhD at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and was a Fellow of The Wolfsonian Foundation Research Centre, Miami Beach, Florida in 1995. Fedja publishes reviews and scholar papers on visual communications and design in Croatian and international magazines. He has published and edited several books including, Modern Zagreb 1992, A Century of Croatian Design (1996), Zagreb-Modernity and the City (2003), Modernism in Practice (2008), and Design Theory and History, A Critical Anthology (2013). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Alen Žunić Alen Žunić earned a Masters degree in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb (summa cum laude), and is now a post-graduate student at Harvard University GSD with a major in theory and philosophy of design. He has published scholary papers on modern and contemporary architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Anthological Architectural Guide to Zagreb (co-author with Z. Karać, 2012) and (Con)Text of Architecture (2015). He has participated in several international conferences and attended architectural workshops (e.g., ETH, AA, etc.). Fedja Vukić Fedja Vukić is associate professor of design theory and history at the Graduate School of Design, Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Vukić got his PhD at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and was a Fellow of The Wolfsonian Foundation Research Centre, Miami Beach, Florida in 1995. Fedja publishes reviews and scholar papers on visual communications and design in Croatian and international magazines. He has published and edited several books including, Modern Zagreb 1992, A Century of Croatian Design (1996), Zagreb-Modernity and the City (2003), Modernism in Practice (2008), and Design Theory and History, A Critical Anthology (2013). Online ISSN: 1531-4790 Print ISSN: 0747-9360 © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2015 Design Issues (2015) 31 (2): 88–100. https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00324 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Alen Žunić, Fedja Vukić; Architectural Magazines and the Concept of Design in Croatia 1945–1980. Design Issues 2015; 31 (2): 88–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00324 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsDesign Issues Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review of Stories of Complicated Grief: A Critical Anthology

Book Review of <i>Stories of Complicated Grief: A Critical Anthology</i>

A Critical Introduction to 12 Years a Slave

In this critical anthology of essays, the authors examine Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave from a variety of analytic frameworks, including feminist theory, trauma studies, film theory, and deconstruction. The authors explore critical questions concerning the politics of representing trauma and violence, the politics of slave suicide, and the intersections of race and gender in the experiences of slave women.

Review: Between Worlds: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction and Criticism, by Deborah Poe and Ama Wattley

Review: <i>Between Worlds: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction and Criticism</i>, by Deborah Poe and Ama Wattley

The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology ed. by Virginia Jackson, and Yopie Prins (review)

The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology ed. by Virginia Jackson, and Yopie Prins (review)

The Superhero Reader CharlesHatfield, JeetHeer, and KentWorcester, Editors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

The Superhero Reader Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester, Editors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.As a follow-up and companion piece to Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester's A Comics Studies Reader (2008), their new collaboration with Charles Hatfield, The Superhero Reader, aims to collect in a single volume a sampling of the most sophisticated or influential commentary on superheroes, and.. .to bring into sharper focus the ways in which superheroes connect with larger social, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and historical (xvii). Although such a description could be applied to an anthology of cultural criticism on virtually any other topic, the editors acknowledge that part of their mission is to legitimize the critical analysis of superheroes, the red-caped stepchild of pop-culture academia. Although there have been single-author books concerning superhero comics before this, nothing quite like The Superhero Reader has been published before. The text that comes closest is Robin S. Rosenberg and Peter Coogan's also newly-published collection, What Is a Superhero f (2013). That anthology, however, takes only relatively recent criticism and commentary in its varied attempts to answer the title question. With Hatfield, Heer, and Worcester's mix of book excerpts and articles from both decades past and the twenty-first century, they perform admirably in conveying the rich, evolving intellectual heritage of superhero studies.Similar to A Comics Studies Reader, The Superhero Reader is helpfully divided into discrete sections, each featuring eight essays. The first concerns the cultural roots and early years of superhero comics. In the second, varied writers apply folklore and cultural studies in attempts to define the genre of superhero comics. The third and final section features essays analyzing the superhero figure through the lenses of gender, race, and sexuality, among other approaches.Perhaps the greatest strength of this collection is its integration of modern academic essays with the works of public intellectuals from the earliest days of superhero comics to the present. For instance, in the first section, contemporary comic book writer Gerard Jones's excerpt from Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (2004) is followed immediately by a passage from Philip Wylie's Gladiator, a 1930 novel about a man with superhuman strength. The texts perfectly complement one another, allowing readers to learn about and then see directly one of the precursors to the superhero genre. …

Book Review

Reviewed by: On Architecture: Melvin Charney, a Critical Anthology ed. by Louis Martin Nicola Pezolet (bio) On Architecture: Melvin Charney, a Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin Montreal/Kingston: McGill–Queens University Press, 2013 Only a year following the untimely death of Melvin Charney (1935–2012) comes On Architecture: Melvin Charney, a Critical Anthology. Thoroughly researched and impeccably organized (both in terms of the book’s overall structure and its visual presentation), this new anthology is most welcome, as it offers the first systematic compilation of Charney’s essays, which made significant contributions to architectural culture over the past decades, both in Canada and internationally. On Architecture is divided into six parts, each preceded by a brief introductory essay by architectural historian Louis Martin, and brings together chronologically more than thirty texts written by Charney between 1962 and 1989 (a few are unpublished manuscripts or appear in English translation here for the first time).1 The book also includes two recent interviews, a short biographical entry, as well as three essays by George Baird, Georges Adamczyk, and Réjean Legault. The essays, grouped under the heading “Critical Contexts,” offer fresh, appreciative insights into the work of the artist, architect, and educator. They are particularly useful for anchoring Charney in the cultural scene of his native Montreal, where he resettled after studying in the United States and traveling abroad. In the early 1960s, the young Charney journeyed to Turkey and rural Italy and recorded his impressions of these places in a series of articles. Along with texts documenting his critical engagement with the nascent pop art scene and the new developments of modernist architecture, these articles are grouped in the section titled “Beginnings.” This section is particularly significant as it shows Charney’s early interest in architecture as “image” and his fascination with the vernacular (in Quebec and abroad)— both of which would thread throughout his lengthy career. For Charney, vernacular buildings such as the rock- cut houses of Göreme or the trulli of Apulia conveyed a valuable sense of identity “at a time when humanity is losing touch with its environment.”2 As Martin points out, Charney’s early interest in the vernacular is no doubt symptomatic of the humanism and the search for an alternative to the orthodox modernism of the architectural scene of this period (one thinks, of course, of Bernard Rudofsky, whose famous Architecture without Architects exhibition to which Charney explicitly refers, but also of Team 10 members Aldo van Eyck and Peter and Alison Smithson). Although Charney professes a genuine [End Page 99] Click for larger view View full resolution 1. Cover of On Architecture: Melvin Charney, a Critical Anthology, 2013. Courtesy of McGill–Queen’s University Press. admiration for the buildings and cities he discovered during his trip, some of his statements are nonetheless problematic. For example, his descriptions of Turkish cities, especially of Istanbul’s street life, carry many Orientalist clichés all too reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Voyage d’Orient diary (published right around the same time).3 This begs various questions about the persistent tendency of architects to project their fantasies and anxieties on what they perceived as Other. Indeed, Charney’s ongoing romance with the vernacular would warrant a more pointed critique than has been thus far offered (in fact, the neo-primitivism and specious psychoanalysis of postwar architectural theory and the cultural stereotyping that comes with a fascination with the “non- pedigreed”, often simplistically [End Page 100] opposed to the “monumental,” is still largely understudied, compared to what has been done in art history in light of postcolonial studies). Click for larger view View full resolution 2. Melvin Charney, view of the principal facade of Marché Bonsecours with grain elevator no. 2 (now demolished) in the background, Montreal, Quebec, 1969. 23.5 x 34.8 cm. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (PH1987:0622). Copyright Melvin Charney, SODRAC, 2014. In the next section, “Beyond Architecture,” Charney adds his insights to the 1960s debates on megastructuralist architecture and environmental design, animated at that time by critics such as Reyner Banham in Britain and Michel Ragon in France. Charney welcomes megastructures, the nadir of technocratic planning...

Page 2: Don’t Fear the Reaper

Page 2Don’t Fear the Reaper Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Editor and Publisher (bio) A lot has been said of late about the death of theory, but not so much on the death of theorists. Sure, there have been obituaries and legacy volumes—and even some biographies of theorists—but not much discussion about what the death of theory’s progenitors means for the institution of theory. In the case of literature, when a major author passes, they are immediately pulled from the contemporary and embalmed in literary history. Their books are often reissued in paperback with fancy new covers—and a volume or two of their letters comes out after a respectful waiting period. If in life they were more like Rock Stars than Writers, then every last fragment of their estate will be culled for publishable material. The most absurd and sad recent cases are the shameful finishing and exploitative publication of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King (2011), and the publication of few dozen index cards that Vladimir Nabokov was shuffling around into a 280 page “novel in fragments” called The Original of Laura (2009). In short, the marketplace of literature takes care of its dead poets. But theorists are neither novelists nor poets—let alone major ones. The work of theory has always been a small market endeavor—and in fact the best-selling books in the field are guidebooks such as Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory (1983) and anthologies such as Vince Leitch’s Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001, 2010). To be sure, even the most well-known and highly—regarded theorists only have audiences a fraction of the size of towering literary figures such as Wallace and Nabokov. So, publishing their unfinished and underfinished work posthumously is not a wise marketing decision for presses interested in selling books—that is to say, most solvent presses today. So, even though David Foster Wallace’s master’s thesis was published complete with an introductory essay, don’t expect Stanley Fish or Barbara Johnson to receive the same treatment. So, what can we expect? Let’s see. Theory has always struck me as being a living entity. Perhaps it was because its major figures always seemed so full of life and lively—most of all in their writing. Not staid and static creatures like the philosophers, but dynamic and dangerous individuals who by the power of their personalities and enchantment of their intellect brought to life a body of thought that straddled but was never at home in any of the traditional humanities disciplines. This disciplinary homelessness created a continuous institutional anxiety about theory. Departments who allowed it entry did so at their own peril—a peril fraught with the potential of disrupting their traditional self-identity. But they also opened up their department to a continual sense of new possibilities and knowledge formations as well as to closer ties with other areas of knowledge and academic disciplines. Through the eyes of theory, traditional disciplinary lines such as philosophy, English, comparative literature, and foreign languages blur via elegant readings that continuously ignore disciplinary stop signs. Moreover, theory always seemed to have a different relationship with history than its associated disciplines. From the vantage point of theory, the institution of philosophy always appears to be unfolding backward into the call and response of its history, whereas theory always appears to remain in the present—and, in effect, resist the pull of history. It might even be said that efforts to map out “the history” of theory or to capture it “in history” are merely attempts to normalize it, that is, to bring it in line with the histories of more traditional areas of inquiry such as philosophy or science. Most certainly, when history finally gets a grip on theory it will be history—in the same way that alchemy and philology are history. But, the distinction here is not between the historical and the ahistorical—the drama the institution of philosophy still plays out over and over again, namely, is philosophy a historical or an ahistorical enterprise? Choosing sides here leads to very different types of philosophical discourse. Rather, in the case...

From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe ed. by E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (review)

Reviewed by: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe ed. by E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken Holly A. Crocker E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken, eds. From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. 280. $38.00 paper. This collection is groundbreaking, not least for its intellectual generosity: in asking what happens to gender in narratives that challenge the boundaries of the human, essays in this volume connect the driving questions of posthumanism to feminist, queer, and postcolonial methodologies. In so doing, this anthology denudes posthumanism of some of its claims to novelty and singularity: investigating the limits of the human becomes less abstract and grandiose when these authors—from [End Page 286] French, history, English, German, and women’s studies—pursue the myriad ways in which cross-species, shape-shifting, and in/organic bodies prompt us to think more precisely about gender’s connection to embodiment. This is the best kind of achievement for a critical anthology: across eight chapters considering bodies as diverse as desirous stones, winged penises, and nursing animals, From Beasts to Souls offers a welcome answer to all those conference panels that for the past decade have been asking “w(h)ither feminism, queer theory, or postcolonialism?” By tracking the specificities of gender in bodies that confound any categorical articulation of the human, articles in this essay collection establish posthumanism as a theoretical methodology deeply indebted to the medieval past, and vitally important to the future of medieval studies. Posthumanism’s imbrication in medieval European sources is perhaps most evident in Chapter 1, “The Sex Life of Stone,” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Here Cohen investigates the motility and potential desire of stones to ask, “Could such a stone be gendered?” (17). In thinking about this question through the Pygmalion myth, medieval lapidaries, and Mandeville’s Travels, Cohen builds a case for seeing stone as part of a “queer ecological materialism” (23), which grants stone agency and desire, powers that remain independent of human obsessions and manipulations. To establish this possibility, Cohen investigates those human fantasies of gender and sexuality that render stone inert, passive, a reflection of human fantasies of stability and permanence. The contrast between these views and those of medieval lapidaries, which invest stones with an active, elementary form of vertu, allows Cohen to connect Mandeville’s discussion of diamonds to a vibrant, nonhuman world of desire, reproduction, and gender. And although Cohen does not fully acknowledge it (his essay is too focused on establishing the independence of lithic desire, in my view), the chapter is masterful at showing how misogyny and heteronormativity seek to shape bodies that cannot fully be known. In Chapter 2, “Nursing Animals and Cross-Species Intimacy,” Peggy McCracken considers the animality that mother’s milk potentially confers in the Old French Crusade Cycle, the Decameron, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, and a Krakow altarpiece entitled The Punishment of Unfaithful Wives. These diverse narratives share the belief that cross-species nursing should only be predicated by need. Because mother’s milk is understood to pass on maternal virtues or faults, stories of nursing deer, or of [End Page 287] women who suckle animals, must be overcome with a return to humanity. In La naissance du Chevalier au cygne, like the Decameron and Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, the animal intimacy of nursing must ultimately be abandoned. In the Krakow altarpiece, by contrast, the “unnatural” act of adultery is punished by forcing women to nurse puppies in public. Animal intimacy is a risk to humanity, but it also uncovers the misogynist assumption that women are more closely connected to animals. Through her deft readings, McCracken shows how women are distanced from humanity through the intimacies of maternity itself. While the stories are meant to provide limit cases, “These stories suggest a mixing—of person and animal, of the human and the bestial” that is persistently associated with women in the Middle Ages (43). Chapter 3, “The Lady and the Dragon in Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion,” by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, pursues a more figural interspecies mingling. By exploring the tale’s...