Monthly Archives: September 2013

John Garrison JohnSF@gmail.com   Review of: Judith Butler, Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.   Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender offers her latest thinking on a variety of issues related both to gender and also to the larger idea of becoming “undone.” In this volume, Butler goes beyond her earlier examinations of gender performativity to explore […]

Manisha Basu English Department University of Pittsburgh mab79@pitt.edu   Review of: Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.   In the first of the six essays in On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag had claimed that after repeated exposure, photographs of atrocity became less real for their audience, and therefore less able […]

Justus Nieland Department of English Michigan State University nieland@msu.edu   Review of: Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs.Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.   Marcus Boon’s ambitious, lucid, and far-ranging cultural history of the connection between literature and drugs eschews a “single chronological history of drugs” and seeks instead “to reveal […]

Laura Shackelford Department of English Indiana University, Bloomington lshackel@indiana.edu   The proliferation of critical work on the networking logics that underwrite capitalism’s global restructuring suggests, quite mistakenly, that capitalism’s rearticulation of the spaces of the world to suit it is something new. Working immediately prior to these shifts, Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, […]

Carsten Strathausen Department of German and Russian Studies University of Missouri-Columbia StrathausenC@missouri.edu   The term “ontology” occupies an increasingly prominent place in current politico-philosophical discourse. “Political philosophy forces us to enter the terrain of ontology,” declare Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Empire (354). Ernesto Laclau recently said that he has “concentrated on the ontological dimension […]

Ulrik Ekman Department for Cultural Studies and the Arts University of Copenhagen ekman@hum.ku.dk   Professor Gumbrecht was interviewed after his visit in November 2005 at the Department for Cultural Studies and the Arts, Copenhagen University, Denmark, arranged by the Research Forum for Intermedial Digital Aesthetics directed by Ulrik Ekman. On that occasion, Gumbrecht gave a […]

Cary Wolfe Department of English Rice University cewolfe@rice.edu   “The work of art is an ostentatiously improbable occurrence.” –Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System (153)   The Blur building designed by the New York architectural team of Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller–a manufactured cloud with an embedded viewing deck, hovering over Lake Neuchatel in […]

Michael Snediker English Department Mount Holyoke College msnedike@mtholyoke.edu   Epithets   While optimism has made cameos in the pages of queer theory, “queer” is not itself readily imaginable as one of optimism’s epithets. More familiar, perhaps, is Lauren Berlant’s and Michael Warner’s invocation of “hegemonic optimism” in their 1998 essay, “Sex in Public” (549). Berlant […]

Brook MillerDepartment of EnglishUniversity of Minnesota, Morriscbmiller@umn.edu A review of: Martin Conboy, Tabloid Britain: Constructing A Community Through Language. New York: Routledge, 2006. I said Charles, don’t you ever craveTo appear on the front of The Daily MailDressed in your Mother’s bridal veil?. . .Oh, has the world changed or have I changed? –The Smiths, […]

Eric KeenaghanDepartment of English State University of New York, Albany ekeenaghan@albany.edu Review of: Laura Moriarty, Ultravioleta. Berkeley: Atelos, 2006; Jocelyn Saidenberg, Negativity. Berkeley: Atelos, 2006; Juliana Spahr, The Transformation. Berkeley: Atelos, 2007.  Disturbed by the mid-century capitalistic imperative that Americans make a living, and unsatisfied with the Soviet Union’s alternative of valorizing communal labor, Hannah […]

Kyle A. WigginsDepartment of English and American Literature Brandeis University kwiggins@brandeis.edu A review of: Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. It is difficult to gauge the political utility of expressly fictive locations like utopias, given the immediacy and concreteness of a daily, lived […]

Jim HicksSmith College University of Massachusetts, Amherst JHICKS@email.smith.edu I begin with a naïve question. How is it possible that the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs did not (yet) adversely affect the careers of those responsible for the war in Iraq? The photos offer dramatic evidence to the court of public opinion. And the case […]

E.L. McCallumEnglish DepartmentMichigan State Universityemc@msu.edu “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” –Susan Sontag, On Photography On Photography To speak of ending in a photograph, as Susan Sontag does, would seem to aver photography’s orientation towards death, an association it has held since its inception and one that has become practically axiomatic in photography […]

Arkady PlotnitskyTheory and Cultural Studies ProgramDepartment of EnglishPurdue Universityplotnit@purdue.edu Robert Hughes’s article offers an unexpected perspective on Alain Badiou’s work and its impact on the current intellectual and academic scene, a cliché-metaphor that (along with its avatars, such as performance or performative, also a pertinent theoretical term) may be especially fitting in this case, given […]

Robert HughesDepartment of EnglishOhio State Universityhughes.1021@osu.edu   “Can we be delivered, finally delivered, from our subjection to Romanticism?” asks the French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937), with an evident sigh (Conditions 158f, Theoretical Writings 22e).1 A peculiar question, it would seem, for an epoch often eager to declare itself at once post-Romantic and postmodern. For Badiou, […]

Jeffrey T. NealonDepartment of English Pennsylvania State University jxn8@psu.edu I. Literature On a recent trip to the library to find an essay that a visiting speaker was going to talk about, something odd (and a bit embarrassing) happened to me. I got the call number for the volume, and bee-lined directly to the library’s “P” […]

Carrie NolandDepartment of French and ItalianUniversity of California, Irvinecjnoland@uci.edu “Is it possible to express emotions without the movement of the face?” –Bill Viola During the last fifteen years of his life, roughly from Phenomenology of Perception of 1945 to the lectures on “Nature” of 1958-61,1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed a theory of the gestural that has provided […]