Monthly Archives: September 2016

Jason M. Baskin is Assistant Professor of English at University of Wyoming, where he specializes in modern and contemporary literature and critical theory. He is completing a book about embodiment and aesthetics in late modernist literature. His essays have appeared in Cultural Critique and Mediations: A Journal of the Marxist Literary Group. Ulrik Ekman is Associate […]

Jeffrey Wallen (bio) Hampshire College jwHA@hampshire.edu   A review of Lance Duerfahrd, The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett’s Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis.  Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. Why does Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot have such resonance when performed in extreme circumstances? Why does a play in which little happens, and which offers […]

Patricia Vettel-Becker­ (bio) Montana State University, Billings pvbecker@msubillings.edu   A review of Catherine Zuromskis, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. What typically escapes interpretation and analysis is the commonplace. This is certainly true of snapshot photography, a practice so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Long dismissed by art historians […]

Janis Butler Holm (bio) Ohio University holm@ohio.edu   A review of Gina Osterloh, Group Dynamic. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 2013. Group Dynamic is a brief but intensive introduction to the work of Gina Osterloh, a Los Angeles-based artist best known for her photographs of meticulously crafted room-sized sets with partially obscured figures that […]

Gregory Flaxman (bio) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill gflax@email.unc.edu   A review of Nathan Widder, Political Theory After Deleuze. London: Continuum, 2012. It’s no coincidence that Gilles Deleuze’s most sustained discussions of politics dwell on its plurality; politics is not given any clearly denotative sense, nor do we find its determinate abstraction (“the political”), […]

Jason M. Baskin (bio) University of Wyoming jbaskin@uwyo.edu   A review of Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, et al., The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. Print. Since 1999, Tom McCarthy—recently heralded as the “standard-bearer of the avant-garde novel”—has served as General Secretary of a “semifictitious […]

David Kaufmann (bio) George Mason University dkaufman@gmu.edu   Is Conceptual writing still interesting?  Not that long ago—in the summer of 2013—Robert Archambeau looked at the buzz around Calvin Bedient’s and Amy King’s attacks on Conceptualism and claimed that, yes, Conceptualism was indeed still interesting.  Arguing that “things we find interesting, much more than things we […]

Ulrik Ekman (bio) University of Copenhagen ekman@hum.ku.dk   1. Introduction David Rokeby began exploring questions of interactivity while studying at the Ontario College of Art (OCA) in 1981. His earliest interactive pieces were constructed with text or photography and specifically designed to be completed by the audience in one manner or another. There were no […]

Jacques Lezra (bio) New York University jl174@nyu.edu   Abstract “The Animal in Translation” shows, through analyses of works by Quine, Hearne, and Derrida, how animality studies and translation studies serve to limit one another, but by the same stroke disclose aspects of each field which remain otherwise obscure.  Each provides for the other a way […]

Leif Sorensen (bio) Colorado State University Leif.Sorensen@colostate.edu   Abstrat Drawing on extensive research in the Richard Hell Papers, this essay argues that the materials in Hell’s archive force a reconsideration of punk and DIY cultural production as alternative modes of subject formation. Exploring the multiple poetic personae that Richard Meyers developed before turning from poetry […]