bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Road to John Fante’s Los Angeles
Authors: Cooper Stephen
Published: January 2021

Originally offered as the 2011 Endowed Bonnie Cashin Memorial Lecture at UCLA Library Special Collections, this talk consists of two parts: an overview of John Fante’s life and times, and a behind-the-scenes account of the work Cooper did in researching his biography of Fante. Confiding to his audience that any biography is to some degree autobiographical, Cooper tells of his own youthful infatuation with Ask the Dust and how that feeling developed into the central project of his professional life both as a writer and a teacher. The revised version of the talk that is presented here leads up to the disclosure of a mystery surrounding the John Fante papers, a mystery that persists to this day.
Introduction
Authors: Das Veena
Published: January 2021

This chapter takes an important insight from Wittgenstein and Cavell that philosophical problems arise in the weave of life and argues that the anthropological tonality of their writing is an invitation for creating particular kinds of connections between philosophy, anthropology, and literature. The argument of the chapter is that the relation between anthropology and philosophy is not grounded in a search for better foundations for anthropology, achieved by launching an inquiry into the human as a general category, but rather by finding the human in engaging with the concrete in specific milieus. It is from within this perspective that ideas about the everyday, the ordinary, and the threats to the ordinary, whether in the form of large catastrophic events or in the form of recurring and repeated crises, are tracked in the neighborhoods in Delhi where the ethnographic work was located. One response to the threats to the everyday is shown to lie in the perfectionist ideas of generating an eventual everyday from the actual everyday rather than treating the skepticism that shadows everyday life as an extinguishable doubt.
A Politics of the Ordinary
Authors: Das Veena
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on quotidian scenes through which the state is engaged over infrastructural projects, such as ensuring access to electricity and water in a locality in Delhi that has its origins in unauthorized occupations over land. One of the tasks in this chapter is to simply show the intensity and the kind of labor that goes into the task of getting electricity meters installed in a locality that falls outside the administrative category of a recognized colony. Apart from meeting the endless conditions setup by an inflexible bureaucracy and the mobilization of local support, the local leaders also work to ward off threats of violence from the mafia-like interests that develop around illegal supply of electricity in such localities. The chapter asks, does this work performed by the local leaders and their supporters count as politics? The chapter engages the theory of performative utterances and speech acts develop by of the philosopher J. L. Austin. Elucidating Cavell’s identification of passionate utterances as distinct from utterances with illocutionary force the chapter looks at the way emotion is laced into language putting into question the idea of stability of convention in the context of political work performed by the poor.
Ordinary Ethics
Authors: Das Veena
Published: January 2021

This chapter makes a case for ordinary ethics as distinct from normative ethics. Rather than assigning a separate domain for ethics with its own specialized vocabulary for moral life deployed by experts, this chapter argues that we could think of ethics as a spirit that suffuses everyday life, somewhat like logic, as it permeates everyday activities. Much discussion on ethics accords a centrality to moments of breakdown and to principles for making choices in hard cases. While there is a place in social life for occasions that demand a muscular definition of the good, the bad, and the righteous, an exclusive emphasis on such moments eclipses those other moments when moral sensibilities are displayed in quotidian acts of care and sustenance. While recognizing the importance of habit as the fly-wheel of society, the chapter argues that sedimentation of experience is only one aspect of habit, the other being the innovations and improvisations through which the particularity of the concrete other is recognized
Ethics, Self-Knowledge, and Words Not at Home
Authors: Das Veena
Published: January 2021

This chapter takes up a particular problematic in the depiction of the everyday—viz., that its very closeness makes it impossible to see it. The chapter pays particular attention to disorders of kinship, arguing that the fieldwork experience does not consist simply of collecting stories or coherent narratives with a clear plot and a delineation of characters. Rather, words and gestures swell up suddenly, often out of context, and provide a glimpse into the turbulent waters that often flow behind the seemingly peaceful and uneventful everyday. Tracking moments such as death-bed statements or moments in a ritual performance when something discordant happens, the chapter delineates how such moments signal the risks to which our actions and expressions are prone. Instead of privileging the psychological subject, the chapter considers the grammatical person with which to think of the self and its opacity. The chapter argues for the salience of the second person as the addressee of a speech event and the relevance of the other for giving life to words. The signature theme of finding one’s voice in one’s history finds ethnographic and literary affirmation in attentiveness to fleeting moments that, from another perspective, it is argued, might last forever.
Disorders of Desire or Moral Striving?
Authors: Das Veena
Published: January 2021

This chapter takes one case of the dangers posed by desire across religious divides—in this instance the small event of a Muslim girl and a Hindu boy in one of the low-income neighborhoods in Delhi having fallen in love with each other. The scene of desire that transcends religious differences and transgresses a given moral code is a significant motif in the poetic imaginary in South Asia, but it rarely asks how such desire is sustained within the social? Usually such love affairs are presented either in the form of cautionary tales or as allegories of the closeness of love and death. In the case examined, the motif shifts to that of inhabiting a life in this difference. The chapter shows that it is not only the couple but everyone in the family who is given an opportunity to make shifts, to learn how to inhabit a newness. The notion of an adjacent self, parallel to the idea of the neighborhood of the actual everyday and the eventual everyday, is taken up to show a moral sensibility that is not about escape from the everyday but an inhabitation of the everyday through a realization of new possibilities within it.
Psychiatric Power, Mental Illness, and the Claim to the Real
Authors: Das Veena
Published: January 2021

This chapter brings out the dark potentials of the everyday by focusing on the madness of a young boy and showing how his illness reverberates in the family and the neighborhood. Canguilhem’s contrast between normatively normal in which norms may be transgressed and those of pathologically normal that signals the death of normativity itself is deployed to show how families become steeped in a scene of trance and illusion and the exhaustion of the capacity to care. The psychiatrist does not represent so much normalizing power as in Foucault but provides simply a small respite from the relentless violence and threats within which the scene of madness is engulfed. The mobile character of power is shown through the residues that are secreted so that when one aspect of power, say its normalizing function as discipline, fades out, another aspect, such as its alignment with sovereign forms of punishment, finds new objects. For Foucault, the archive was the place where individuals who are caught in the grip of the law become available as subjects to the historian, but for the anthropologist, the life of law flows through different kind of hinges and junctions that are not exhausted by the archive.
The Boundaries of the “We”
Authors: Das Veena
Published: January 2021

Through a triangular reading of J. M. Coetzee’s novels Waiting for the Barbarians and Diary of a Bad Year in conversation with the philosopher/psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, this chapter depicts the nature of violence under Empire. It makes a case for the erosion, not only of this or that society under Empire but also of the human form of life. The question of responsibility is posed through the magistrate, a man completely unaware of his own complicity in projects of Empire and the torture practiced in it. Time is posited in terms of waiting so that violence from the barbarians may not have happened yet—but it is almost waiting at the door of reality. In the novel, the figure of the barbarian woman creates the possibility of a future together by a make-believe language that rejects the lure of any standing languages. Coetzee destabilizes the notions of author and reader in these novels, blocking any attempt at ersatz ethical posturing by narrative devices of a disfigured author function and the dispersal of the reader into different modes of reading. Both novels resonate with the idea of everyday as recovered from the debris of the political community.
A Child Disappears
Authors: Das Veena
Published: January 2021

Focusing on a case in which an eight-year-old girl is abducted, forcibly confined, and raped, this chapter analyzes the judgment of the court sessions. Paying close attention to the grammatical structure of both written and oral statements, the chapter shows the different kinds of splits that happen within these statements. The judge’s pronouncements show a doubling of voice—one voice through which she converts the narrated events into objects recognizable to the law, and a second voice in which the law speaks through the voice of the judge. Similarly, the child witness is shown to be split into the witness, one who saw the various acts of horrifying violence done to her, and second, the victim who experienced these events on her body. Finally, the chapter reads the minor contradictions that were papered over in the court to take the reader to the life of the law outside the court into the neighborhood where the everyday harassment by police officers, the bribes and the scandals, are the stuff of everyday experiences. The notion of ordinary realism helps in the analysis to anchor the contradictory affects in which the law embodies both threat and promise.
Of Mistakes, Errors, and Superstition
Authors: Das Veena
Published: January 2021

This chapter analyzes Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer not as pertaining to a theory of religious belief and ritual but to his major preoccupation with pictures of the world produced through what he called “grammatical illusions.” It argues that Wittgenstein faults Frazer not so much for having made a mistake in interpreting rituals as expressions of an erroneous understanding of cause and effect, but rather for being in the grip of a superstition creating false excitement about primitive practices where none were warranted. Wittgenstein draws on our common background as humans—the natural history we might invent to show that had Frazer paid attention to our primitive reactions as humans, he might have found other routes to connect the practices of the so-called primitives to those commonly found in his own society. The chapter offers a sustained reading of some of the most intriguing comments of Wittgenstein to ask such questions as what it is to take the facts of one’s existence upon oneself? The chapter holds that such points of connection create a more meaningful interface between philosophy and anthropology than any grand foundational gestures could do.
Concepts Crisscrossing
Authors: Das Veena
Published: January 2021

This chapter takes up a reading of certain classic texts of British anthropology to ask how are anthropological concepts generated? Looking closely at the terms around which religious beliefs and practices are organized among the Dinka and the Nuer, as described by Lienhardt and Evans-Pritchard respectively, the chapter shows that the idea of God is transported from the Old Testament notions to decide which terms can qualify to be translated as God depending on what is taken to be real and what an illusion. As a thought experiment, the chapter draws on different notions of god(s) and of ritual practices (such as sacrifice) from Vedic texts in the Sanskritic tradition and asks what if gods were seen as entities produced through grammar, brought into existence only for the duration of a ritual, as some texts on ritual hermeneutics in India argued? Would we have thought of the Dinka and Nuer concepts of god or witches or spirits differently? The chapter also offers a way to think of what Cora Diamond called a “crisscross” philosophy as a tapestry of overlapping threads put together patiently and with many hands.
The Life of Concepts
Authors: Das Veena
Published: January 2021

This chapter is a reflection on how thinking and living an anthropological life are joined together. The discussion proceeds through an exegesis of two books on loss—one, a book of poems written by Renato Rosaldo, years after the death of his wife, Michelle Rosaldo; and the second, on the women raped and rehabilitated as bironganas (war heroines) in the national imagery in post-war Bangladesh. Rosaldo allows the searing grief at the death of his wife to find expression in different voices imagined as those of actual people from his earlier fieldwork. The refraction of his grief into these different voices reveals the omens and premonitions that convey the menace and dangers that lurk in everyday life. Nayanika Mookherjee finds a way of conveying the fine grains of experience in the extreme history (charam itihas) that the women said they were offering to her and in which they lived as khota—damaged, stained women. It is argued that the book itself might be regarded as written in an autobiographical voice though this voice is defined not through personal stories but through the self-knowledge that comes when writing from the impersonal region of the self.
Form and Event
Authors: Diano Carlo , Lezra Jacques
Published: January 2021

Carlo Diano’s Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy. Already available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, it appears here in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction by Jacques Lezra that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy. Form and Event reads the two classical categories of its title phenomenologically across Aristotle, the Stoics, and especially Homer. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the “eventic form.” On Diano’s reading, eventic forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life.
Introduction
Authors: Lezra Jacques
Published: January 2021

Diano’s Form and Event is part of the long effort that members of European cultural elites make to legitimate their genealogy invoking a spectral Greek legacy they seek to describe, interpret, and summon. Like the most responsible and original of these, he does not provide a conceptual synthesis of his organizing terms—of form and event (what Diano refers to as “the mystical identity of the principle governing both”). Nor are we dealing here, narrowly, with what the subtitle to Forma ed evento offers: “Principles for an interpretation of the Greek world.” Something else is at stake. In question is precisely what counts or can be made to serve as a principle—that is, as a principium, a nonanalyzable term that is also though not necessarily compatibly the beginning of a series; what counts as an axiom of interpretation, conduct, description, judgment, identity—that is, what is in question in Form and Event is precisely what counts or can be made to serve as a principle for the conceptual lexicon of European modernity.
Form and Event
Authors: Diano Carlo , Diano Carlo , Lezra Jacques
Published: January 2021

Italian philologist and philosopher Carlo Diano’s Form and Event: Principles for an Interpretation of the Greek World is a work of great importance not only for classical studies of Ancient Greece, but also for contemporary continental philosophy. Form and Event has been translated into a variety of languages and its translation now into English makes available this seminal work to a larger audience. In Form and Event Diano updates phenomenologically these two classical categories across a number of masterful readings of Aristotle, the Stoics, and particularly Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the “eventful form.” On Diano’s read, eventual forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life.
Introduction: Toward an Experimental Lexicography
Authors: Dworkin Craig
Published: January 2021

The introduction summarizes the scope of the project and its methodologies, arguing for a critically descriptive reading practice. Looking at artists’ books, conceptual writing projects, and texts by writers as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Solmaz Sharif, and Angelo V. Suárez, the chapter first sketches the range of works that engage the dictionary in ways other than those investigated in subsequent chapters. In contrast to writers who have turned to the dictionary as an idealized abstraction, or a source of suppressed cultural biases, the chapter then proposes a dictionary poetics extrapolated from the particular form of reference books and the typography of particular editions, with their emphasis on the chain of the signifier, the chance proximities of otherwise unrelated words, and recursive structures of motivated paths and self-referential loops. Discussing poems by Emily Dickinson, Cecil Giscombe, Lyn Hejinian, Jack Kerouac, and Stéphane Mallarmé the chapter outlines the principles of a radical lexicography in which the inherent logic of the dictionary serves as a generative, structuring device (and not merely an authoritative compendium).
The Oxford English Dictionary and George Oppen’s Discrete Series
Authors: Dworkin Craig
Published: January 2021

Chapter 3 focuses on George Oppen’s first two books, the lost 21 Poem (discovered in 2017) and Discrete Series (published in 1934). Considered by critics to be inscrutably gnomic, unrelated, and discontinuous (indeed, “discrete”) a reconstruction of Oppen’s source text—the Oxford English Dictionary, which had been completed to much celebration in 1928 just as Oppen was writing his poems—reveals his exhaustive inclusion of even the specialist definitions of certain key words. In addition to establishing continuities among the putatively discrete poems, the chapter offers fresh historical readings of modern mechanism (automobiles and elevators) that populate his poems and that served in turn, for William Carlos Williams, as the figure for the poems’ own lexical machinations. Furthermore, the logic of the signifier that structures the dictionary reveals an unexpected self-portraiture at work, across Oppen’s œuvre, in certain figures of glass enclosures and windows.
Introduction
Authors: Eggemeier Matthew T. , Fritz Peter Joseph
Published: January 2021

The introduction poses the book’s central theological concern to contrast mercy as described in Catholic theology with the sacrifices of persons and creation made to the global economy under neoliberalism. An initial definition of neoliberalism as a politicized mutation of capitalism, a statement of the book’s critical method, and outlines of each chapter are given. The introduction ends with a meditation upon the golden calf, a potent metaphor for neoliberalism, which Pope Francis calls an “idolatry of money.”
Catholic Social Thought against Economism
Authors: Eggemeier Matthew T. , Fritz Peter Joseph
Published: January 2021

During the last three papacies, Catholic social teaching (CST) has become particularly sensitized to the danger of capitalist economism, a tendency to reduce the whole of life to economic matters. A concern with economism enters with John Paul’s first social encyclical, continues when Benedict XVI links the error of economism to his criticisms of economic utopianism, and matures when Pope Francis criticizes the contemporary dominant manifestation of economism, which he calls by various names, including “unfettered capitalism,” “the faceless economy,” “the economy that kills,” and “neoliberalism.” The chapter ends by discussing how neoliberalism has been made to seem friendly to Catholics by neoconservatives who distort CST by ignoring the continuity between the three most recent popes regarding opposition to economism.
Urban Formalism
Authors: Faflik David
Published: January 2021

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.
Introduction
Authors: Faflik David
Published: January 2021

This book rests upon a pair of related propositions that have far-reaching consequences for the work of urban studies. The first is that the history of the modern city is a history of urban forms. The second is that the interpretive turn to formalism represents a wholly new approach to thinking about urbanism and historicism. In other words, this book argues that to conceive of the city “formally” is not only to revise our understanding of the city’s actual existence. It is to argue for an alternative way of apprehending the conditions through which knowledge of the city is even possible. Forms alter our sense of what the historical city was. Forms change how we perceive the very practice of urban perception, whether we’re talking about the perceptual habits of historical observers from the past or anyone who is mindful, today, of how forms function in the present century. In the final analysis, the twin claims on which this book depends suggest a different kind of urban being even as they propose a novel approach to city “reading.” In forms, we’ll never know the city the same way again.
Strong Reading, or the Literary Conversion of the Urban
Authors: Faflik David
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the phenomenon of “Strong reading,” named after the nineteenth-century New York lawyer, bibliophile, and diarist George Templeton Strong. As evidenced by Strong’s own historical example, the Strong reader placed such great faith in his traditional standards of literary discrimination that he proceeded to read all of urban life as if it were a work of literature. The unstated aim of this manner of city reading was to remake the more troubling aspects of urban life into a more familiar form of “text.” In turn, the Strong reader might have managed to convert the modern city into a safer kind of aesthetic spectacle, but he often purchased his interpretive reassurance at the expense of a less mediated relation to urban life.
The Revolutionary Formalism of France
Authors: Faflik David
Published: January 2021

This chapter addresses how the divergent city experience of the Paris métropole accumulated contrary meanings (overtly political in the minds of some, artfully performative in the minds of others) for interested onlookers during the tumultuous middle decades of the nineteenth century. The signature rhythms of the city’s divided politics in this period constituted a form unto themselves. For some observers of Paris, the distinguishing characteristic of these forms is that they were being placed under great strain by the domestic factions coalescing in France around a number of longstanding social grievances there, which together found expression in the country’s capital city. Another group of observers might have recognized the revolutionary potential of such grievances, but they were preoccupied instead by the captivating drama that was politics in Paris. These readers monitored the city’s politics less to understand its core issues than to enjoy what was effectively a form of street theatre for a viewing public. In the Paris of 1848, readers met with an urban “text” the content of which was sometimes indistinguishable from the enormity of its historical forms.
Afterword
Authors: Faflik David
Published: January 2021

Urban Formalism has examined what it historically meant to “read” the mid-nineteenth-century city, in the broadest sense of that term. I’ve placed forms at the heart of this study in the belief that the work of urban interpretation ultimately requires us to attend to the representative patterns of the city’s cultural formations. These days, such formations are increasingly recognized as “forms.” This study accordingly sits at the semantic intersection of some of the historical city’s most readable (which is not to say most easily apprehensible) formal “texts.” Among these last I have included the literary city, the material city, the political city, and the visual city. My argument, throughout, has been that the often-contradictory ways by which our predecessors interpreted the forms of the modern city at once made the metropolis more and less readable.
Introduction
Authors: Grant Roger Mathew
Published: January 2021

This chapter places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in eighteenth-century music theory. Because theorists in that period struggled to explain how music functioned as a sign, they began to propose an alternative, materialist theory of vibrational attunement in order to account for music’s affective power. The chapter demonstrates the similarities between eighteenth-century attunement theories and contemporary affect theory, explaining how the peculiar problems of theorizing affect generate repeating patterns in the historical evolution of the concept. It also includes a discussion of the book’s methodology and a brief sketch of its contents.
Coda: Affect after the Affektenlehre
Authors: Grant Roger Mathew
Published: January 2021

This concluding chapter places contemporary affect theory in conversation with the historical investigation outlined in the body of the book. It finds within recent affect theory a certain musicality and a tendency to rehearse dynamics that once played out within historical music theory. This final chapter closes with a call to restore diachronicity and movement to affect theory: to think affect historically, and to therefore pay close attention to the movements between the objects and subjects that have generated it.
Of Other Petrofictions
Authors: Groves Jason
Published: January 2021

The first chapter argues that the romantic imaginary not only develops out of literary images of mining but that it is materially from the mine. Taking Wackenroder’s letter describing his and Tieck’s 1793 descent into an iron ore mine as an initial document of German romanticism, this chapter resituates Tieck’s romantic novella Rune Mountain against the backdrop of their first-hand observations of mining industry and the contemporaneous geosciences. However, their romantic vision of mines involves minerals envisioning the romantics: though ostensibly a story about an eccentric human protagonist, Rune Mountain can also be read as a story about the eventfulness of this landform, which serves less as a passive backdrop and more as a captivating and eccentric antagonist. In this way Rune Mountain becomes less a story about the ramifications of the romantics’ overactive imagination and more about the ramifications of an excessively active planet.
Introduction
Authors: Johnson Galen A.
Published: January 2021

Merleau-Ponty’s profound engagement with literary writers is readily apparent: Proust and Valéry, also Stendhal, Paul Claudel, Claude Simon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Balzac, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, Sartre, and Beauvoir. Merleau-Ponty’s first two 1953 courses at the Collège de France as well as the course of 1953–54 all address questions of expression and literary language: The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Research on the Literary Usage of Language, and The Problem of Speech. Recent transcription and publication of these new resources lend urgency to this project. Our use of the term “poet” includes literary authors in general, be they novelists or “poets” in the narrower sense, and our focus is on the writers of “modernity” or “modernism.” The meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics opens with reflections on philosophy of language in sharp contrast with Sartre’s What is Literature? It studies four paradoxes of literary expression: the paradox of the true and the imaginary, of speech and silence, of the subjective (the most secret) and the objective, and of the relation of the author and the person who lives. These are the “surprises,” the “traps,” that make literature appear as a problem to itself and cause the writer himself or herself to ask: “what is literature?”
A Poetics of Co-Naissance
Authors: Aubert Emmanuel de Saint
Published: January 2021

Merleau-Ponty’s reading of André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon allows us to shed some light on the relations between Being and Flesh in his philosophy, as well as how these relations promise a genuine poetic art. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh (poetic of the body and desire), a poetic of mystery (which is not primarily what is hidden, but what expresses itself inexhaustibly), and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. These three dimensions touch respectively on the overdetermination Merleau-Ponty gives to the questions of desire, expression, and perception—and are deployed in their corresponding horizons, the first more anthropological, the next more epistemological, and the last more ontological. The bold and broad inspiration that Merleau-Ponty finds in André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon is a particularly rich leading thread in the exploration of this poetic, which plunges us into the heart of the unfinished work site of the philosopher’s last manuscripts, some of which are not yet published.
From the World of Silence to Poetic Language
Authors: Johnson Galen A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter makes explicit the influence of Valéry whose poem La Pythie [The Pythoness] is quoted by Merleau-Ponty in the penultimate sentence of The Visible and the Invisible. Merleau-Ponty discussed the work and life of Paul Valéry (1871–1945) for the entire first half of the first course of 1953, Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage. After early poetic successes, Valéry experienced a deep personal crisis that led him to impose a silence upon himself, which lasted for a period of twenty-five years from 1892 until 1917, after which he emerged reborn as a writer. Merleau-Ponty recognizes the power of silence to nourish both poetic and philosophical language in relation to three orders or dimensions: “the horizon of the visible, the horizon of the nameable, and the horizon of the thinkable.” The notions of the “chiasma of two destinies” and the “implex of words” derive directly from Valéry, who leads on to Mallarmé and Baudelaire together with Edgar Allan Poe, as well as to Francis Ponge, who captured this overlapping exchange among the dimensions of Being in Taking the Side of Things [Le parti pris des choses].
Overture: The Sound of a Novel
Authors: Napolin Julie Beth
Published: January 2021

The Overture introduces the major terminology of the book grounded in sound studies, narrative theory, novel theory, and modernism, as well as the book’s major figure, Joseph Conrad. Asking “what is the sound of a novel?” the overture argues that we cannot turn so easily to novel theory to answer this question, that we must instead go to sound studies. However, sound studies is often premised upon the suppression of the linguistic. The question, then, demands that we carve out a new territory between the available discourses of sound, narrative, and the novel. The Overture rehearses the methodology of the book in miniature, which involves making connections across difference.
Coda: Literary History as Miscegenating Sound: The Sound and the Fury
Authors: Napolin Julie Beth
Published: January 2021

The ideal name would resemble water.

Denise Riley

In interviews, Faulkner credited the fantasied image of Caddy Compson climbing up a pear tree as the origin of The Sound and the Fury (1929). Caddy was his “heart’s darling.” Faulkner avows this image and elevates it in memory and autobiographical discourse. Yet the title of the novel directs us to its neglected beginnings in “sound and fury,” an echo of James Wait’s sonorous “despair and fury.”...
Intersonority: Unclaimed Voices Circum-1900, or Sound and Sourcelessness in The Souls of Black Folk
Authors: Napolin Julie Beth
Published: January 2021

The chapter takes up Du Bois as a contemporary of Conrad and Freud, but one who was listening to memory, song, race, and the unconscious in ways that they could not. It reads Du Bois as a theorist of sound through his strategies of resonance, asking how music, for Du Bois, is a sonic trace of slavery. Using musicology and archival documents, the reading is an intensive engagement with the aurality of Du Bois’s strategies of composition, including musical notion and collage. Ultimately, the reading recuperates gender and the feminine at the heart of The Souls of Black Folk as a work of listening and mourning.
A Sinister Resonance: On the Extraction of Sound and Language in Heart of Darkness
Authors: Napolin Julie Beth
Published: January 2021

Chapter Three is a study of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel narrated in single night aboard a ship when a man remembers his journey to the Congo. The chapter seeks a critical form for this novel that Chinua Achebe argues should no longer be read. Searching for a way to describe it, Conrad wrote that it was like “a sinister resonance” and “continued vibration.” These sound figures, based in his memories of music, issue a profound challenge to the transcendental signifier that supports narrative levels: “voice.” At the same time, the chapter seeks out linguistics in the material substratum of vibration. It argues that the linguistic sign and the history of telecommunications—sharing in a dream of lossless and perfect communication—cannot be thought outside of the colonial extraction of sound in its ongoing violence.
The Unlikely Environmentalisms of Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Authors: Neely Michelle C.
Published: January 2021

Against Sustainability argues for a transformation of our environmental ethics and our environmental imagination. The introduction demonstrates that the manifest difficulties of centering transformative environmental ethics in mainstream U.S. environmentalism are compounded by the hegemony of the sustainability paradigm. Sustainability captures a well-meaning impulse to ensure the stable persistence of human societies over time, yet its reassuring emphasis on stability comes with a high cost: sustainability prizes continuity with pasts the Anthropcene reveals as environmentally and ethically problematic. The introduction illustrates the limits of future-oriented paradigms dominated by pastoral thinking by reading contemporary critics of the U.S. food system against their nineteenth-century counterparts. An archival approach to industrial farming and animal agriculture proves that many of their hallmark practices originate in the antebellum period or earlier. The introduction ultimately argues that an honest reckoning with the history of U.S. environmental ideas and practices compels us to recognize the imbrication of many of our most cherished environmental ideals with the systems that produced the problems to which they apparently respond: capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. If we want something different—for ourselves and for the planet—we will have to imagine it, and we will have to build it.
Recycling Fantasies: Whitman, Clifton, and the Dream of Compost
Authors: Neely Michelle C.
Published: January 2021

Chapter one takes up the paradigm of recycling in Walt Whitman’s first two editions of Leaves of Grass (1855 and 1856). While scarcity of materials meant scavenging and reuse were common practices in the nineteenth century, organic material recycling first emerged as a scientific principle during the antebellum period. Whitman’s documented journalistic and poetic interest in “compost” has led scholars to elevate the once-overlooked Whitman into the ecopoetic pantheon. Chapter one challenges this increasingly standard reading by placing Whitman’s interest in compost and organic recycling alongside his even more famous poetic investment in an indiscriminate, “omnivorous” consumption. Compost emerges as the twin of appetite in Whitman’s poetic environment, which reveals how recycling authorizes consumption without limits and yields a fundamentally static, and therefore nonegalitarian and anti-ecological vision of community. The last part of the chapter explores resistance to this paradigm in the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a twentieth-century African American poet self-consciously rewriting Whitman’s vision of democratic and environmental community. Ultimately, chapter one suggests that while Clifton resists the dream of cyclical, effortless material recycling and consequence-free consumption, it is nineteenth-century Whitman’s fantasy of the earth endlessly recycling and renewing human waste that remains more characteristic of contemporary U.S. life.
Radical Pet Keeping: Crafts, Wilson, and Living with Others in the Anthropocene
Authors: Neely Michelle C.
Published: January 2021

Chapter four explores radical pet keeping, an unlikely environmentalism keyed to the strengths and the weaknesses of the Anthropocene proposal. The first part of the chapter examines how figures of the animal, beast, pet, and pet keeping typically feature in antislavery literature by authors ranging from David Walker to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The next section explores Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (c. 1853–1861), which develops a disturbing vignette of pet and enslaved pet keeper murder that undermines the naturalness of oppression based upon racial and species difference. The last part of the chapter treats Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), which depicts an interspecies friendship between Frado and Frado’s pet dog, Fido. Frado’s transgressive sympathy allows her to imagine familial relationships between not only Blacks and whites, or servants and masters, but humans and animals, as well. The chapter argues the radical pet keeping imagined in these two novels rests upon an ethic of care that fosters interracial and interspecies solidarity not dependent on sameness. Radical pet keeping, like Black feminism, foregrounds interdependence across differences, making it a useful environmental paradigm in the Anthropocene, as climate change increasingly forces all life on Earth to live in the world Anthros has built.
Embracing Green Temporalities: Indigenous Sustainabilities, Anglo-American Utopias
Authors: Neely Michelle C.
Published: January 2021

Against Sustainability concludes with a coda that contrasts Anglo-American and certain Indigenous American approaches to “zero waste.” Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) illustrates the limitations of a manufacturing-focused ethic. By contrast, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) links a zero-waste ethic to a decolonized relationship to the land. Achieving this version of zero waste requires transforming not simply U.S. manufacturing and disposal processes, but its culture. Using these examples, the coda suggests that there are contexts in which sustainability works as a paradigm. It makes sense to “sustain” Indigenous environmental cultures that resist rather than perpetuate the systems responsible for our environmental degradation. By contrast, Anglo-American sustainability maintains continuity with capitalism’s profit and growth imperatives, with settler colonial resource extraction, and other values and practices inimical to just biotic community. Radical action will only come from transformative environmental ethics that help Americans confront our past truthfully and then imagine and act for a more ecological present. Replacing sustainability with an orientation toward functional utopianism, and remaining committed to strategic, provisional ethics—such as joyful frugality and radical pet keeping—might help bridge the gap between our deadly present and a more livable future.
“Africanist Presence” and the Role of Black Bodies
Authors: O'Donnell Angela Alaimo
Published: January 2021

Chapter 4, “‘Africanist Presence’ and the Role of Black Bodies,” taking its title and cue from Toni Morrison’s seminal study of race in American Literature, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, examines O’Connor’s exploration of the essential role played by African Americans in the construction of a white consciousness. It also considers the work of womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland on “enfleshing freedom” in which she meditates on the imaging of the black body in Western culture and its implications in the Christian Church. The chapter considers the difference between what anthropologist Mary Douglas refers to as “physical bodies” and “social bodies” and the ways in which these representations and perceptions of the body enter into O’Connor’s work (73). The chapter includes analysis of “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” “The Artificial Nigger,” and “Judgement Day” (reprise).
Exoplanets and Icy Moons and Mars, Oh My!
Authors: Pryor Adam
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines astrobiological phenomena in order to press beyond popular preconceptions about the field of astrobiology: that it is solely or primarily concerned with studying aliens that we do not yet know exist. Specifically considering Kepler 452-b, Proxima-b, Enceladus, and Mars, the chapter considers implications that emerge from closely studying the scope and scale of astrobiological research. These issues of scope and scale are figured in relation to the astrobiological concern for microbial life, the importance of living-systems, and models of habitability.
Astrobiology’s Intra-Active Aliens
Authors: Pryor Adam
Published: January 2021

This chapter lays a conceptual foundation by introducing how the intra-active quality of astrobiological phenomena provides a distinctive context for framing what constitutes meaningful human existence, because the scale of these phenomena is so vast. To think astrobiologically requires that we imagine significant ontological units beyond the human individual and her agency that accord with the more general theory of living-systems that astrobiology is beginning to articulate. It explores how the interdisciplinary discoveries of astrobiology proffer a particular transdisciplinary vision of the cosmos with significance for theological anthropology and environmental thinking about the Anthropocene.
The imago Dei as a Refractive Symbol
Authors: Pryor Adam
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on two key themes constructive accounts of the imago Dei must address: the continuing relevance of the image/likeness distinction beyond its original exegetical framing and how what we mean by ‘image’ might be better theologically rendered as ‘symbol.’ Situating the doctrine in the wider biblical cosmogony from which it arises, while focusing on three historical theologians—Irenaeus, Augustine, and Schleiermacher—the chapter builds a case for what constitute inescapable elements of this symbol. Building on this historical recapitulation, it is argued that to be the image of God is to be a symbol of God: one who refracts the creative power of God evidenced in cosmogonies to facilitate the flourishing intra-action of living systems with the habitable environment. The consequence of this approach is that to be the imago Dei is not something properly ascribed to any individual organism as a marker of distinctiveness, but it describes a particular type of astrobiological intra-action that extends the creative power of the divine as a refraction, not merely a reflection.
Conceptualizing Nature
Authors: Pryor Adam
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores how astrobiology invites us to reconceptualise ‘nature.’ It explores how the constitutive mutuality the Anthropocene opens for our environmental imagination—between nature and human being—‘corroboartiavely’ taps into the intra-action of astrobiology and symbols used in theological anthropology. To do this, it examines the flexibility inherent to the use of the term ‘nature’ as it has been developed within a typology of American environmental imagining. It characterizes how the story of human being and nature interacting has slipped away in light of the call to recognize intra-action: how the Anthopocene symbolizes a disorientation implicit to astrobiological ways of framings a human relationship to world.
The Anthropocene as Planetarity in Deep Time
Authors: Pryor Adam
Published: January 2021

In light of contemporary accounts of the Anthropocene, this chapter re-figures the relationship between human being and nature, such that nature is not the dialectical antithesis to human being and our reflexivity with nature is not easily marginalized. It proposes a simple definition for this relationship: human beings are planetary creatures in deep time. This definition indicates how the Anthropocene disorients us both in terms of the spatial (i.e., planetary) and temporal (i.e., deep time) boundedness of our subjectivity. Building on supporting ideas—‘planetarity’ and a ‘Sapiezoic’ eon—that help us imagine the implications of the Anthropocene’s disorientation of our subjectivity, this chapter articulates the potential symbolic power of the Anthropocene to imagine human beings as intra-active agents.