NOW PUBLISHED: Thomas Meyer’s BEOWULF Is In the Building

by EILEEN JOY Thomas Meyer’s reworking of Beowulf is a wonder. ~John Ashbery punctum books is thrilled to announce today the publication, online and in print, of Thomas Meyer’s avant-garde and typographically dazzling translation of the Old English poem Beowulf, part-epic, part-monster-thriller, part-gore-fest, part-elegy. This publication is an immense labor of love on the part[…]

AUDIOFILE: Ecologies Roundtable Session (Oliphaunt Books)

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your garden shears. ~Lowell Duckert, “Recreation” The roundtable session on “Ecologies,” organized by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and sponsored by George Washington University’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute [GW-MEMSI] for the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan this past May, was a memorable event, featuring lively, provocative,[…]

Like a Radio Left On / On the Outskirts of Identical Cities: Living (with) Fradenburg

Figure 1. Aranye Fradenburg delivering her plenary address at the 1st Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, Austin, Texas [Nov. 2010]   [note: punctum books will be publishing a collection of essays by Aranye Fradenburg, Staying Alive, in late 2012/early 2013] by EILEEN JOY . . . obscure / forces are at work /[…]

Help Wanted: Steal This University

by EILEEN JOY What enables us to risk change is the feeling that we are understood and (therefore) accompanied. –L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer”   Jeffrey Cohen blogged at In The Middle a few weeks ago about the Exemplaria conference, held in early February at University of Texas-Austin, on “Surface, Symptom, and the State of[…]

Oceanic Sorrow: An Elegy for Detroit

by EILEEN JOY I just thought I would share with everyone here a talk I recently delivered at George Washington University as part of a symposium on “Ecological Movement,” sponsored by GW’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, and which also featured remarks from Jennifer James, Lowell Duckert, and Stacy Alaimo. I share it in[…]