by EILEEN JOY To become adult in our culture (which for most of us means to become compliantly productive) is . . . to be increasingly disabled for the kinds of humorous and dire, purposeful play that creates geometries of attention revelatory of silences in the terrifying tenses that elude official grammars. –Joan Retallack, The[…]
by EILEEN JOY Yes, Virginia, there is a Swedish Twitter University, and I am going to give a Twitter lecture for them, “More Notes Toward a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism,” tomorrow at 8:00 pm GMT, which means 3:00 pm for you East-Coasters and so on and so forth, according to your own timeline. The Swedish[…]
by EILEEN JOY Erratic angels, like the incubus-demon, the Fairy King and Merlin, are the vicars or intermediaries who make possible the world’s vibrancy by enabling contact and relation. They allow the emergence of transformative textualities, even while they themselves are left behind at that luminous advent. –Jeffrey Cohen, “Sublunary” Perhaps then the sublunary, as[…]
by EILEEN JOY The United States Postal Service started a dead letter office in 1825 to deal with undeliverable mail. In 2006 approximately 90 million undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA) items ended up in this office; where the rightful owners cannot be identified, the correspondence is destroyed to protect customer privacy, and enclosed items of value are removed.Items[…]
by EILEEN JOY [cross-posted to In The Middle] In the 16 October 2011 edition of The Chronicle Review, an essay appeared by Jeffrey J. Williams, “The Brief, Wondrous Life of the Theory Journal,” which argues that a certain “wave” of new theory journals in the 1970s (with the founding of journals such as New Literary[…]
by JEFFREY COHEN [cross-posted to In The Middle] Below, a portion of my introduction to Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects. Follow the previous link to read its table of contents. The volume is the first of several to be published through a partnership between GW MEMSI and punctum books. Pleas also consider liking Oliphaunt[…]
by EILEEN JOY [cross-posted to In The Middle] Every known object rotates as if: b. keeping busy c. stunned –Rae Armantrout, “Arrivals” We address the question of our aliveness to the object of fascination because contemplating such an object allows us to suspend our aliveness without suffering from it; in reverie, in gazing, we are[…]
If the Middle Ages is a machine of the Great Indoors, of the Ptolemaic world, of the cosmic egg, then we have to think the Great Indoors is living in the Great Outdoors, not just pointing to it from within. –Nicola Masciandaro, from his closing remarks to Speculative Medievalisms 2: A Laboratory-Atelier by EILEEN JOY[…]