Published: 10/21/2013
Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts fiercely defends the liberal arts in and from an age of neoliberal capital and techno-corporatization run amok, arguing that the public university’s purpose is not vocational training, but rather the cultivation of what Fradenburg calls “artfulness,” including the art of making knowledge. In addition to sustained[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 05/23/2013
A Sanctuary of Sounds is an aural rewriting of William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1931). A polyphonic object. A garden — assemblage of blooms, of affects, of sounds, of meaning. An invitation to rethink appropriation ethically, aesthetically, and epistemologically. The appropriation of a body of work, of a physical body, of an idea, of data. The[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 04/28/2013
In the dead letter office, you will find a Memoir American. The texts which comprise it — forms of essay, talk, dialogue — at one time saw themselves as individualists who went somewhere (to small press magazines) on their own. Now they are here, collected with the chance of going nowhere together. As it should[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 11/29/2012
John Gardner’s career was permanently changed by his publication of On Moral Fiction (1978), a controversial and derided assessment of the state of literature as Gardner saw it. By arguing for a return to greater seriousness and moral commitments in literature, Gardner found himself attacked on all sides by critics and writers who found his[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 12/05/2012
“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 08/13/2012
The death by suicide of Gary J. Shipley’s close friend, Conrad Unger (writer, theorist and amateur entomologist), has prompted him to confront not only the cold machinery of self-erasure, but also its connections to the literary life and notions surrounding psychological bewitchment, to revaluate in both fictional and entomological terms just what it is that[…]
Published: 01/26/2012
Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! (2000) encapsulates two thousand years’ worth of utterances in a symbolic act of remembrance and expression of despair for the current age, in which we find “our minds and ears fouled by degraded public speech—by media hype, insipid sermons, hollow political rhetoric, and the ritual misuse of words.” Through 120 densely allusive[…]
Published: 01/17/2013
Proceedings from the two Speculative Medievalisms symposia, held at King’s College London (Jan. 2011) and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (Sep. 2011), and organized by The Petropunk Collective (Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O’Rourke). These interdisciplinary events were dedicated to dialogue and cross-contamination between traditional concepts of speculatio, present-minded premodern[…]