“The world too much with us? Rot!”: William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Literary Perception

This paper examines the poetics of perception and the accompanying moral commitments of William Carlos Williams’s poetry, paying attention in particular to the visual ethos of his work. If in his early years Williams conceptualized the poet’s function as “lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses.” One of the chief arguments here is that this emphasis be understood as an expansive and ethically implicating one, rather than in creatively circumscribing terms. “Such war, as the arts live and breathe by,” Williams asserts in 1944, “is continuous.” After establishing the ethical basis for Williams’s poetics, this paper assesses the perceptual politics of his work of the 1940s specifically, and in a number of literary and historical contexts, including: his revisionary engagement with William Wordsworth and the Romantic tradition; his infamous poetic “exultation” at the bombing of London in 1941 and his elegy for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and his politically complex and often incendiary poems of social observation in these years. As such, this article both reveals and interrogates the sometimes contradictory ethical engagements and creative procedures that define Williams’s work in a period of profound political crisis

Soulful bodies and superflat temporalities: a nomadology of the otaku database of world history at the ends of history

This thesis is a philosophical engagement with the popular, low, and vernacular theories of History performed and expressed within contemporary Japanese manga (‘comics’) and anime (‘limited animation’), and most importantly, in the global production and consumption of otaku (‘manga and anime fan’) cultural and media ecologies. My project is rooted in a reading of the post-structural theoretical inquiries of Gilles Deleuze in parallel with what media theorist McKenzie Wark calls ‘otaku philosophy’ to examine how both high and low theories articulate anxieties and fascinations with the global theoretical discourses on ‘the ends of History’ and the imminent demise of industrial modernity. The first portion of the thesis is dedicated to a reading of the Japanese counter-cultural manga movement called gekiga (‘dramatic pictures’). In traversing gekiga’s post-war lineages to its revival in the medievalism of otaku artists Miura Kentarō and Yukimura Makoto, the first part postulates on what an anti-modern, anti-historical approach – or what Deleuze and Guattari call a nomadology – might look and feel like as it is mediated in the manga form. The second portion of the thesis examines the way in which Japanese anime mobilises the philosophies of nomadology in its filmic form and transmedial properties. In a critical assessment of the anime works of the otaku-founded media corporation Type-Moon, this section explores the Fate series alongside Deleuzian film and media philosophies to explore the infinite potentialities and recursive limitations of otaku nomadologies as they materialise beyond the screen. By reassessing the rise of otaku culture as a vernacular, global, and cosmopolitan rise in the critique of modernity and History, this thesis hopes to explore how transcultural and transmedial fan philosophies of historicity, memory, and temporality can be recontextualised within current academic debates about the efficacy of post-national historiographic pedagogies explored in the fields of postcolonial studies, comparative studies, global studies, and media studies

NP: New Press

Dedicated to the formation of the “social and economic combinations” of new presses, the dissertation NP: New Press addresses the question: What does innovation look like in the publishing context? Its answer—as it assists in the formation of new institutionally-based publishing units—paradoxically involves a certain refusal to answer that question at all, since it is only when NP discovers new projects that it facilitates the collective formation of a business plan and in fact a new press. NP then deliberately moves on to another institution, to the building of yet another new press, since internal to NP is the idea that innovation arrives only in the starting anew, with different people, with different projects, within different institutions, in different locations