A Garden of Wandering: A Response to Simon During

This short essay is part of a Forum centered upon responses to Simon During's essay, “Precariousness, Literature and the Humanities Today,” Australian Humanities Review 58 (May 2015), and argues (following Nicholas Bourriaud's figure of the radicant) for the becoming-itinerant of humanistic practice, as well as for reinventing the Academy as a wandering (and welcoming) Pavilion of Thought, especially under the contemporary aegis of neoliberal precarity

Dark Chaucer: An Assortment

Although widely beloved for its playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer’s poetry is also subtly shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom, scenes and events where everything could possibly go horribly wrong or where everything that matters seems, if even momentarily, altogether and irretrievably lost. And then sometimes, things really do go wrong. Opting to dilate rather than cordon off this darkness, this volume assembles a variety of attempts to follow such moments into their folds of blackness and horror, to chart their endless sorrows and recursive gloom, and to take depth soundings in the darker recesses of the Chaucerian lakes in order to bring back palm- or bite-sized pieces (black jewels) of bitter Chaucer that could be shared with others . . . an “assortment,” if you will. You never know what you will find in the dark. Contents: Candace Barrington, “Dark Whiteness: Benjamin Brawley and Chaucer” – Brantley L. Bryant & Alia, “Saturn’s Darkness” – Ruth Evans, “A Dark Stain and a Non-Encounter” – Gaelan Gilbert, “Chaucerian Afterlives: Reception and Eschatology” – Leigh Harrison, “Black Gold: The Former (and Future) Age” – Nicola Masciandaro, “Half Dead: Parsing Cecelia” – J. Allan Mitchell, “In the Event of the Franklin’s Tale” – Travis Neel & Andrew Richmond, “Black as the Crow” – Hannah Priest, “Unravelling Constance” – Lisa Schamess, “L’O de V: A Palimpsest” – Myra Seaman, “Disconsolate Art” – Karl Steel, “Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye” – Elaine Treharne, “The Physician’s Tale as Hagioclasm” – Bob Valasek, “The Light has Lifted: Pandare Trickster” – Lisa Weston, “Suffer the Little Children, or, A Rumination on the Faith of Zombies” – Thomas White, “The Dark Is Light Enough: The Layout of the Tale of Sir Thopas.” This assortment of dark morsels also features a prose-poem Preface by Gary Shipley.

Beowulf and the floating wreck of history

In his Introduction to A Beowulf Handbook, John Niles writes that future Beowulf studies are likely to reflect an increasing self-consciousness about both the historicity of Anglo- Saxon scholarship and the theoretical underpinnings of literary scholarship in general. 1 There have been many scholars who have recently been attending to this task, especially in order to trace the connections between the historical and political issues of English linguistic imperialism and cultural colonization and the history of Old English studies, with the intention of raising what Allen Frantzen has termed a critical self-consciousness among Old English scholars, such that they might be willing to rethink their practices and subjects within the larger arena of Cultural Studies, while still continuing to emphasize the close study of language and history.2 As a result, it is no longer news that Anglo- Saxon England and the Middle Ages are, to a certain extent, cultural constructs that have arisen out of the negotiations and interactions between scholars and their subjects, and therefore, efforts thus far to construct disciplinary genealogies often focus on persons, texts, and textual events that tend to underline the notions that Anglo-Saxon England is mainly a discursive formation and that scholarly disciplines are mainly ideological enterprises and power discourses which, over the course of time, cover over their political origins through various acts of repression and forgetting. While it seems apparent that disciplines maintain their institutional existence and authority–that they endure–through the discourses of one or more dominant ideologies, hidden or overt, and through historically codified systems of doctrine, it is the argument of this dissertation that the discipline of Beowulf studies emerges out of a series of historical accidents intersecting-sometimes randomly, sometimes more purposefully-with what Michel Foucault called the more enduring structures of history, 3 in much the same way Beowulf exists for us today, not as the singular fruit of a long and purposeful enterprise of a unified nationalist bibliography, but rather, as one of the more beautiful scraps of the floating wreck of history. Furthermore, the scholars of our discipline cannot be construed as knowing subjects embodying transcendental notions of language and history; rather, caught in the pitch and tide of existential time, their lives and careers represent, not the fixity of any one idea, but the flux of ideas. This study constructs a narrative of Anglo-Saxon scholarship from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries that will hopefully draw a picture of both the always historically contingent nature of the scholarly enterprise as well as the necessity of rethinking that enterprise in ways that could connect the study of an Anglo-Saxon text like Beowulf with one of the most pressing and urgent questions in the university community today: why are humanities studies necessary? Given the current state of the American university, which, as Bill Readings has shown so cogently in his book The University in Ruins, has become a kind of transnational techno-bureaucratic economically-driven corporation, the very question of the value of culture (detached from its role in building bureaucratic excellence ) has reached a crisis point. Readings convincingly argues in his book that we need to find a way to both recognize the historical anachronism at the heart of the space of the university (it is no longer the perfect model of a rational community, nor the sole legitimator of what culture means), while also continuing to hold that space open as one site among others where the question of being-together is raised, which is another way of saying that the university is quite possibly the best site (if somewhat structurally and ideologically past) for holding open the temporality of questioning culture\u27s relationship to history and vice versa, and this dissertation aims to demonstrate that the study of Beowulf can play an important role in this project

I Have Kept My Heart Yellow: Stories

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University

Introduction: The Work, or the Agency, of the Nonhuman in Premodern Art

An overview of the "state of the field" of critical posthumanist studies that also argues for the important intervention of premodern studies into contemporary critical posthumanism studies, and which serves as the Introduction (with chapter summaries) to "Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism," eds. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (Ohio State University Press, 2016)

Exteriority Is Not a Negation, But a Marvel: Hospitality, Terrorism, Levinas, Beowulf

This essay considers Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of hospitality in relation to the “isolated and heroic being that the state produces by its virile virtues,” through an analysis of female Chechen suicide terrorists in contemporary Russia and the figure of Grendel in the Old English poem "Beowulf," in order to raise some questions about the relation between violence, justice, and sovereignty, both in the Middle Ages and in our own time

The Signs and Location of a Flight (or Return?) of Time: The Old English WONDERS OF THE EAST and the Gujarat Massacre

In this essay, I examine two widely divergent instances of what I understand to be a compulsive and racialized-sexualized violence against women whose bodies have been figured as "foreign"/Eastern (and even, as animal and barbaric) threats within collective national bodies: the real case of a massacre in the modern state of Gujarat in southwestern India in 2002 and the imaginative case of Alexander the Great’s massacre of a "race" of giant, masculinized "women" in the fantasized Babilonia of the Anglo-Saxon "Wonders of the East." Both cases reveal, I believe, certain persistent social anxieties about the racialized female body as, in Elizabeth Grosz’s terms, “a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order,” and a “contagion.” Out of the horror and disgust that sometimes arises in the encounter with the female body that is perceived as aggressively monstrous, and which is seen to mark, in the words of William Ian Miller, “a recognition of danger to our purity,” we can trace a very ancient and ritualized type of reactionary (riotous, yet also highly controlled) violence that is both morally condemnatory and sublimely (even sexually) ecstatic, and which can be seen, to a greater and more restrained degree, respectively, in the Gujarat genocide and the Old English text

Thomas Smith, Humfrey Wanley, and the "Little-Known Country" of the Cotton Library

Although there were many handwritten, often informal catalogues of Sir Robert Cotton's manuscripts and books during his lifetime and in the years afterwards, the desire for an official printed catalogue which could be circulated in the public realm did not really bear fruit until the late 1600s. And when two versions finally did appear -- the Reverend Thomas Smith's in 1696 and Humfrey Wanley's in 1705 -- they represented the fruits of bibliographic labours undertaken with great care and anxiety over the individual mastery of a summum of texts delimited by the contingencies (social, political, economic, geographical, and otherwise) of time and place, as well as over the perceived importance of indexing and preserving a national literary heritage well before the academic disciplines of systematic bibliography, literary history, or English studies even existed. In the often fractious relationship between Smith and Wanley, a productive convergence resulted that helped pave the way for a new union bibliography, and the evidence would seem to suggest that when it came to the conception and articulation of the necessity for a universal comparative catalogue in the early modern period, Wanley was the chief (if often underappreciated) conscience of English bibliography

You Are Here: A Manifesto

This essay ruminates the ethics of a co-implicated, bounded dependence between objects (human and otherwise) that are always in some sense withdrawing from each other but also always together in a some-place labeled "here": the world (where no Absolute or Outside vantage point is possible or habitable). This essay also considers the possibility, through literary studies, of building more capacious networks of more affectively companionable sentience (with texts seen as actants that possess sentience and what Jane Bennett calls "vibrant materiality")

Here Be Monsters: A Punctum Publishing Primer

Relative to many of the ongoing discussions and debates around the changing (and often precarious) landscapes of scholarly publishing, and especially around Open Access publishing, we at punctum books have put together a sort of "primer" (which also serves as our own, expanded vision statement) on what we see as the perils of the commodification and privitisation of the dissemination of university research, and how we feel academic publishing (ideally university-, and even more so, library-based publishing) should be proceeding. This "primer" also serves as a call to faculty-researchers who we feel are not paying as close enough attention to these issues as they should, with tips for how they can help us to move to more equitable, democratic, open, caring, and accessible forms of academic publishing. The PDF archived here does not preserve the embedded URL hyperlinks of the original, which are important in term of providing the research resources. To access the original post, with embedded hyperlinks, go here: https://punctumbooks.com/blog/here-be-monsters-a-punctum-publishing-primer/