The Arts of Living / Epicurean Rain

This short essay, co-authored with L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, in the edited 2-volume collection BURN AFTER READING, eds. Eileen A. Joy, Myra Seaman, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Oliphaunt Books, 2014), ruminates the importance of the humanities as an important space for the artfulness of living, for enriched environments, and real-time experimental ecologies that donate valuable resources, not just for surviving, but thriving. The essay also urges a move, for the university, to the para-academic Outside, where it might help spawn a vibrant network of Outstitutions and a materialist Epicureanism for new and sustaining historical trajectories

Unlearning: A Duologue

In this free-wheeling back-and-forth conversation (or, rhizomatic duologue), originally presented at Trinity College Dublin in September 2014 as part of the School of Education's "Pedagoics of Unlearning" conference, and now published as a chapter in THE PEDAGOGICS OF UNLEARNING, eds. Eamonn Dunne and Aidan Seery (punctum, 2016), L.O. Aranye Fradenburg and Eileen A. Joy investigate the multiple valences and traces of the terms “learning” and “unlearning,” while also bringing those terms into contact with psychoanalytic theory, discontinuist temporalities, autopoiesis, living (biological) process, ethology, intersubjectivity, attachment and affect, ecological thought, radical doubt (and hope), the Real, “holding” environments, politics, neoliberalism, the ethics of care, institutionality, creatureliness, failure, mourning, and yearning

Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts

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 “artfulness,” including the art of making knowledge. Humanist pedagogy and research use play and intersubjective exchange to foster forms of artfulness critical to the future of our species. From perception to reality-testing to concept-formation and logic, the arts and humanities teach us to see, hear and respond more keenly, and to imagine, or “model,” new futures and possibilities. Bringing together psychoanalysis, neuroscience, animal behavioral research, biology & evolutionary theory, and premodern literarature (from Virgil to Chaucer to Shakespeare), Fradenburg offers a bracing polemic against the technocrats of higher education and a vibrant new vision for the humanities as both living art and new life science. Contrary to recent polemics that simply urge the humanities to become more scientistic or technology-focused, to demonstrate their utility or even trophy their uselessness, Staying Alive does something remarkably different: it argues for the humanism of a new scientific paradigm based on complexity theory and holistic and ecological approaches to knowledge-making. It urges us to take the further step of realizing not only that we can promote and enhance neuroplastic connectivity and social-emotional cognition, but also that the humanities have always already been doing so. “Nature always exceeds itself in its expressivity” — which is to say that living is itself an art, and artfulness is necessary for living: for adaptation and innovation, for forging rich and varied relationships with other minds, bodies and things, and thus, for thriving — whether in the boardroom or the art gallery, the biology lab or the recording studio, the alley or the playground, the book or the dream

Students and Teachers: An Interview with Aranye Fradenburg Joy

This essay showcases the pedagogic philosophy and legacy of UC Santa Barbara Professor Emerita Aranye Fradenburg Joy, a Chaucerian distinguished by her contributions to feminist, psychoanalytic and new historicist thought. The piece features an interview between Fradenburg Joy’s former PhD student, University of Iowa Professor Kathy Lavezzo, in which Fradenburg describes her approach to teaching as well as her experiences with a host of teaching instructors and mentors. In addition, Lavezzo shares and discusses some of the notes she took as a TA for Fradenburg’s Canterbury Tales class, and recalls, with UC Berkeley Professor Maura Nolan, Fradenburg’s teaching style and its considerable impact on them as students, teachers and researchers. Ultimately, this piece registers intellectual gifts handed down by not only an important Chaucerian, but also a genealogy of professors who have passed to the next generation valuable knowledge on teaching a paradigmatic medieval work