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Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects [new from punctum books]

<You can download the book for FREE or purchase the print edition [for a mere $17.00] HERE.>

Edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen

 

Animal, Mineral, Vegetable examines what happens when we cease to assume that only humans exert agency. Through a careful examination of medieval, early modern and contemporary lifeworlds, these essays collectively argue against ecological anthropocentricity. Sheep, wolves, camels, flowers, cotton, chairs, magnets, landscapes, refuse and gems are more than mere objects. They act; they withdraw; they make demands; they connect within lively networks that might foster a new humanism, or that might proceed with indifference towards human affairs. Through what ethics do we respond to these activities and forces? To what futures do these creatures and objects invite us, especially when they appear within the texts and cultures of the “distant” past?

Contents: Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University):“Introduction: All Things” – Karl Steel (Brooklyn College): “With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf Child of Hesse” – Sharon Kinoshita (University of California, Santa Cruz):“Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire” – Kellie Robertson (University of Wisconsin-Madison):“Exemplary Rocks” – Valerie Allen (John Jay College of Criminal Justice): “Mineral Virtue” – Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University): “Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency” – Carla Nappi (University of British Columbia): “You Don’t Mess With The Yohan: Cotton, Objects, and Becoming Vegetal in Early Modern China” – Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan): “The Human and the Floral” –Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville): “You Are Here: A Manifesto” – Julian Yates (University of Delaware): “Sheep Tracks” – Julia Reinhard Lupton (University of California, Irvine): “Of Chairs, Stools and Trestle Tables: Scenes from the Renaissance Res Publica of Things”

Response essays: Lowell Duckert, “A Slower (Non)humanities” – Jonathan Gil Harris, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Twenty Questions” – Nedda Mehdizadeh, “Ruinous Monument’: Transporting Objects in Herbert’s Persepolis” Read more

postmedieval volume 3, issue 1: Becoming Media

CURRENT ISSUE

About the cover

Co-Editors:
Jen Boyle and Martin Foys

  • Editors’ Introduction: “Becoming Media”
  • “Danse macabre and the virtual churchyard”
    Seeta Chaganti
  • “Writing in water”
    E. J. Christie
  • “Reproducible media in the early fifteenth century, mostly Italian”
    Arne Flaten
  • “‘Thinking with things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt”
    Julia Reinhard Lupton
  • “Wayless abyss: Mysticism, mediation and divine nothingness”
    Eugene Thacker
  • “Plant–>animal–> book: Magnifying a microhistory of media circuits”
    [Digital Essay: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v3/n1/plantanimalbook/ ]
    Whitney Trettien
  • Book Review Essay: “Scraping by: Towards a pre-historic criticism”
    Juliet Fleming

[See postmedieval site at Palgrave for more information on this issue.]

The Second Biennial BABEL Conference

David Fried, Way of Words, No. 3: “A mind once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimension.”

cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university
20-22 September 2012                 Boston, Massachusetts

***SEE CALL FOR PAPERS ON BABEL MEETING SITE***

[co-organized by the BABEL Working Group, Boston College, Northeastern University, M.I.T., postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, and punctum books]

FEATURED SPEAKERS:

Jane Bennett (Chair, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University)

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen  (George Washington University, Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute + In The Middle)

Carolyn Dinshaw (Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English at New York University), author ofChaucer’s Sexual Poetics (1989)

Lindy Elkins-Tanton (Director, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution for Science)

David Kaiser (Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Department Head of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, M.I.T.)

Marget Long (MFA, Rhode Island School of Design)

Sans façon (Glasgow, Scotland)

“Read more”  for all the details about the featured presenters, the conference theme and call for papers, and the conference organizers Read more

dead letter office: a new imprint of BABEL and punctum books

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 of value that cannot be returned are sold at auction, except for pornography and firearms. The auctions also occasionally include items seized by postal inspectors and property being retired from postal service.

~“Dead letter office,” Wikipedia entry

punctum books is pleased to announce a new imprint, in partnership with the BABEL Working Group:

dead letter office

dead letter office will publish small chapbook-style works, of approximately 20 to 40 pages, representing work that either has “gone nowhere” or will likely go nowhere, yet retains nevertheless little inkdrops of possibility and beauty and the darkling shape of a more full-bodied form and structure — to whit: the conference or seminar paper that will never become an article, the stray pages for a half-baked article that will never become the full-baked article, the half-finished chapter that will never make it into the book or the dissertation, the outlines and notes and semi-polished pages for manuscripts that are simply unfinish-able, the essay that can find no welcoming harbor (and that you half-suspect is ill-conceived but likely isn’t), the prospectus for the project you can never seem to find your way to start, the prolegomenon and preamble without follow-up, the stray children of your pen, the letter you wrote then tucked away in a drawer, fearing to mail it, or the one you sent and received again, with the stamp, “return to sender,” or which was never received or returned, that you perhaps lost (then re-found). Read more

Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory-Atelier [Forthcoming from punctum books (Spring 2012)]

Edited by The Petropunk Collective (Eileen A. Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O’Rourke)

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 medieval studies, and contemporary speculative realist and object-oriented philosophies. In its medieval formulation,speculatio signifies the essentially reflective and imaginative operations of the intellect. Here the world, books, and mind itself are all conceived as specula (mirrors) through which the hermeneutic gaze can gain access to what lies beyond it. “To know is to bend over a mirror where the world is reflected, to descry images reflected from sphere to sphere: the medieval man was always before a mirror, both when he looked around himself and when he surrendered to his own imagination” (Giorgio Agamben,Stanzas).  Correlatively, speculative realism, as the term suggests, is characterized by the self-contradictory intensity of a desire for thought that can think beyond itself – a desire that proceeds, like all philosophy, in a twisted and productive relation to the phantasm of the word. Aiming to rise above and tunnel below the thought-being or self-world correlation, speculative realism “depart[s] from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage[s] in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself” (The Speculative Turn). Speculative Medievalisms, like some weird friar-alchemist in an inexistent romance, plays the erotic go-between for these text-centered and text-eccentric intellectual domains by trying to transmute the space between past and present modes of speculation from shared blindness to love at first sight. Possibly succeeding, the volume brings together the work of a motley crew of philosophers and medievalists into prismatic relation. Read more

Featured Articles

Recent Articles

2
Feb

postmedieval volume 2, issue 3: New Critical Modes

Co-Editors:
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Cary Howie

  • Editors’ Introduction: “Novelty”
  • “A critical poetics of allure: 10 antiphons for the bringing-to-appearance of the place of allure as a complicity of human and non-human matter in writing, or, the Physis of the Whale in Anglo-Saxon England”
    Daniel C. Remein
  • “Getting medieval in real time”
    Richard Godden
  • “Flirting as a critical mode: Barthes, Alcibiades, Sartre”
    Anna Klosowska
  • “‘An abecedarium for the elements”
    Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
  • “On medieval blogging” [Interview]
    Brantley L. Bryant and Carl S. Pyrdum III,
  • “Like two autistic moonbeams entering the window of my asylum: Chaucer’s Griselda and Lars von Trier’s Bess McNeill’”
    Eileen A. Joy
  • “Means of transport”
    Cary Howie
  • Always already new: The possibilities of the enfolded instant”
    Karmen McKendrick
  • “Manuscript thinking: Stories by hand”
    Catherine Brown
  • Book Review Essay: “Re-viewing the eastern Mediterranean”
    Sharon Kinoshita
[See postmedieval site at Palgrave for more information on this issue.]
27
Jan

West[Michigan]ward, Ho! 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies

 by EILEEN JOY

The schedule for the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies [10-12 May 2012, Western Michigan University] is now published, and that means this is the time of year to start thinking about which chain-mail dress you want to pack, which medievalists you want to either hug or slap this coming May, and how you are going to sneak your way into Elizabeth Teviotdale’s bedroom, thereby ensuring better time slots at next year’s Kalamazoo — that is, if you’re a great lover and you’re her type [gosh, I really hope Liz Teviotdale has a good sense of humor; I think she does, actually].All kidding aside, I thought I would highlight here some sessions that In The Middle-ers, BABEL, postmedieval, and GW-MEMSI will be involved in, and PLEASE feel free to tell us in the comments section which sessions you think we should take note of [and yes, isn't it refreshing to use those dangling participles, now that we're allowed to?]. I know there are a LOT more sessions I am not listing here that promise to be REALLY interesting, like Session 124 on “Thing Theory and Object-Oriented Studies in Medieval Contexts” and Session 437 on “Cosmopolitanism in the Middle Ages,” and I could go on and on, but I won’t.  Read more »
27
Jan

Fuck Pessimism: Embrace Youngsterism

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 Poethical Wager

Thanks to Jeffrey’s recent post on Tweeting the MLA Conference [a conference, moreover, that included a concerted attention upon the digital humanities and its possible future(s)], a very lively set of comments emerged, and I’m glad they have because they arrived at the exact moment I was contemplating writing a post titled “Fuck Pessimism,” and gave me some extra fuel. Late December and early January is a queer time of year–on the one hand, it heralds [if even as a mirage] new beginnings and re-tooled ambitions and second [and third and fourth and so on] chances as well as a chance to pause and rest and refresh; on the other hand, for many of us working in literature, history, philosophy, cultural studies, new media, and foreign languages departments, it signifies that annual meeting [MLA, AHA, APA, etc.] where hundreds and hundreds of anxious and well-trained and talented job seekers gather to make the best pitch they can for some future job security, and this at a time when the economic picture for those in the humanities does not look so hot [although recent numbers do indicate a slight up-tick in available jobs], and the American economy in general kind of sucks, and everyone is admittedly worried about the future of academic publishing. Read more »

21
Oct

I’ll Stop the World and Melt With You: A Plea for Inextricability, for Staying Awake, and for an Insomniac Humanities

by EILEEN JOY

for Brantley Bryant

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 undead.
(Aranye Fradenburg, “My Worldes Blisse: Chaucer’s Tragedy of Fortune”)

leave your possessions, positions, ambitions at home,
temporarily quit the human race;
how long can we stay?
the fairies with the stars won’t say;
it all depends on your money . . . or your case.
(poem written by an anonymous American while incarcerated in a Chinese prison, from This American Life, Episode 448, Adventure!, Act I: “Chinese Checkmate”)

What we need is an account . . . of how the complications of praise may be thought, said, and sung together with the complications of truth and, yes, pleasure.
(Cary Howie, “Inextricable,” Glossator 4: Occitan Poetry)

Before beginning, a disclaimer and a frank personal aside: I am well aware that some people are afflicted by chronic and long-term bouts of insomnia, and that this can be a horrible thing to live with, and I am not meaning in any way with my post here to minimize or overlook that fact. For a brief period, when I was working on my MFA in the early 1990s and living in Richmond, Virginia, over a period of about a year, I had a terrible and long battle with insomnia that was also combined with an illogical anxiety that if I went to sleep, I would die. I never actually sought help for this (because I was young and stupid), but spent many late nights and early mornings riding my bicycle through the lamp-lit streets of the historic Fan district in Richmond in order to wear myself out, and also because I believed that, by cycling, I was keeping myself alive. I had a lot of interesting “visions,” epiphanies, “visitations,” and hallucinations on these bike rides, some of which made it into my fiction writing, and one of which convinced me I had cracked the “code” of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” but mainly, it was just a horrible period in my life. It didn’t help that, at the time, I was also — how shall I put this? — a total pothead. But I must admit, I have some nostalgia for those visions and visitations, which were, for lack of a better way to describe them, windows that momentarily cracked open to reveal to me the frail yet tender interconnectedness of everything, human and inhuman, past and present (Richmond is a truly Southern gothic city in which the past is always visible), as well as the shining beauty of the world. In short, even when sick and afraid, I’m an optimist [or is it" hopeless aesthete?]. Read more »

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