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8
Nov

postmedieval volume 1 issue 3: Critical Exchanges

Volume 1, Issue 3:
Critical Exchanges: ‘Bruce Holsinger’s The Premodern Condition’ / ‘The State(s) of Early English Studies’

Volume 1, Issue 3: Critical Exchanges: ‘Bruce Holsinger's The Premodern Condition’ / ‘The State(s) of Early English Studies’

This issue features two clusters of essays.

Bruce Holsinger’s critically lauded 2005 book The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory presented an elegant excavation of the medieval influences undergirding the work of some of the most brilliant thinkers of the postwar French intelligentsia, elaborating the ‘medievalisms’ that are so deeply constitutive of modern theory. In the first critical exchange, Louise D’Arcens, Claire Monagle and Stephanie Trigg, three scholars who work, from various angles, in medievalism and medieval cultural studies, discuss The Premodern Condition, with a response from Bruce Holsinger.

‘The State(s) of Early English Studies’ forms a series of dispatches from some of the ‘fronts’ of Old English and Anglo Saxon Studies, asking how we might sketch out some of the futures (with an emphasis on the plural) of an early English studies that is not (and never really was) a realm apart from either later periods within literary-historical studies or from contemporary life and thought. ‘The States(s) of Early English Studies’ is collaboration with The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe, and the remaining essays in the cluster can be read free online in that journal.

Issue 1.3 (Fall / Winter 2010)

 

 

4
Nov

BABEL Conference 2010: Conference program

1st Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group

“after the end: the humanities, medieval studies, and the post-catastrophe”

4-6 November 2010

University of Texas at Austin*

*co-sponsored by the BABEL Working Group, University of Texas at Austin, College of Charleston, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and Palgrave Macmillan

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

[for information on how to register, where to stay, how to get around, where to eat, etc., go HERE]

Abandoned Mining Town (Kolmanskop, Namibia)

*all images in program are from artificial owl: the most fascinating abandoned man-made creations

*Thursday and Friday sessions @ AT&T Center; Saturday Sessions @ University Teaching Center

Thursday, November 4th

REGISTRATION: 11:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

AT&T Center @ Amphitheater

* * * * *

1:00 – 2:30 p.m.

Session 1. Technologies of Narration

AT&T 102

Organizer: Scott Garbacz, University of Texas at Austin

Chair: Scott Garbacz

“Technologies bombard human beings with a ceaseless offer of previously unheard-of positions — engagements, suggestions, allowances, interdictions, habits, positions, alienations, prescriptions, calculations, memories. Generalizing the notion of affordance, we could say that the quasi-subjects which we all are become such thanks to the quasi-objects which populate our universe with minor ghostly beings similar to us and whose programmes of action we may or may not adopt.” –Bruno Latour, “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means”

It has long been recognized that reading acts and processes are both culturally produced and culturally productive. Yet as we move further into the 21st Century, “New Media” technologies are changing the array of possibilities for storytelling — and in the process, as Latour points out, violently reshaping the array of (now clearly interdependent and non-rational) subject positions available. Modes ranging from blogs to guerilla marketing to ratings-driven television to massively multiplayer video games are taking on new cultural prominence, challenging the previous dominance of the printed word (the prime constitutive technology of the so-called “modern” period, driving productions ranging from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Joyce’sUlysses). As we consider life and consciousness “after the end” of print culture’s methodologies and verities, it is worthwhile also to consider pre-modern technologies of cognition and visual imagination, whose explicit intertextuality and alien cultural matrix may shed new light on potentialities for the intersection of narrative and consciousness. Read more »

4
Nov

BABEL Conference 2010 Call for Papers

1st Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group

after the end: medieval studies, the humanities, and the post-catastrophe

4-6 November 2010

University of Texas at Austin

[co-organized by the BABEL Working Group, University of Texas at Austin, College of Charleston, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, andPalgrave Macmillan]

[See conference program here]

abandoned building, post-Chernobyl disaster (Prypiat, Ukraine)

That a major shift in the role and function of the intellectual is occurring is clear. What it will have come to have meant is an issue upon which those in the University should attempt to have an impact. An attention to this problematic is necessary. How we pay attention to it is not determined. Therein lies the freedom and the enormous responsibility of Thought at the end of the twentieth century, which is also the end of what has been the epoch of the nation-state. (Bill Readings, The University in Ruins)

One thinks in the Humanities the irreducibility of their outside and of their future. One thinks in the Humanities that one cannot and must not let oneself be enclosed within the inside of the Humanities. But for this thinking to be strong and consistent requires the Humanities. (Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition”)

This conference will bring together medievalists with scholars and theorists working in later periods in the humanities in order to collectively take up the broad question of what happens “after the end,” by which we mean after the end of the affair, the end of the world, and everything in between. After gender, sex, love, the family, the nation-state, the body, the human, language, truth, feeling, reason, ethics, modernity, politics, religion, God, the nation-state, secularism, liberalism, the humanities, the university, teleology, progress, history, historicism, narrative, meaning, the individual, singularity, theory, practice, what else is there? Here, we mean to hopefully inspire a set of discussions and debates relative to the “post” of the subjects we study within (and beyond) the humanities: can we really ever be “after” anything, and if so, in what (productive and/or perilous) ways, and what next? We are also interested in cultivating some ruminations upon Teresa de Lauretis’s call in 2o03 at the symposium organized by Critical Inquiry, that

now may be a time for the human sciences to reopen the questions of subjectivity, materiality, discusivity, knowledge, to reflect on the post of posthumanity. It is a time to break the piggy bank of saved conceptual schemata and reinstall uncertainty in all theoretical applications, starting with the primacy of the cultural and its many “turns”: linguistic, discursive, performative, therapeutic, ethical, you name it. . . . Perhaps there can be no survival without the gnawing, dull pain of betrayal. Perhaps only betrayal leads to the apprehension of otherness and another cognition of the now. But do not ask me how or what, not yet.

Further, for medievalists especially, but also for modernists, can we really ever be “after history” or “post-historical,” and if so, what would now count as the Real of our studies; if not, in what ways do history and historicism still matter? Read more »

16
May

BABEL @ Kalamazoo 2010 (the photographic evidence)

BABEL Suite Late-Night Goings-On: Kalamazoo 2010

[specific individuals are not identified in photos so as to protect the pure and the unholy]

Read more »

16
May

Kalamazoo 2010: BABEL & postmedieval sessions


Abandoned, Never Completed Hotel (North Taiwan)

45th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University
13-16 May 2010  Kalamazoo, MI

[See informal photos of BABEL at Kalamazoo 2010, if you dare]

I. BABEL Working Group panels:

1. Session 444: On The Question of Style (Roundtable)

Saturday, May 15th @ 1:30 p.m. (Fetzer 1005)

Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Organizer and Presider

In recent years we have had some provocative experiments in style in medieval studies. In her book The Shock of Medievalism, Kathleen Biddick stages an imagined conversation between the Venerable Bede, a Stanford dean, a professor of Old English, and a Chicana feminist critic in order to write a “historical poetics of mourning and rememoration.” In his book Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey Cohen tells a personal story about the catastrophe of 9/11 and his son’s anxieties over his father’s travels that is intimately connected to the larger purpose of his book: to describe the “possible bodies” of both the Middle Ages and our own times. Cohen also re-tells the history of Alfred’s struggles with the Vikings through Alfred’s hemorrhoids. In her review of David Wallace’s Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn, Jenna Mead terms Wallace’s critical mode ficto-criticism, a “genre that inserts autobiographical self-realization into theoretically-conscious critical scholarship . . . rethinking the generic and thus intellectual boundaries of canonical criticism.” In her book Getting Medieval: Sexual Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, Carolyn Dinshaw recounts her own history as a lesbian student at Princeton to partially describe her scholarly and personal orientation to the work of the gay medieval historian John Boswell, which then forms one of many openings to a newly fashioned affective, queer historiographical practice. Read more »

1
May

postmedieval volume 1 issues 1-2: When Did we Become Post/human?

Volume 1, Issues 1-2: When Did We Become Post/human?

Volume 1, Issues 1-2: When Did We Become Post/human?

Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) and Craig Dionne(Eastern Michigan Univ.)

This issue is designed as a dialogue with Katherine Hayles’s 1999 book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, and features medieval and early modern approaches to the question of the historicity of the post/human as an intellectual, social, cultural, philosophical, and scientific category of thought as well as a state of material reality. The issue also seeks to demonstrate that contemporary discourses on the post/human raise a host of troubling questions relative to issues of embodiment, subjectivity, cognition, sociality, sexuality, spirituality, self-determination, collectivization, expression, representation, well-being, ethics, governance, technology, and the like for which pre- and early modern history and culture provide important resources for critical reflection. The issue features Katherine Hayles, Andy Mousley, and Kate Soper as Respondents.

Issue 1.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010)

15
Oct

SEMA 2009 BABEL Panel

35th Annual Southeastern Medieval Association Meeting
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN   15-17 October 2009

BABEL Working Group panel:

Session 33: Knowing and Unknowing Pleasures

Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) and Anna Klosowska
(Miami University of Ohio),
Co-Organizers

Fig 1. Bruce Nauman, Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain

Panel Description:

Building on BABEL’s panel at the Kalamazoo Congress (2009), “Are We Enjoying Ourselves? The Place of Pleasure in Medieval Scholarship,” and continuing the line of questioning that emerged in the discussion at the conference and beyond (for example: at the medieval studies weblog In the Middle), this panel will address some of the questions we have raised. Foremost among them are: what is useless pleasure, what is essential pleasure, what might be dangerous pleasure, and who or what decides? Is there class in pleasure—or, as Roland Barthes might say, “Einstein on one side, Paris-Match on the other” (MythologiesOeuvres complètes, p. 700)? What are the ethical conditions of pleasure? While some of the presenters will focus on fascist specters that haunt the ethics/aesthetics borderlands (Finke and Shichman), others (Klosowska and Joy) propose an optimistic “coexisting multiplicities” reading where pleasure is “between everyone,” like a “little boat used by others” (Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues, pp. 2, 9). Read more »

15
May

BABEL @ Kalamazoo 2009 (the photographic evidence)

BABEL Parties — Kalamazoo 2009

[specific individuals are not identified in photos so as to protect the innocent and the depraved]

BABEL Party at Citscape, Thursday evening, May 7th:

Read more »

6
May

Kalamazoo 2009: BABEL sessions

Fridgehenge (Sante Fe, New Mexico)

44th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University
6-10 May 2009  Kalamazoo, MI

[See informal photos of BABEL@Kalamazoo 2009, if you dare]

I. BABEL Working Group panels:

Session #253: Are We Serious Enough Yet? The Place of Ethics in Medieval Scholarship (Roundtable)

Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Organizer and Presider

When Michael Calabrese published his 2002 article, “Performing the Prioress: Conscience and Responsibility in Studies of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” where he argued against what he called a “politically driven medieval literary criticism” and for an “Arnoldian disinterestedness,” the question was raised [again] as to whether or not medieval scholarship is or should be a site for politically- and ethically-inflected interpretive approaches. This debate raises the very provocative questions of whether or not historical scholarship can ever be disinterested or unaffected by the sometimes very painful and traumatic episodes it investigates [such as anti-Semitic pogroms or the Crusades or slavery], and whether or not literature can be separated and investigated outside of history, and if so, in what ways? Read more »

19
Mar

grant proposal to the University of Chicago’s Arete Initiative project

Virtue and Its Multiple Histories: Time, Disciplinary Fixations, and the Limits of the Human

Submitted for “A New Science of Virtues” Grant Competition by:

We are an interdisciplinary team of researchers who represent disparate fields (literature, history, biology, art, and cognitive science) and distant time periods (the premodern and the modern). Jeffrey J. Cohen and Eileen Joy are scholars of medieval literature and cultural studies; Jessica Palmer is a biologist and an artist; Jonah Lehrer is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on cognitive science in dialogue with the humanities. The four of us are interested in utilizing new modes of electronic communication (especially but not limited to the three blogs we manage and author: In the MiddleBioephemera, and The Frontal Cortex) to foster new cross-disciplinary scholarly and creative communities. [Read more at In the Middle.]

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