BABEL working group

Dec

postmedieval 3.4: The Intimate Senses

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Intimate Senses/Sensing Intimacy (Holly Dugan and Lara Farina)

ESSAYS

Transcending, othering, detecting: Smell, premodernity, modernity (Mark M. Smith)

The play of skin in The Changeling (Patricia Cahill)

Sense and simulacra: Manipulation of the senses in medieval ‘copies’ of Jerusalem (Laura D. Gelfand)

The city out of breath: Jacobean city comedy and the odors of restraint (Hristomir A. Stanev)

Revolting anatomy in the Farce nouvelle des cinq sens de l’homme (Julie Singer)

RESPONSE ESSAYS

The cultural life of the senses (David Howe)

On sensory history and contemporary placemaking in the social sciences (Mark Paterson)

A neuroscientific perspective on medieval intimacies (Jonathan Cole)

A third ear in the intimate senses? (Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren)

As if our friends felt the sun for us (Georgina Kleege)

BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

Books and bodies, literature and the senses in the early middle ages (Clare A. Lees)

[see postmedieval site at Palgrave for more information on this and other issues]

Dec

Dark Chaucer [new from punctum books]

Dark Chaucer: An Assortment

Edited by Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy & Nicola Masciandaro

Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2012. 224 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0615701073.

OPEN-ACCESS e-book or $15.00 [€13.00] in print.

Published: 2012-12-23

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. Not that this collection finds only emptiness and non-meaning in these caves and lakes. You never know what you will discover 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.

[visit punctum books]

Oct

Radical Hope for Medieval and Early Modern Studies [an interview with Eileen Joy]

Michael Ursell, of the Stanford University Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, interviewed Eileen in the wake of the BABEL 2012 conference in Boston in September.

Eileen talked about BABEL, past and future, in terms of:

Medieval Studies as Performance Art

A Manifesto for Radical Optimism

The Right to Care About Everything

Starting Over

Find the interview here.

Oct

Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood, and I, I Took the One Less Travelled By: Why I Resigned my Professorship

by EILEEN JOY

I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: put your cards on the table.

~Amy Hempel, “Tumble Home”

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never Is, but always To be blest:

The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

~Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

Part I. Fear of Flying

For several years now, I have been engaging in various processes of what I am now calling de-materializing. Some of these were painful and not exactly self-willed. For example, in 2006, I separated from a partner with whom I had lived for about 14 years, and in fact, we continued on, in fits and starts until 2009, and somehow managed to part as friends, even while much that transpired between us from about 2005 to 2009 was incredibly sad, occasionally terrifying, and heartbreaking. But in May 2006, while on a mini-research trip at Cambridge University, I remember standing in the narrow hallway of a B&B on a communal wall-phone talking to my partner and realizing, this is it, we’re separating (and not because I wanted to; I did not want that, not then), my life is now officially over, and I have nothing to live for. Thanks to a beautiful best friend of 27+ years, I would have a place to live in the hills of eastern Tennessee for the rest of the summer, and indeed, she and her husband tended to me so carefully for the next 3 months, I will likely never be able to repay the gift of their kindness. They gave me an enchanted respite; they made me laugh; they “entertained” me; they surrounded me with good company, elegant dinners, and several tuns of wine.

I’ve always connected my love relationships to my work; when they are good, I can think and write and extend my affections to pretty much everything, and I only see the light in everything, but when my primary relationships are breaking down, I can’t think straight and I pretty much shut down. Everything goes black. It did not help that, at the same time that my partner was effectively breaking up with me, that my stint at Cambridge was not going so well. I had chosen Old English as my primary research specialty (having finished my PhD in Nov. 2001), and at the time, whether just imagined in my own head or not, I felt like this: “Wow, everyone in Old English studies, with 1 or 2 exceptions, really hates me.” A less self-absorbed (but still personal) version of this might have been, “Old English studies is never going to accept the kind of work I want to do, and maybe I should stop striving so hard to be a part of a field that isn’t welcoming the approaches I am trying to devise. Maybe I should just go away. Maybe medieval studies, and even academia, isn’t for me at all.” BABEL was partly founded, in 2004, out of the collective depression of 5 women — myself, Betsy McCormick, Mary Ramsey, Myra Seaman, and Kimberly Bell — who just weren’t sure anyone would ever pay any attention to us because we had no (or not much) institutional privilege, and maybe we should just do whatever the hell we wanted, anyway. Plus, we wanted to have some fun at conferences that struck us as stultifyingly boring. In addition, I had resigned my job at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in May 2005 in order to accept a job at my partner’s university in South Carolina [with the hope of repairing our broken relationship], and now, in May 2006, after a brutal bid to re-apply and ultimately win back my job at SIUE [which only happened because a courageous department Chair, Charles Berger, overruled the hiring and department’s executive committees to re-hire me, and let it be said, now, finally, and in public, what a debt I owe to him and others at SIUE who wanted me back, despite the “weirdness” of my having left to begin with], I was facing a scary and uncertain future. Read more

Sep

These Are the Tiny Engines That Power the Sails of Our Adventure: Friendship as a Way of Life (Again, and Again)

by EILEEN JOY

It is now 2 days since returning from the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group in Boston last week, and I am still trying to recover. Following this blog post I am going to share with everyone the notes of the first-ever “think tank” of BABEL, held the Sunday after the conference, in which a group of us engaged in some strategic planning for the future of our conference, but also for BABEL as an organization that is getting larger and larger in terms of its activities and membership. WE NEED HELP. To that end, in the next day or two, I will share what we discussed at our day-long retreat and also invite everyone here to please pitch in ideas regarding the next meeting, to be held in Autumn 2014 at UC-Santa Barbara.

In the meantime, I would like to share with everyone here the edited and slightly expanded version of the presentation that I and my partner Anna Klosowska delivered in Boston as part of Brantley and Sakina Bryant’s “Impure Collaborations” panel, which they described this way:
This panel explores collaborations that challenge the customary professional expectations of academic being-together. What kinds of shared work beckon beyond the sanitized templates for “objective” (“pure”) and “professional” academic collaboration? How can we best make visible the ways in which that affinity, friendship, eros, identity, political engagement, and other off-the-CV connections give us ways of working outside of often constrictive and normative academic hierarchies and working conditions?
Friendship, and also “work” motivated by personal intimacy and love, was the topic Anna and I chose, and we understand the mine-field in which we tread. It is hoped that it is understood that we do not take our project of friendship [which we believe is deeply political and radical] as some sort of monolith: “we are all friends now! isn’t that groovy?” As if that “group” or whatever it is would not be striated by all sorts of differences, internal dissension, mixed motives, lopsided attractions, asymmetrical power dynamics, and the like. The project of friendship, in relation to the academy, is, for us, very much a Derridean and even Foucauldian working through of what is to-come, to-arrive. It is a project of radical hope, not a *thing* that already exists. It is not one specific group that insists on a sort of membership or set of rituals or personality types for being “in” or “out.” It is not a collective that absorbs nor threatens to absorb otherness and difference; it is an activity of clearing ground so that anything might happen, so that specific persons can feel safe to be exactly who they are, even if what that is might embody the wish to be “left alone.” It requires courage, because you have to be willing to allow yourself to be changed through your encounters with others. And without further ado, here are our remarks: Read more

Sep

cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university [from punctum books]

by BABEL Working Group

Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2012. 95 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0615697659. Free download.

Published: 2012-09-10

To download the book, go HERE.

This small book comprises the program of the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, hosted by Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts from 20-22 September 2012, and co-hosted by Boston College, College of Charleston, George Washington University’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, Harvard University, M.I.T., Palgrave Macmillan, punctum books, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and Tufts University.

Featured Speakers: Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, David Kaiser, Marget Long, and Sans façon [Charles Blanc and Tristan Surtees].

Sessions: The Inter-Discipline of Pedagogy; Getting Medieval on Medieval Studies; Medieval Touchscreen; Families Old and New; Going Postal: Networks, Affect, and Retro-Technologies; Digging in the Ruins: Medievalism and the Uncanny in the University [I & II]; Future-Philology; Intellectual Crimes: Theft, Punking, and Roguish Behavior; Impure Collaborations; Enjoying the End (Again); Textual Fault-Lines; All In a Jurnal’s Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose; Ecomaterialism; The Urmadic University; Synaesthetics: Sensory Integration Against the Disciplines; Hoarders/Hordes; Parts, Wholes, and the New; Will It Blend? Equipping the Humanities Lab; What Is Critical Thinking?; #Occupy Boston: Humanities and Praxis; Se7en Undeadly ScIeNceS: The Trivium and Quadrivium in the Multiforking University; Wild Fermentation: Disciplined Knowledge and Drink; The Historiographic Ghost. Read more

Sep

Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf [new from punctum books]

Beowulf: A Translation

by Thomas Meyer

Edited by David Hadbawnik

with a Preface by David Hadbawnik, an Introduction by Daniel C. Remein, and an Interview with Thomas Meyer

Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2012. 312 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0615612652. FREE download + $15.00 in print.

Published: 2012-08-25

To download the book, go HERE. To purchase a handsome print copy, go HERE.

“Thomas Meyer’s modernist reworking of Beowulf is a wonder.” ~John Ashbery

“Tom Meyer’s Beowulf reenacts the dark grandeur of a poem that is as much a story of vengeance as it is of courage and loyalty. Meyer brings the poem’s alliterative, inflected line in concert with post-Poundian lineation to give the reader a vivid sense of our oldest poem’s modernity. This is a major accomplishment.” ~Michael Davidson

“Meyer’s work is amazing and richly satisfying, a full-scale collaboration between an ancient poem and a modern poet. Its diversity of tone is dazzling, from stately to swinging, from philosophically abstract to savagely concrete, from conversationally discursive to gnomic, haunting, chthonic — yet every line feels honestly rooted in the original text, the echo of an generous, open-hearted, and lovingly close reading of the poem.” ~Roy Liuzza

Many modern Beowulf translations, while excellent in their own ways, suffer from what Kathleen Biddick might call “melancholy” for an oral and aural way of poetic making. By and large, they tend to preserve certain familiar features of Anglo-Saxon verse as it has been constructed by editors, philologists, and translators: the emphasis on caesura and alliteration, with diction and syntax smoothed out for readability. The problem with, and the paradox of this desired outcome, especially as it concerns Anglo-Saxon poetry, is that we are left with a document that translates an entire organizing principle based on oral transmission (and perhaps composition) into a visual, textual realm of writing and reading. The sense of loss or nostalgia for the old form seems a necessary and ever-present shadow over modern Beowulfs. Read more

Sep

Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism [punctum books]

punctum books is thrilled to announce the publication of Speculations III — the first issue of Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism (edited by Michael Austin, Paul J. Ennis, Fabio Gironi, Thomas Gokey, and Robert Jackson) to be published in conjunction with punctum books. This is a leviathan whale of an issue [510 pages!] comprising articles (by Benjamin Norris, Beatrice Marovich, Levi Bryant, Daniel Whistler, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Christopher Norris, and Michael Haworth), position papers (by Christian Thorne and Peter Wolfendale), translations (Graham Harman’s “On Vicarious Causation” into German, for example), reviews (of Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects, Graham Harman’s Circus Philosophicus, Christopher Watkin’s Difficult Atheism, Andy Merrifield’s Magical Marxism, and Joseph Nechvatal’s nOise anusmOs installation), and an interview with Stathis Psillos. Those interested in the ongoing struggles to define exactly what Speculative Realism (SR) is, will want to read the translation of Louis Morelle’s comprehensive “Speculative Realism: After Infinitude and Beyond?” also included in this issue.

To download the entire issue [510 pages!] and also individual articles, go HERE. To purchase a handsome print copy, go HERE.

Sep

postmedieval 3.3: Cognitive Alterities/Neuromedievalism

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: Cognitive alterities: From cultural studies to neuroscience and back again (Jane Chance)

ESSAYS: THEORY

Re-visioning the past: Neuromedievalism and the neural circuits of vision (Ashby Kinch)

Neurobiological alphabets: Language origins and the problem of universals (Matthew Boyd Goldie)

Once more with feeling: Tactility and cognitive alterity, medieval and modern (Lara Farina)

ESSAYS: NARRATIVE

‘Mind like wickerwork’: The neuroplastic aesthetics of Chaucer’s House of Tidings (Ashby Kinch)

Imitating Christ as a meme (Mayumi Taguchi)

Feeling the Passion: Neuropsychological perspectives on audience response (Kerstin Pfeiffer)

Manual thinking: John Mombaer’s meditations, the neuroscience of the imagination and the future of the humanities (Sara Ritchey)

EDITOR’S RESPONSE

A cautionary note from a neuroscientist’s perspective: Interpreting from mirror neurons and neuroplasticity (Antony D. Passaro)

BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

Going mental (Aranye Fradenburg)

[see postmedieval site at Palgrave for more information on this and other issues]

Aug

CFPs: BABEL & postmedieval @ Kalamazoo 2013

BABEL is sponsoring two roundtables–“Plunder” and “Blunder”–while postmedieval is sponsoring a roundtable, “Thriving.” Abstracts are due September 15 (see details for submission below), and descriptions follow:

Thriving: A Roundtable
Sponsor: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies

Play values experimentation. When we play, we are more open to the new, from within and without. We become ‘‘neophiles’’ and innovators, making active use of our imaginations. Playing and pretending are crucial to the becomings of living creatures, to adaptation and behavioral flexibility; . . . Play teaches ‘‘vital skills’’; it is transformative and transforming. We can neither thrive nor survive without it. And it is highly contagious, a powerful medium of affect transmission.

~ Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer”

The work of Aranye Fradenburg, especially her psychoanalytic criticism of Chaucer, and her formulations of discontinuist historical approaches to the Middle Ages, has been extremely influential within medieval studies for the past 15 or so years. More recently she has been focusing on more broad defenses of the humanities, especially with regard to the valuable role of literary studies relative to the arts of everyday living,eudaimonia [flourishing], ethical community, and well-being, and also on psychoanalysis itself as a “liberal art.” Relationality, intersubjectivity, aliveness, resilience, care of the self and also of others, adaptive flexibility, playfulness, shared attention, companionship, healing, and thriving seem, increasingly, to be the key watchwords and concerns of Fradenburg’s work, and at the same time, the so-called “literary” mode is still central to these concerns, such that, as Fradenburg has written, “Interpretation and relationality depend on one another because all relationships are unending processes of interpretation and expression, listening and signifying. In turn, sentience assists relationality: we can’t thrive and probably can’t survive without minds open to possibility, capable of sensing and interpreting the tiniest shifts in, e.g., pitch and tone” [“Frontline: The Liberal Arts of Psychoanalysis,” Journal of theAmerican Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 39.4 (2011): 589-609]. This roundtable invites short presentations on the valuable role(s) that medieval studies might play in the future of the liberal arts, especially as they pertain to “thriving” and “living” and to the ways in which living itself is an art. [Aranye Fradenburg will be a participant on this panel.] Read more

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