BABEL @ Kalamazoo2013
Now, Kalamazoo Voyager!
by EILEEN JOY
The International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan is fast approaching, so if you have not ordered your steampunk glasses and hauberk, I recommend you do so now. The BABEL Working Group, GW’sMedieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, and postmedieval are all sponsoring sessions, which are described below, and I invite everyone to use the comments section here to direct our attention to other sessions which you think would be of interest to readers of the In The Middle or just to say, “I’m in this session; come and heckle me!” In the meantime, in order to further our project of a drunkenly deranged medieval studies in which all of our critical faculties are thrown to the wayside in favor of a micropolitics of disruption, revelry, and indiscriminate affection [and maybe a few fistfights and sudden sing-a-longs of Neutral Milk Hotel], please consider yourself invited to the following social events:
Karaoke @Shakespeare’s Pub
Wednesday, May 8th, 9:00 pm onward
BABEL Working Group: Open-Bar Reception/Meeting
Friday, May 10th, 5:15 pm, Fetzer 2020
*we will be giving away punctum books [Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf, Dark Chaucer: An Assortment, Speculative Medievalisms: Discography, and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects], and also taking suggestions for panel themes for the 2014 Congress
BABEL Working Group + postmedieval: Annual Party
Friday, May 10th, 9:00 pm onwards
@Bell’s Brewery
*all the beer is on BABEL [wristbands to be distributed at brewery]
I want to mention here, also, that Palgrave has finally agreed to a special discounted price [$49 per year for 4 issues, print + online] for graduate student subscribers topostmedieval, and you can see more about that HERE. Related to that, we are also giving away 3 annual subscriptions [print + online] to the journal via a special Twitter contest, and you can see more about that HERE. Read more 
CALL FOR SESSIONS: BABEL 2014 Santa Barbara
3rd Biennial Meeting of
the BABEL Working Group
~ON THE BEACH~
16-18 October 2014
University of California, Santa Barbara
Call for Sessions
Someone is living on this beach. ~David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. ~Herman Melville, Moby Dick
BABEL’s 3rd Biennial Meeting situates itself along the fractal shoreline of the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara, a town named after the patron saint of miners, artillerymen, explosives, and lightning. In the spirit of such rogue-ish and transitory confraternities of pirates, smugglers, saints, pyro-artists, rebels, and surfers, and following in the spectral footsteps of the after-party stragglers and wastrels of La Dolce Vitastumbling into the early morning light of a bleached-out Fellini-esque seascape, where they are caught by the gaze of a dead stingray snared in a fishing net, we will gather on the beach to explore together the question of what it means to be stranded and how the beach itself (writ large as Beach) might serve as a new Academy of Thought, where thinking would emerge from lively (if also messy and uneasy) collaborations between whales, surfers, clouds, waves, starfish, grains of sand, swimmers, lagoons, saints, coral, marshes, divers, dunes, skiffs, ports, sharks, etc. Our aim will not be to find a site of clear demarcation between water and earth, shore and sea, sand and sun, inside and outside, sky and cloud, human and nonhuman, past and future, University and Real World, work-time and play-time. Rather, we will seek to cohabit a turbulent site of entangled encounter, of weathering and advancing into the weather: a place of “formal inexhaustibility” where trans-corporeal bodies flow into and collide with each other, caught within and moving along eddies of emergence, erosion, and what Vicki Kirby calls “life at large” (“there is no outside of Nature”). At the same time, we will note that we are outside and we will ask what it means to be outside, exposed to the elements and the elemental, to think but also to feel a beachy Outside. Read more
Transparent Things: A Cabinet [new from punctum books]
Transparent Things: A Cabinet
Edited by Maggie M. Williams and Karen Eileen Overbey
Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2013. 88 pages + illus. ISBN-13: 978-0615790374.
OPEN-ACCESS e-book + $15.00 [€13.00] in print.
Published: 2013-03-28
Inspired by a passage in Vladmir Nabokov’s Transparent Things (1972), and also compiled as a future love letter to The Material Collective, the essays collected here play with the transparency of pedagogy, scholarship, and writing, as well as with objects that can be seen through, such as crystals and stained glass. As Nabokov wrote,
When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!
For the art and literary historians gathered together in this volume (Angela Bennett Segler, Jennifer Borland, Karen Eileen Overbey, Nancy Thompson, and Maggie M. Williams), all students of medieval material, these tensions between surface and depth, present and past, concentration and skimming are all too familiar. The inherent contradictions of medieval objects, their irreducibility to either the purely intellectual or the merely physical, are at once the delights and the dangers of the art historian’s work. This book thus offeres a dialogue on the question of how our encounters with physical things spark a process and how objects might allow unique collisions between the past and the present, the human and the inanimate, the practice of history and lived experience. As works of medieval studies or art history, these essays are incomplete, awkward, and provisional. Some of them may even read like embarrassing teenage poetry. This collection is like that dusty box in the basement: it is full of raw, unedited, transparent expressions of affect, of the sort we have learned to hide.
Table of Contents: Maggie M. Williams and Karen Eileen Overbey — “Introduction: Dear Material Collective”; Karen Eileen Overbey — “Reflections on the Surface, or, Notes for a Tantric Art History”; Jennifer Borland — “Encountering the Inauthentic”; Angela Bennett Segler — “Touched for the Very First Time: Losing My Manuscript Virginity”; Nancy Thompson — “Close Encounters with Luminous Objects”
[visit punctum books]
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)
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]
postmedieval 3.2: Cluster on “Disability and the Social Body” and 3 regular articles
CURRENT ISSUE
Cluster Essays (Edited by Julie Singer):
- Cluster Editor’s Introduction: Disability and the Social Body (Julie Singer)
- How to Kiss a Leper (Julie Orlemanski)
- The Disabled Body in the Fabliaux (M. Andia Augustin)
- Drug Overdose, Disability, and Male Friendship in Fifteenth-Century Mamluk Cairo (Kristina Richardson)
- ‘That suck’d the honey of his music vows’: Disability studies in early modern musicological research (Samantha Bassler)
Regular Essays:
- Queer Relics: Martyrological Time and the Eroto-Aesthetics of Suffering in Bertha Harris’s Lover (Kendra Smith)
- Networks of Exchange in The Franklin’s Tale (Janet Thormann)
- Monstrous Mongols (Noreen Giffney)
Peer Review, Once More, But This Time With Feeling
by EILEEN JOY
Figure 1. Eco Pods, Boston
[Architects: Howeler + Yoon]
As some of you may know already,postmedieval is about halfway through a 2-month open “crowd review” of its forthcoming special issue on Becoming-Media, co-edited by Jen Boyle and Martin Foys, and you can see what has been happening with that, and also participate yourself, here:
Crowd Review: Becoming-Media Issue
In all honesty [and yes, I know I am an impartial judge], I have been thrilled with how this crowd review has been progressing thus far–if you follow the link above, you can see for yourself that, in just under four weeks, we have had a fairly robust response, with really thoughtful and expansive comments from a wide variety of commentators [the issue’s editors, junior faculty, more senior faculty, graduate students, and one imagines, some independent scholars]. Of course, we have to reflect that the essays were solicited in advance by the issue’s two editors and received some expert review by them before emerging into the crowd review context, and some of the essays may have received comments in other contexts prior to being received by Jen and Martin [I know, for example, that Whitney Trettien blogged and tweeted portions of her essay in the past and also maintains a public wiki where she keeps all of her notes, annotations, and bibliography relative to her various writing projects]. I belabor this point because it is not the mission of this crowd review to ask potential reviewers to assess whether or not these essays are worth publishing or not. To a certain extent, that has already been decided by the issue’s editors, although, just as with an edited volume of essays, all of the authors involved understand that the crowd review process does serve as a form of “external” review of their work for this special issue of the journal, and I assume they will revise accordingly with Jen and Martin’s expert guidance [but also with their own sense of which comments best serve the purposes of their separate essay projects: in other words, the authors still maintain sole control of the overall direction and content of their individual essays]. But something also really different and importantly valuable is going on here, and it is worth reflecting upon further. Read more
postmedieval volume 2, issue 2: The Medievalism of Nostalgia
CURRENT ISSUE
Co-Editors:
Helen Dell [University of Melbourne], Louise D’Arcens [University of Wollongong] and Andrew Lynch [University of Western Australia]
- Editor’s Introduction: “Nostalgia and medievalism: Conversations, contradictions, impasses”
- Helen Dell, University of Melbourne
- “The nostalgic moment and the sense of history”
Linda M. Austin, Oklahoma State University - “Nostalgia, medievalism and the Vínland voyages”
Geraldine Barnes, University of Sydney - “Laughing in the face of the past: Satire and nostalgia in medieval heritage tourism”
Louise D’Arcens, University of Wollongong - “‘Yearning for the sweet beckoning sound’: Musical longings and the unsayable in medievalist fantasy fiction”
Helen Dell, University of Melbourne - “Negotiations of nostalgia: Strangeness and xenodochy in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe”
Melinda Graefe, Flinders University - “Nostalgia and critique: Walter Scott’s ‘secret power'”
Andrew Lynch, University of Western Australia - Response Essay: “Medievalism and its discontents”
Renée R. Trilling, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign - Book Review Essay: “Nostalgia on my mind”
Carolyn Dinshaw, New York University
Crowd Review LIVE: Becoming-Media Issue of postmedieval
New York Public Library
- Seeta Chaganti, “Danse Macabre in the Virtual Churchyard”
- Eddie Christie, “Writing in Wax, Writing in Water”
- Arne Flaten, “Reproducible Media(s) in the Early Fifteenth Century (Mostly Italian)”
- Julia Lupton, “Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt”
- Eugene Thacker, “The Wayless Abyss: Mysticism and Mediation”
- Whitney Trettien, “Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew’s Anatomy of Plants (1682)”
In step with the mission of the journal, this issue represents a wide range of fields and subjects, including performance studies (dance), architecture, art history, poetics, medieval literature, history of printing and engraving, the decorative arts, movement studies, history of taste and judgment, object-oriented studies, intellectual history, new media and technology studies, composition studies, mysticism, philosophy, botany, the history of books, history of science, the vegetal, the animal, theology, etc. What all of the essays have in common, in the words of the special issue’s co-editors, Jen Boyle and Martin Foys, has something to do with
our dependence on the recursive circuitry and tangle of technologies, bodies, narratives, spaces, and mediating technics, across historical periods and across literary, scientific, philosophical, and theological modes of expression. Read more
