The Second Biennial BABEL Conference: PROGRAM AVAILABLE
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
***CONFERENCE PROGRAM 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 
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)
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects [from punctum books]
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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 FORUM II: The State(s) of Review
FORUM II: The State(s) of Review
March 2012
FORUM II features responses to the crowd review that was part of “Becoming Media,” postmedieval vol. 3, issue 1.
Introduction: How Open, or, Can Vulnerability Go Digital?
Holly A. Crocker
In the Shape of a Crowd
Jen Boyle
Building Community
Sarah Werner
“Yeah, but good luck getting it peer-reviewed”
Bonnie Wheeler
Not Far From, but Close to, the Madding Crowd Review
Eileen A. Joy
Experiment and Replication in the Humanities
Katherine Rowe
Saving Tenure, or Helping to Kill it?: A Few Words about “Publish, then Filter”
Sharon O’Dair
Eight Crowded Paragraphs Collaborating Openly
Martin K. Foys
postmedieval volume 3, issue 1: Becoming Media
CURRENT ISSUE
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.]
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
West[Michigan]ward, Ho! 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies
by EILEEN JOY
Fuck Pessimism: Embrace Youngsterism
by EILEEN JOYThanks 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
dead letter office: an imprint of BABEL and punctum books
Series Editor: Eileen Joy (eileenajoy@gmail.com)
I am tired, Beloved,
of chafing my heart against
the want of you;
of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
~Amy Lowell, “The Letter”
Don’t fear anything for your letters, they are burnt
one by one and I hope you do the same with mine.
~Camille Claudel
Dead Letter Office publishes small chapbook-style works, of anywhere from 30 to 80 or so pages, representing work that either has gone “nowhere” or will likely go nowhere, yet retain 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 nor returned, that you perhaps lost (then re-found). We seek, also, experiments in whimsy, in over-reaching, in idle speculation, in prospecting for fool’s gold, in working mountains into molehills, in marking and then forgetting a path in a wild wood of visible darkness. In short, the Dead Letter Office invites you to take those letters out of the drawer or shoebox, to re-visit and re-polish them, without worrying about conclusions or ultimate destinations, and send them to us. We will also consider actual letters to the dead: belated eulogies, posthumous transmissions to the underworld, love (and hate and other) missives to the departed, funerary telegrams, and various notes and commentaries to be used as devices to water the graveyards where, to cadge from Walter Benjamin, some of the dead are turning by a strange heliotropism toward the sun that is rising in the sky of history.
. . . it is a fine consolation among the absent that if
one who is loved is not present, a letter may be embraced instead.
~Isidore of Seville
TITLES
Anthony Adler, The Afterlife of Genre: Remnants of the Trauerspiel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer(January 2014)
Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (December 2012)
M.H. Bowker, Ostranenie: On Shame and Knowing (December 2012)
Joff Bradley, Philosophy and the Deadly Ritournelle (Winter 2013)
Andreas Burckhardt, A Sanctuary of Sounds (May 2013)
David R. Cole, Traffic Jams: Analysing Everday Life through the Immanent Materialism of Deleuze & Guattari
(February 2013)
Denzil Ford, Suite on “Spiritus Silvestre: For Symphony (December 2012)
Benjamin Hollander, Memoir American (May 2013)
Trevor Jones, The Non-Library (Autumn 2013)
Phil Jourdan, John Gardner: A Tiny Eulogy (November 2012)
Maxwell Kennel, Dialectics Unbound: On the Possibility of Total Writing (Spring 2013)
Milcho Manchevski, Truth and Fiction: Notes on (Exceptional) Faith in Art (May 2012)
Adrian Martin, Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez (October 2012)
Michael E. Moore, Nicholas of Cusa and the Kairos of Modernity: Cassirer, Gadamer, Blumenberg(September 2013)
Michael Munro, What Is Philosophy? (October 2012)
Michael Munro, Of Learned Ignorance: Idea of a Treatise in Philosophy (June 2013)
Dominic Pettman, In Divisible Cities (August 2013)
David Rawson, Fuckhead (September 2013)
Gary J. Shipley, The Death of Conrad Unger: Some Conjectures Regarding Parasitosis and Associated Suicide Behavior (March 2012)
Whitney Anne Trettien, Gaffe/Stutter (Autumn 2013)
I’ll Stop the World and Melt With You: A Plea for Inextricability, for Staying Awake, and for an Insomniac Humanities
by EILEEN JOY
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
