Barge Life: On Jean Vigo’s “L’Atalante”

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FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

“Waves washing up against the hull, a bed and a small stove, the deck hatch sealed shut – the vessel is the ultimate dwelling.” How to live together in cramped quarters? How to create a microcosm against hostile surroundings? In Barge Life, Florian Deroo tackles these question by looking at a mythical classic of French[…]

Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds

Published: 08/24/2023

Superhero meaning making is a site of struggle. Superheroes (are thought to) trouble borders and normative ways of seeing and being in the world. Superhero narratives (are thought to) represent, and thereby inspire, alternative visions of the real world. The superhero genre is (thought to be) a repository for radical or progressive ideas. In the[…]

Desire/Love (2nd edn.)

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FORTHCOMING Fall 2023

“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant in this volume. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern[…]

Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 2: The Contest between B-Genres

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Published: 11/24/2020

In The Contest between B-Genres, the “Space Trilogy” by J.R.R. Tolkien’s friend and colleague C.S. Lewis and the roster of American science fictions that Gotthard Günther selected and glossed for the German readership in 1952 demarcate the ring in which the contestants face off. In carrying out in fiction the joust that Tolkien proclaimed in[…]

How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound

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Published: 07/18/2019

What do we do when we read? Reading can be an act of consumption or an act of creation. Our “work reading” overlaps with our “pleasure reading,” and yet these two modes of reading engage with different parts of the self. It is sometimes passive, sometimes active, and can even be an embodied form. The[…]

Desire/Love

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Published: 12/05/2012

“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what[…]