Genre: Literary Studies

The Death of Conrad Unger: Some Conjectures Regarding Parasitosis and Associated Suicide Behavior

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Published: 08/13/2012

The death by suicide of Gary J. Shipley’s close friend, Conrad Unger (writer, theorist and amateur entomologist), has prompted him to confront not only the cold machinery of self-erasure, but also its connections to the literary life and notions surrounding psychological bewitchment, to revaluate in both fictional and entomological terms just what it is that[…]

Annotations to Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech!

Published: 01/26/2012

Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! (2000) encapsulates two thousand years’ worth of utterances in a symbolic act of remembrance and expression of despair for the current age, in which we find “our minds and ears fouled by degraded public speech—by media hype, insipid sermons, hollow political rhetoric, and the ritual misuse of words.” Through 120 densely allusive[…]

Speculative Medievalisms: Discography

Published: 01/17/2013

Proceedings from the two Speculative Medievalisms symposia, held at King’s College London (Jan. 2011) and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (Sep. 2011), and organized by The Petropunk Collective (Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O’Rourke). These interdisciplinary events were dedicated to dialogue and cross-contamination between traditional concepts of speculatio, present-minded premodern[…]

On an Ungrounded Earth

Published: 03/13/2013

For too long, the Earth has been used to ground thought instead of bending it; such grounding leaves the planet as nothing but a stage for phenomenology, deconstruction, or other forms of anthropocentric philosophy. In far too much continental philosophy, the Earth is a cold, dead place enlivened only by human thought—either as a thing[…]

Dark Chaucer: An Assortment

Published: 12/23/2012

Read Marion Turner’s review of Dark Chaucer in Studies in the Age of Chaucer HERE. 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,[…]

Beowulf: A Translation

Published: 08/25/2012

See reviews of Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf: Make Magazine, thecohort@marco, Nomadics, The Medieval Review, H_NGM_N, and Glasgow Review of Books 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[…]