Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 03/15/2018
Tar for Mortar offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature’s greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story “The Library of Babel” is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 10/16/2018
The Bodies That Remain is a collection of bodies and absences. Through biography, experimental essay, interview, fictional manifestation, and poetic extraction, The Bodies That Remain is a collection of texts and images on the bodies of artists and writers who battled with the frustration of their own physicality and whose work reckoned with these limitations[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 01/24/2020
Why should there only be literary scholarship about authors who actually lived, and texts which exist? Where are the articles on Enoch Campion, Linus Withold, Redondo Panza, Darshan Singh, or Heidi B. Morton? That none of these are real authors should be no impediment to interpreting their invented writings. In the first collection of its[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 07/11/2017
Of the Contract is a version of a text that is as old as any memory, or a form of legal instrument that constitutes the basis of the world in which its terms have been translated. The text remains as open to renewal as that world remains to future alteration, and the terms are both[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 05/15/2017
In 1980, Jacques Derrida published La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà. At the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the English translation, Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida revisits this seminal work in Derrida’s oeuvre. Derrida himself described The Post Card in his preface as “the remainders of a destroyed correspondence,” stretching from 1977 to 1979. A cryptic text,[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 03/15/2017
My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain. ~ Walter Benjamin “No longer imminent, the End is immanent.” “Ends are ends,” Frank Kermode goes on to clarify, “only when they[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 03/02/2017
Kill Boxes addresses the legacy of US-sponsored torture, indefinite detention, and drone warfare by deciphering the shocks of recognition that humanistic and artistic responses to violence bring to consciousness if readers and viewers have eyes to face them. Beginning with an analysis of the ways in which the hooded man from Abu Ghraib became iconic,[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 12/16/2016
A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler uses the chance synchronicity of the 2013 Israeli parliamentary elections and literary theorist Judith Butler’s controversial Brooklyn College address calling for the boycotting of Israeli academic, cultural, and economic institutions as an occasion for examining possible relations between Jewishness and state-centered forms of self-governance.[…]