To Be, or Not to Be: Paraphrased

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Published: 06/17/2016

To Be, or Not to Be: Paraphrased is an expanding deconstruction of Hamlet’s famous existential question, achieved by putting the line through paraphrasing software 50 times. With each permutation, the quotation grows longer and its meaning is distorted, causing the question to question its own existence by acting as a faulty self-replicator, a nonsensical self-affirmation that[…]

As If: Essays in As You Like It

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Published: 12/29/2016

Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a play without a theme. Instead, it repeatedly poses one question in a variety of forms: What if the world were other than it is? As You Like It is a set of experiments in which its characters conditionally change an aspect of their world and see what comes[…]

The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness

Published: 11/04/2017

Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to “cute” in the sense of “attractive, pretty, charming” to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context[…]

Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties

Published: 03/10/2016

This collection of essays by one of medieval studies’ most brilliant historians argues that the analysis and critique of biopower, as conventionally defined by Michel Foucault and then widely assumed in much contemporary theory of sovereignty, is a sovereign mode of temporalization caught up in the very time-machine it ostensibly seeks to expose and dismantle.[…]

Crush

Published: 02/27/2014

In Crush, a stunning collection of erotic poems and queer meditations delineating Stockton’ and Gilson’s mutual crushing on each other, but also all of the ways in which, sweetly and also sadly, affection ameliorates the anguishes that, despite our deepest devotions, are never constant, Stockton and Gilson write, In Aranye Fradenburg’s words, Shakespeare’s sonnets describe[…]

The Disaster Is Up to Us: Julian Yates and Liza Blake on Metaphysics, Composing, and Kitchening

Figure 1. Douglas Hodge as Titus and Sarah Rees as Lavinia in 2006 production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus at the Globe Theatre by EILEEN JOY [cross-posted to In The Middle] Composition may be the recipe for deriving a practice from Object Oriented Ontology, or Speculative Realism, but the disaster is up to us. –Liza Blake,[…]

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[…]