The Ruins of Solitude

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

What happens when love unravels one’s knowledge structures? In The Ruins of Solitude, after the birth of a child, Bragg embraces of the event of love and examines the resulting disintegration of her supposed authorial subjectivity. Against the pressure to produce and organize knowledge—the pressure of writing a dissertation, for example—Bragg contemplates the poetic modes[…]

Imperial Physique

Published: 11/19/2019

In 2008,  JH Phrydas wrote a story about how bodies talk without words. He wanted the story to not just describe the silent ritual of nonverbal communication but to perform it. The interaction would be visceral – the exchange melancholic, yet full of lust. He wanted words to retain the unsayable: the subtle movements of[…]

Illegitimate

Figure 1. still image from Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You (1996) by EILEEN JOY I am recently returned from the 4th Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, held at the University of Toronto (Oct. 9-11; see full program HERE), where I participated as a speaker on a session co-organized by Craig Dionne[…]

How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page

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Published: 09/11/2015

The contributors range from graduate students and recent PhDs to senior scholars working in the fields of medieval studies, art history, English literature, poetics, early modern studies, musicology, and geography. All are engaged in academic writing, but some of the contributors also publish in other genres, includes poetry and fiction. Several contributors maintain a very[…]

[Given, If, Then]: A Reading in Three Parts

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Published: 02/08/2015

[Given, If, Then] attempts to conceive a possibility of reading, through a set of readings: reading being understood as the relation to an Other that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification, and, therefore, prior to any attempt at assimilating, or appropriating, what is being read to the one who reads. As such, it[…]

Hang On to the Emails: Collaboration Across the Divide, In Life and In Death

by EILEEN JOY cross-posted at In The Middle I am thrilled to announce today the publication, by punctum books, of The Witch and the Hysteric: The Monstrous Medieval in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan, co-authored by Alexander Doty and Patricia Ingham. As part of punctum’s Dead Letter Office series, this book means a lot to me in[…]

Dialectics Unbound: On the Possibility of Total Writing

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Published: 06/28/2013

Dialectics Unbound: On the Possibility of Total Writing re-imagines figures of ontological totality, in and out of writing, first by exploring some lineages of the dialectic, and second by engaging thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and his assertion of nonidentity, Julia Kristeva and her positing of a fourth term of the dialectic, and Fredric Jameson’s[…]

Ostranenie: On Shame and Knowing

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Published: 12/24/2012

Ostranenie, the term for defamiliarization introduced by Russian writer and critic Victor Shklovsky, means, among other things, to see in strangeness. To see in strangeness is to participate in an illusion that is more real than real. It may be achieved by (re)presenting the surface as the substance, the play as the thing, or by[…]