Literature and Cultural Studies 2020 Brochure

O S N A B R Ü C K STAT I ON TO J E RU SA L E M A MEMOIR

H É L È N E C I XO U S T R A N S L AT E D B Y P E G GY K A M U F F O R E W O R D B Y E VA H O F F M A N

LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES 2020

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O S N A B R Ü C K STAT I ON TO J E RU SA L E M A MEMOIR

H É L È N E C I XO U S T R A N S L AT E D B Y P E G GY K A M U F F O R E W O R D B Y E VA H O F F M A N

HI G HL I G H TS IN L ITE R ATURE & CULTURAL STUDI ES Whose Middle Ages?

Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem HÉLÈNE CIXOUS Translated by Peggy Kamuf Foreword by Eva Hoffman

Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past Andrew Albin, Mary C. Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas L. Paul, and Nina Rowe, Editors Introduction by David Perry Afterword by Geraldine Heng

Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation For eighty years, the Jonases family of Osnabrück were part of a vibrant Jewish community in Lower Saxony. After World War II, Osnabrück counted not a single Jew. Building on stories from her mother and grandmother, this book imagines fragments of the family’s life, and especially the tragedy of her Uncle André, who followed his daughter to Jerusalem only to be sent back. (“You are too old. They need young people in Palestine.”) He returned to Osnabrück in time to be deported to a death camp.

Weaving Cixous’s own visit to Osnabrück with scenes from her childhood in Algeria and stories of the Jonas family, Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem is of the author’s most intensely engaging books.

Written for the crisis of a globally resurgent far-right and aiming to address its misuses of history head-on, Whose Middle Ages? is an interdisciplinary collection of short, accessible essays intended for the nonspecialist reader and ideal for teaching at an undergraduate level. Each of twentytwo essays takes up an area where digging for meaning in the medieval past has brought something distorted back into the present: in our popular entertainment; in our news, our politics, and our propaganda; and in subtler ways that inform how we think about our histories, our countries, and ourselves. Each author looks to a history that has refused to remain past and uses the tools of the academy to read and re-read familiar stories, objects, symbols, and myths.

240 PAGES, 5 X 8, 35 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823285563, PAPERBACK, $20.00, £15.99 Fordham Series in Medieval Studies

144 PAGES, 5 X 8, 17 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823287628, HARDBACK, $24.95, £19.99 MARCH 2020

The Instant and Its Shadow A Story of Photography JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BAILLY Translated by Samuel E. Martin

In Praise of Risk

Two photographs, connected by a ladder, separated by a century. First, William Henry Fox Talbot photographed a faithfully realistic image of a ladder against a haystack in the English countryside. One hundred years later, an anonymous photographer captured another ladder, “photographed” alongside an incinerated man by the blinding light of the atomic bomb. For Bailly, these two images underpin a poetic and theoretical reflection on the origins of photographic technique, the imaginative power of montage, and the relation of photography to time itself.

“Magisterial. Dufourmantelle shows how life is universalized in risk and how recognizing this fact means enlisting in a fraternity among humans.”—Antonio Negri When Anne Dufourmantelle drowned in a heroic attempt to save two children caught in rough seas, obituaries around the world rarely failed to recall that she was the author of a book entitled In Praise of Risk, implying that her death confirmed the ancient adage that to philosophize is to learn how to die. Now available in English, this magnificent book offers a trenchant critique of the psychic work the modern world devotes to avoiding risk.

ANNE DUFOURMANTELLE Translated, with an Introduction, by Steven Miller

128 PAGES, 5 X 8, 13 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823287444, PAPERBACK, $25.00, £19.99 APRIL 2020

240 PAGES 9780823285440, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99

Witnessing Girlhood

The Disabled Church

Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing LEIGH GILMORE AND ELIZABETH MARSHALL

Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship REBECCA F. SPURRIER

“Witnessing Girlhood is a tour de force: demanding and authoritative. Gilmore and Marshall articulate a powerful analysis of representations of girls and women on the fraught subjects of domestic violence, rape culture, survivor and victim identity, and persistent concerns about intrinsic female vulnerability. Here is a necessary and eloquent feminist affirmation on issues of gender and violence.”—Gillian Whitlock, author of Soft Weapons and Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions Witnessing Girlhood charts a history of how women use life narrative to transform conditions of suffering, silencing, and injustice into accounts that enjoin ethical response. Gilmore and Marshall attend to how authors return to a narrative of traumatized and silenced girlhood and the figure of the child witness in order to offer public testimony.

“An in-depth engagement with a unique community where mental illness is not pathologized. Spurrier does not provide a romantic view where love overcomes and unites. Rather, she takes the time to explore the messiness of community building where fissures and distance are negotiated for the overall well-being of the community. Through a negotiation of difference, Holy Family tries to welcome all to the table of worship and the table of sustenance. The Disabled Church is a detailed and thoughtful ethnographic study.”—Michael Gill, Syracuse University 272 PAGES, 7 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823285525, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99

160 PAGES, 12 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823285488, PAPERBACK, $25.00, £19.99 www.fo rd h am p re ss .co m

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HI G HL I G H TS IN L ITE R ATURE & CULTURAL STUDI ES Expanded Cinema

Noir Affect

Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker, Editors Afterword by Paula Rabinowitz

Fiftieth Anniversary Edition GENE YOUNGBLOOD Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller

Noir Affect proposes a new understanding of noir as defined by negative affect. This new understanding emphasizes that noir is, first and foremost, an affective disposition rather than a specific cycle of films or novels associated with a given time period (the mid-twentieth century) or national tradition (the U.S.). Instead the essays in Noir Affect trace noir’s negativity as it manifests in different national contexts (from the U.S. to Mexico, France and Japan) manifests in a range of different media (films, novels, video games, and manga).

Featuring an afterword by celebrated noir scholar, Paula Rabinowitz, and essays by an array of leading scholars, Noir Affect aims fundamentally reorient our understanding of noir.

First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic tools. Long considered the Bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftiethanniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world.

464 PAGES, 5 ½ X 8 ¼ , 60 COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS AND 284 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823287413, PAPERBACK, $34.95, £27.99 Meaning Systems MAY 2020

304 PAGES, 11 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823287666, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £27.99 JUNE 2020

Crimmigrant Nations

Urban Formalism

Resurgent Nationalism and the Closing of Borders Robert Koulish and Martje van der Woude, Editors

The Work of City Reading DAVID FAFLIK

A timely examination of the increasing efforts to criminalize the status of immigrants, exiles, and refugees As the distinction between domestic and international is increasingly blurred along with the line between internal and external borders, migrants—particularly people of color—have become emblematic of the hybrid threat both to national security and sovereignty and to safety and order inside the state. From building walls and fences, overcrowding detention facilities, and beefing up border policing and border controls, a new narrative has arrived that has migrants assume the risk for government sponsored degradation, misery, and death. Crimmigrant Nations examines the parallel rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and right-wing populism in both the United States and Europe to offer an unprecedented look at this issue on an international level.

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity.

144 PAGES, 12 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823287680, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99 Polis APRIL 2020

416 PAGES 9780823287499, PAPERBACK, $34.95, £27.99 MARCH 2020

Jacques the Sophist

At Wit’s End

The Deadly Discourse on the Jewish Joke LOUIS KAPLAN

Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis BARBARA CASSIN Translated by Michael Syrotinski

At Wit’s End explores the fascinating discourse on Jewish wit in the twentieth century when the Jewish joke became the subject of serious humanistic inquiry and inserted itself into the cultural and political debates among Germans and Jews against the ideologically-charged backdrop of antiSemitism, the Jewish question, and the Holocaust.

Shedding new light on anti-Semitism and on the Jewish question leading up to the Holocaust, At Wit’s End provides readers with a unique perspective by which to gain important insights about this crucial historical period that reverberates into the present day, when potentially offensive humor coupled with a toxic political climate and xenophobia can have deadly consequences.

“A most compelling reading of Lacan’s oeuvre, pursuing and revealing its unique and radical edge.”—Alenka Zupančič, author of What IS Sex? Sophistry, since Plato and Aristotle, has been philosophy’s bad other. Yet sophistry’s emphasis on words and performativity remain more important for us than the Truth that philosophers hold dear. In this dazzling book, Barbara Cassin celebrates an underground survival of the sophistical tradition in the work of psychoanalysis.

In taking seriously equivocations, jokes, and unfinishable projects of interpretation, analysts, like sophists, allow performance, signifier, and inconsistency to reshape truth. In doing so, they have become our culture’s key dissidents.

352 PAGES, 25 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823287567, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99 MAY 2020 www.fo rd h am p re ss .co m

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192 PAGES, 9 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823285747, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99

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AMERICAN STUDIES The Princeton Fugitive Slave

A Desire Called America

“The Princeton Fugitive Slave is fascinating historical detective work. Lolita Buckner Inniss has recovered the journey of James Collins Johnson from his youth as a slave on the Maryland Eastern Shore to his life as a free man in Princeton.

Deeply researched, the book overturns any lingering idea that Princeton was a haven from the broader society. Johnson had to cope with the casual racism of students, occasional eruptions of racial violence in town and the ubiquitous use of the N-word by even the supposedly educated. This book contributes to our understanding of slavery’s legacy today.”

—Shane White, author of Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire

Critics of American exceptionalism usually view it as a destructive force eroding the radical energies of social movements and aesthetic practices. In A Desire Called America, Christian P. Haines confronts a troubling paradox: some of the most provocative political projects in the United States are remarkably invested in American exceptionalism. Riding a strange current of U.S. literature, Haines reveals a tradition of viewing the United States as a unique and exemplary political model while rejecting exceptionalism’s commitments to nationalism, capitalism, and individualism. Through Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William S. Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon, Haines brings to light a radically different version of the American dream–one where political subjects value an organization of social life that includes democratic selfgovernance, egalitarian cooperation, and communal property.

The Trials of James Collins Johnson LOLITA BUCKNER INNISS

Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons CHRISTIAN P. HAINES

272 PAGES, 14 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823285341, HARDBACK, $29.95, £23.99

Xenocitizens

272 PAGES 9780823286959, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99

Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America JASON BERGER

R AC E & E T H N I C ST U D I E S

“Jason Berger’s Xenocitizens displays both a burning concern about the present and a patient curiosity about the past. As a way of thinking through—and beyond—our own political disaster, this book lingers with the political imagination of nineteenth-century American literature, explicating its fantasies of personhood and belonging. At his best, Berger refuses caricatures of liberalism and returns the nineteenth century’s ways of being to us in all their rich, beguiling, subversive weirdness. Writings from another time in history enable thinking anew, not as a familiar national tradition but as something else, disorienting and strange.”—Caleb Smith, Yale University, author of The Prison and the American Imagination and The Oracle and the Curse

John Fante’s Ask the Dust

A Joining of Voices and Views Stephen Cooper and Clorinda Donato, Eds.

This volume assembles for the first time a staggering multiplicity of reflections and readings of John Fante’s 1939 classic, Ask the Dust, a true testament to the work’s present and future impact. Charting the trajectory of one Arturo Bandini over the multiethnic terrain of Los Angeles, ambition and bravado soar, crash, and burn in Fante’s signature novel in ways that resonate profoundly some eighty years after Stackpole Press’s first edition entered the world. As our attention is increasingly drawn to the West Coast as the bellwether of new beginnings and bold starts, Arturo Bandini’s ranting and roving through a dry, dusty L.A. kicks up a windswept nostalgia whose grit settles in the soul and stays.

304 PAGES 9780823287673, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £27.99 JUNE 2020

Against Sustainability

Reading Nineteenth-Century America in the Age of Climate Crisis MICHELLE C. NEELY

288 PAGES, 6 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823287857, PAPERBACK, $40.00, £33.00 Critical Studies in Italian America APRIL 2020

Against Sustainability responds to twenty-first-century environmental crisis not by seeking the origins of U.S. environmental problems, but by returning to the nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to many of our most familiar environmental solutions. In readings that juxtapose antebellum and contemporary writers such as Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton, George Catlin and Louise Erdrich, and Herman Melville and A.S. Byatt, the book reconnects sustainability, recycling, and preservation with nineteenth-century U.S. contexts such as industrial farming, consumerism, slavery, and settler colonial expansion. These readings demonstrate that the paradigms explored are compromised in their attempts to redress environmental degradation because they simultaneously perpetuate the very systems that generate the degradation to begin with.

Thinking Through Crisis

Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics JAMES EDWARD FORD III

In Thinking through Crisis, James Edward Ford III examines the works of Richard Wright, Ida B Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes during the 1930s, in order to articulate a materialist theory of trauma. Ford highlights the dark proletariat’s emergence from the multitude apposite to white supremacist agendas. In these works, Ford argues, proletarian, modernist, and surrealist aesthetics transform fugitive slaves, sharecroppers, leased convicts, levee workers, and activist intellectuals into protagonists of antiracist and anti-capitalist movements in the United States.

336 PAGES 9780823286911, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £27.99 Commonalities

224 PAGES 9780823288205, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99 JUNE 2020 www.fo rd h am p re ss .co m

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ANTHROPOLOGY

POLITICAL THEORY

Textures of the Ordinary

Mutant Neoliberalism

Textures of the Ordinary is an exploration of everyday life in which anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy.

Based on two decades of ethnographic work among lowincome urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture allows her to align her ethnography with stunning anthropological moments in Wittgenstein and Cavell as well as in literary texts from India. Das poses a compelling question–how might we speak of a human form of life when the very idea of the human has been put into question? The response to this question, Das argues, lies in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other within overlapping forms of life.

“This is the book we need today: the authors refuse to debate about what liberalism ‘is’ and instead take us into the thicket of its fracturing and multiple futures in the wake of the great financial crisis.”—Elizabeth Povinelli, Columbia University

Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein VEENA DAS

Market Rule and Political Rupture William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, Editors

Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Sören Brandes, Wendy Brown, Melinda Cooper, Julia Elyachar, Michel Feher, Megan Moodie, Christopher Newfield, Dieter Plehwe, Lisa Rofel, Leslie Salzinger, Quinn Slobodian 320 PAGES, 3 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823285709, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £27.99

On Universals

Constructing and Deconstructing Community ÉTIENNE BALIBAR Translated by Joshua David Jordan

432 PAGES 9780823287697, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £27.99 Thinking from Elsewhere MAY 2020

“In this penetrating book, Étienne Balibar reopens afresh the quarrel of universals from a philosophical anthropology perspective, but rather than answers, he offers the aporias of the universe as a multiversum and of recognition of multiplicity as a condition for political unity. Delving eclectically into Western philosophy, his reflection illuminates contemporary debates about racism, xenophobia and even speciesism.”

—Didier Fassin Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton “[Universality is] a concept that Bailbar has almost singlehandedly salvaged.”—Bruce Robbins, Columbia University

The Doctor and Mrs. A.

Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis SARAH PINTO

“A richly layered, rigorous, often surprising, delightful romp of a book that will appeal to a wide range of readers.”

—Lucinda Ramberg, Cornell University Just before India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. “Mrs. A.” (as she is known) turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints.

This book explores those conversations, and reminds us that the west did not invent feminism, that psychiatry’s history of innovation is global, and that ethical thinking need not center on western myths or paradigms.

160 PAGES 9780823288557, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £21.99 Commonalities AUGUST 2020

Thinking with Balibar

A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice Ann Laura Stoler, Stathis Gourgouris, and Jacques Lezra, Editors

The distinguished contributors to Thinking with Balibar— philosophers, literary critics, anthropologists, political scientists—reflect on Étienne Balibar’s most important terms and concepts, and provide, in the shape of a conceptual lexicon, a group of essays that work outward from Balibar’s works in idioms deeply influenced by Balibar’s thought, toward the most pressing political, philosophical and disciplinary problems of the day.

256 PAGES 9780823286669, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £21.99 Thinking from Elsewhere

Contributors: Emily Apter, Étienne Balbar, J. M. Bernstein, Judith Butler, Monique David-Ménard, Hanan Elsayed, Didier Fassin, Stathis Gourgouris, Bernard E. Harcourt, Jacques Lezra, Patrice Maniglier, Warren Montag, Adi Ophir, Bruce Robbins, Ann Laura Stoler, Gary Wilder 256 PAGES 9780823288489, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £27.99 Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory JULY 2020

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LITERARY CRITICISM The Disposition of Nature

The Literary Qur’an: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb HODA EL SHAKRY

Environmental Crisis and World Literature JENNIFER WENZEL

The novel, the literary adage has it, reflects a world abandoned by God. Yet the possibilities of novelistic form and literary exegesis exceed the secularizing tendencies of contemporary literary criticism. Showing how the Qur’an itself invites and enacts critical reading, Hoda El Shakry’s Qur’anic model of narratology enriches our understanding of literary sensibilities and practices in the Maghreb.

The Literary Qur’an mobilizes the Qur’an’s formal, narrative, and rhetorical qualities, alongside embodied and hermeneutical forms of Qur’anic pedagogy, to theorize modern Maghrebi literature. Placing twentieth-century novels by canonical Francophone writers into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones, The Literary Qur’an stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts, languages, and literary canons.

“The Disposition of Nature is a tour de force. It will set a new bar for the burgeoning field of ecological criticism, and will become a foundational text for the environmental humanities. The research is of astounding range and quality, it is written with gorgeous clarity and elegance, and its intellectual ambition leaves one breathless.”—Mary Louise Pratt, New York University “A powerful affirmation of the value of postcolonial perspectives in discussions of the Anthropocene as well as a trenchant critique of the recent world literature paradigm.

Wenzel’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in environmental justice and its relation to literature and narrative.”—Ursula K. Heise, University of California, Los Angeles 352 PAGES, 8 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823286775, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99 DECEMBER 2019

240 PAGES, 1 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATION 9780823286355, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £21.99 DECEMBER 2019

Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading ERIN GRAFF ZIVIN

The Geological Unconscious

How do we read after the so-called death of literature? If we are to attend to the proclamations that the representational apparatuses of literature and politics are dead, what aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities remain for us today? Our critical moment, Graff Zivin argues, demands anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability in works of philosophy and art.

Rather than applying concepts from philosophy in order to elucidate cultural works, the book exposes works of philosophy, literary theory, narrative, poetry, film, and performance art and activism to one another. Through these acts of exposure between continental philosophy and Argentine literature, art, and film, Graff Zivin shows how anarchaeological reading radicalizes the possibility of justice.

German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary JASON GROVES

Already in the nineteenth century, German writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown, let alone the technologies that could forecast those changes. Through readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works from Goethe to Brecht, the author traces a geological unconscious—unthought and even actively repressed geological knowledge—where it manifests in European literature and environmental thought.

192 PAGES, 12 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823286812, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £21.99 Lit Z JANUARY 2020

208 PAGES, 5 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823288090, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99 JULY 2020

Decadent Orientalisms

The Decay of Colonial Modernity DAVID FIENI

Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction

Decadent Orientalisms presents a critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline together with Arab responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West.

Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism’s power.

“Radical Botany is an extraordinary contribution to the burgeoning fields of plant studies and the nonhuman turn. The book succeeds beautifully in discovering and entwining an entire tradition of speculative botany that will reshape plant studies and posthumanist theory. I have no doubt this text will be eagerly devoured by readers.”—Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times Radical Botany uncovers a speculative tradition that conjures new languages to grasp the life of plants in all its specificity and vigor. Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. The book traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants within literature and art for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought.

224 PAGES 9780823286393, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99 JANUARY 2020

304 PAGES, 13 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823286621, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99 DECEMBER 2019

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LITERARY CRITICISM Dictionary Poetics

Old Schools

“A captivating study. Radical Lexicography offers a remarkable set of keys for reading—and unlocking—recondite modern and contemporary poetry, and this knowledge is conveyed with a deep comprehension of the material and historical contexts of their production.”

—Josephine Park, University of Pennsylvania The new modes of writing pioneered by the literary avantgarde invite new ways of reading. Dictionary Poetics examines book-length poems from Louis Zukofsky to Harryette Mullen, that are structured by particular editions of specific dictionaries. Dworkin maps the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned.

“A wonderfully intelligent and exhilarating book. I haven’t read such a smart text in a long time.”—Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania Old Schools marks out a modernist countertradition: a fascination with outmoded educational forms that persists long after the rise of reform-minded pedagogical theories.

Progressive education was championed not only by political progressives but also by Fascists in Italy, where it was an object of Gramsci’s critique. Building on Gramsci’s pages on Latin, McGlazer shows how figures in various cultural vanguards, from Victorian Britain to 1970s Brazil, reimagined the old school.

Toward a Radical Lexicography CRAIG DWORKIN

Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress RAMSEY MCGLAZER

240 PAGES, 15 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823286584, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99 Lit Z JANUARY 2020

272 PAGES, 8 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATION 9780823287963, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £27.99 Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics MAY 2020

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies

SAM SEE Edited by Christopher Looby and Michael North

In the Wake of Medea

Neoclassical Theater and the Arts of Destruction JULIETTE CHERBULIEZ

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies collects in two parts the scholarly work—both published and unpublished—that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013.

In Part 1, in a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues that nature is constantly and aimlessly variable, and that nature itself might be considered queer. In Part 2, See proposes that, understood as queer in this way, nature might be made the foundational myth for the building of queer communities.

With Essays by Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Wendy Moffat.

“In this impassioned and dazzling study Juliette Cherbuliez discerns how violence shapes a panoply of major and minor works in the classical canon. Among others, Corneille, Rotrou, Racine contend with vitally destructive forces that define and exceed the stage and the early modern world at large. Using Corneille’s Médée as a template, she shows how the unlikely protagonist, who embodies incertitude, anger and contrition indeed personifies the contradictions at the core of the Baroque and Classical age. In its close and informed readings In the Wake of Medea unsettles and inspires. “—Tom Conley, Harvard University

336 PAGES 9780823286997, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99 JANUARY 2020

256 PAGES, 19 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823287819, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99 AUGUST 2020

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LITERARY CRITICISM Radical Ambivalence

The Fact of Resonance

Radical Ambivalence is the first book-length study of O’Connor’s attitude towards race in her fiction and correspondence. It is also the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of O’Connor’s thoughts on the subject.

O’Connor lived and did most of her writing in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights movement. In one of her letters, O’Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the U.S. with regard to race: “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.” Radical Ambivalence explores this double-mindedness, and how it manifests itself in O’Connor’s fiction.

The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory have been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism’s question “who speaks?” in the hidden acoustic questions “who hears?” and “who listens?”

Moving between Joseph Conrad, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, Frantz Fanon, Chantal Akerman, and others, Napolin captures and enhances literature’s ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustic unconscious of texts.

Race in Flannery O’Connor ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form JULIE BETH NAPOLIN

288 PAGES, 10 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823288168, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99 Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory JUNE 2020

192 PAGES 9780823287659, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99 Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O’Connor Trust Series JUNE 2020

MUSIC

Resisting Allegory

Interpretive Delirium in Spenser’s Faerie Queene HARRY BERGER, JR. Edited by David Lee Miller

Peculiar Attunements

How Affect Theory Turned Musical ROGER MATHEW GRANT

Spenser is a delirious poet. He can’t plough straight. What he builds is shiftier, twistier, than anything dreamed up or put down by M. C. Escher.

So begins Resisting Allegory, in which the leading Spenser critic of our time sums up a lifelong commitment to the theory and practice of textual interpretation. Central to this volume is an attention to the deployment of gender in conjunction with the Berger’s notion of narrative complicity. Resisting Allegory offers a model of theoretically sophisticated criticism that never wavers in its close attention to the text.

“Affect theorists and musicologists have been waiting for a book like this for a very long time, and we are lucky to get it from a thinker as clear-sighted as Grant. Peculiar Attunements promises to become an instant classic in the study of affect and emotion studies.”—Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago “A tour-de-force.”—Carolyn Abbate, Harvard University Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the eighteenth century. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century aesthetics, Grant offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes.

304 PAGES 9780823285631, HARDBACK, $75.00, £62.00 JANUARY 2020

Middling Romanticism

192 PAGES, 1 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATION 9780823287741, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99 MARCH 2020

Reading in the Gaps, from Kant to Ashbery ZACHARY SNG

Romanticism is often understood as an age of extremes, yet it also marks the birth of the modern medium in all senses of the word. Engaging with key texts of the romantic period, the book outlines a wide-reaching project to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle. Sng argues that Romanticism dislodges such terms as medium, moderation, and mediation from serving as mere self-evident tools that conduct from one pole to another. Instead, they offer a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that recognize their centrality to the concept of relation.

224 PAGES 9780823288410, HARDBACK, $55.00, £45.00 Lit Z JUNE 2020

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RELIGION The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin

Religion, Emotion, Sensation

The definitive edition of Catholic Worker cofounder Peter Maurin’s Easy Essays, including 74 previously unpublished works Although Peter Maurin is well‐known among people connected to the Catholic Worker movement, his Catholic Worker co-founder and mentee Dorothy Day largely overshadowed him. Maurin was never the charismatic leader that Day was, and some Workers found his idiosyncrasies challenging.

Reticent to write or even speak much about his personal life, Maurin preferred to present his beliefs and ideas in the form of Easy Essays, published in the New York Catholic Worker.

Featuring 485 of his essays, as well as seventy-four previously unpublished ones, this text offers a great contribution to the corpus of twentieth-century Catholic life.

Religion, Emotion, Sensation asks what affect theory has to say about God or gods, religion or religions, scriptures, theologies, and liturgies. Contributors explore the crossings and criscrossings between affect theory and theology and the study of religion more broadly, as well as the political and social import of such work.

Bringing together affect theorists, theologians, biblical scholars, and scholars of religion, this volume enacts creative transdisciplinary interventions in the study of affect and religion through exploring such topics as biblical literature, Christology, animism, Rastafarianism, the women’s Mosque Movement, the unending Korean War, the Sewol ferry disaster, trans and gender queer identities, YA fiction, queer historiography, the prison industrial complex, debt and neoliberalism, and death and poetry.

Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker Lincoln Rice, Editor

Affect Theories and Theologies Karen Bray and Stephen D. Moore, Editors

864 PAGES 9780823287536, PAPERBACK, $34.95, £27.99 Catholic Practice in North America AUGUST 2020

272 PAGES 9780823285662, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £27.99 Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia DECEMBER 2019

Beyond the Doctrine of Man

Circling the Elephant

Decolonial Visions of the Human Joseph Drexler-Dreis and Kristien Justaert, Editors

A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity JOHN J. THATAMANIL

“This interdisciplinary work moves from re-articulating the doctrine of man into a re-engagement with Christian theology in order to creatively and imaginatively present the reader with divinity in the flesh. Covering geopolitics and biopolitics and the matter of enfleshed resistance, Beyond the Doctrine of Man offers a challenge to theology from many sides, but a challenge it is meant to rise to, not buckle under.

This is a remarkable book offering depth of academic analysis presented in an accessible manner.”—Lisa Isherwood, University of Winchester

Christian theologians have for some decades affirmed that they have no monopoly on encounters with God or ultimate reality, and that other religions also have access to religious truth and transformation. If that is the case, the time has come for Christians not only to learn about but also from their religious neighbors. Circling the Elephant affirms that the best way to be truly open to the mystery of the infinite is to move away from defensive postures of religious isolationism and self-sufficiency and to move, in vulnerability and openness, toward the mystery of the neighbor.

Employing the ancient Indian allegory of the elephant and blind(folded) men, John J. Thatamanil argues for the integration of three, often-separated theological projects: theologies of religious diversity (the work of accounting for why there are so many different understandings of the elephant), comparative theology (the enture of walking over to a different side of the elephant), and constructive theology (the endeavor of re-describing the elephant in light of the other two tasks).

304 PAGES 9780823285860, PAPERBACK, $35.00, €27.99 DECEMBER 2019

Grave Attending

A Political Theology for the Unredeemed KAREN BRAY

“In Grave Attending, Bray forges a bold, and yet surprisingly gentle, theological response to the driving economies of salvation that flow through the bloodstream of U.S. politics and American Christianity. Immersed in multiple scholarly discourses, Bray manages to expose the significance of theology amongst these, as her theological vision insists on countering the pathologizing forces that either numb us or compel us to rise above suffering. She catches readers off-guard by crafting a lyrical work of theology that claims moods and modes of reflection that are often deemed unsuitable and unworthy. Bray’s theology claims the damned and damns the redemptive.”—Shelly Rambo, Boston University

320 PAGES 9780823287734, PAPERBACK, $30.00, €27.99 Comparative Theology: Thinking Across Traditions MAY 2020

272 PAGES 9780823286867, PAPERBACK, $35.00, €27.99 DECEMBER 2019

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PHILOSOPHY The Philosophers’ Gift

Technologies of Critique

WILLY THAYER Translated by John Kraniauskas

Reexamining Reciprocity MARCEL HÉNAFF Translated by Jean-Louis Morhange

“Willy Thayer belongs to the very core of Latin American thought today. He has produced decisive readings of the contemporary university, of avant-gardism during the Pinochet dictatorship, and of neoliberalism. This deeply original book is an essential contribution to contemporary AngloAmerican discussions in critical theory and philosophy.”

—Alberto Moreiras, Texas A&M University “Thayer is one of the most important philosophers working in the Spanish-speaking world today. He reveals an entirely novel notion of the artistic and political vanguard and of the function of art in the contemporary world.”

—Brett Levinson, Binghamton University, SUNY “At a moment when critique would seem to have lost its aura, Thayer has succeeded in reconfiguring critique as constellation and construction.”—David Lloyd, University of California, Riverside

Winner, French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation.

“Marcel Hénaff asks why the gift has become a topic of such intense interest among philosophers of ethics. Might the idea of the gift as a figure of absolute generosity be a lament about the absence of just institutions? Hénaff asks philosophy to relinquish its idealism in favor of what a more empirical anthropology teaches about the functions of giving in creating the social and institutional conditions necessary for being together among strangers. This book is his gift to politics.”—Rosalind C. Morris, Columbia University 256 PAGES 9780823286461, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99

Form and Event

Principles for an Interpretation of the Greek World CARLO DIANO Translated by Timothy C. Campbell and Lia Turtas, Introduction by Jacques Lezra

208 PAGES, 5 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823286737, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £23.99 Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory JANUARY 2020

“In this brilliant, brief book, written ten years before Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and thirty years before Badiou’s Being and the Event, Carlo Diano develops a theory of the event that constitutes one of the decisive moments in twentiethcentury European philosophy.”—Giorgio Agamben

Merleau-Ponty’s Poetic of the World

Philosophy and Literature GALEN A. JOHNSON, MAURO CARBONE, AND EMMANUEL DE SAINT AUBERT

“An excellent, long overdue study of an important but underdiscussed aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. This is a book that Merleau-Ponty scholars and phenomenological readers of all sorts, as well as readers of modernist poetry and literature, will welcome. The authors of this volume have made a profound case for philosophical engagement with poetry, for ‘philosophy as poetry,’ and for the centrality of poetry and literature to phenomenological ontology.”

—Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Johns Hopkins University

144 PAGES, 5 X 8, 11 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823287925, PAPERBACK, $25.00, £19.99 Commonalities JULY 2020

Postcolonial Bergson

SOULEYMANE BACHIR DIAGNE Translated by Lindsay Turner, Foreword by John E. Drabinski

Henri Bergson has long been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy, yet his influence extends well beyond Europe. Postcolonial Bergson traces the influence of Bergson’s thought through the work of two major figures in the postcolonial struggle, Muhammad Iqbal and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Poets and statesmen as well as philosophers, both of these thinkers—the one Muslim and the other Catholic—played an essential political and intellectual role in the independence of their respective countries. Both found, in Bergson’s work, important support for their philosophical, cultural, and political projects.

256 PAGES 9780823287703, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99 Perspectives in Continental Philosophy AUGUST 2020

144 PAGES, 5 X 7 ½ 9780823285822, PAPERBACK, $24.00, £18.99

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