Abstract: The significance of what it means to be human has become an explicit problem for many fields in literary and cultural studies today, from posthumanism and human-animal studies to disability studies and various forms of cultural studies focused on the historical and ongoing animalization of human populations. Whether self-identified as posthumanist or not, critical disability studies and critical

Abstract: This interview between Sunaura Taylor and Sara E. S. Orning took place digitally, over the course of several months in the spring of 2020, during the time that the COVID-19 pandemic exploded around the world. The exchanges have been edited into the four conversations presented here, dealing with human and nonhuman life, death and vulnerability, racial and environmental justice, and extinction

Abstract: This commentary on the dialogue between Sunaura Taylor and Sara Orning seeks to understand the connections they draw among pandemic conditions, the treatment of animal life, disability, and the requirement for new networks of care. Along the way, it becomes clear that certain ideals of human existence that disavow its constitutive animality are responsible for notions of anthropocentric autonomy

Abstract: Care is work, an attitude toward others, and an ethical ideal. The intimate and necessary labor required to sustain those who are dependent, it is a limited resource unjustly extracted from women and people of color. Care ethics provides robust arguments for recognizing human interdependency with and accountability to the environments in which we are embedded, however it often reaches an

Abstract: Stereotyped pacing, self-biting, coprophagia, and other such behaviors have long been observed among animals in menageries and zoos. Yet it was only in the mid-twentieth century that such phenomena were scientifically problematized as abnormal—as deleterious modifications of natural behavioral norms due to captivity, specifically, anthropogenic modes of enclosure and exhibition that inadequately

Abstract: Jack Halberstam’s evocative description of a fellow airline passenger’s service animal is both an artful performance of queer negativity, and also an outstanding example of the nested interdependencies that are the subject of my essay. However, he misrepresents my definition of care by claiming that it depends on benevolent human regard. I agree with Halberstam that desire is often taboo

Abstract: Stereotyped pacing, self-biting, coprophagia, and other such behaviors have long been observed among animals in menageries and zoos. Yet it was only in the mid-twentieth century that such phenomena were scientifically problematized as abnormal—as deleterious modifications of natural behavioral norms due to captivity, specifically, anthropogenic modes of enclosure and exhibition that inadequately

Abstract: This essay responds to Chrulew’s “Abnormal Animals” through an examination of the use of restriction and seclusion against people with disability within sites of incarceration. Building on Chrulew’s essay, I observe that Umwelt is a useful tool for conceptualising the institution as a horizon of meaning and intelligibility that closes off other worlds for those who are captive to it. I note

Abstract: This article explores the problematic history of bringing together disability and animality, along with its potential. The aim is to introduce and develop the concept of disanimality, which is defined as “a disruptive affect, a feeling of discomfort, a site for critique, but also an opportunity for critical disability, animality, and human-animal studies to come together in more productive

Abstract: Answering Michael Lundblad’s call for critical disability, animality, and human-animal studies to come together in more productive ways, in this response essay I argue that the focus needs to be on the historical material conditions of transnational capitalism that enable the tripartite constitution of Otherness—be-coming disabled/be-coming animal/be-coming Black.

Abstract: Transhumanism longs not only for the enhancement of human capabilities but also for the end of suffering; that longing conflates the destiny of the individual with that of the human species. This essay examines the ideals that are most central to the transhumanist imaginary, showing that they are less exotic than is suggested by their aura of futurity, and that their implications for the

Abstract: The evolutionary drift of the concept of “the human” among transhumanists covers over the fact that white, masculine, capacitated, bourgeois identity continues to pass as universal at the expense of racialized subjects, sexual outliers, disabled people, and lower-class cast-offs from the age of colonialism. Black feminist materialists and disability posthumanists (neomaterialists) argue that

Abstract: Joseph Beuys is certainly one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, and assessments of the political character of his work have diverged sharply. In part, this is because of the biographical facts of Beuys’s own career—he was a Luftwaffe pilot in World War II for Nazi Germany and was shot down in action, yet later helped found the European Green Party—and in part it is because

Abstract: Reporting on the Syrian civil war and on Syrian migration to Europe since 2015 often suggests that a drought from 2006–2009 caused an agricultural collapse, spurring rural-to-urban migration and social conflict underpinning the uprisings of 2011. Such narratives regularly focus on the mass death of sheep, goats, and other “livestock” as indexes of the environmental violence underpinning war

Abstract: This brief response to Neel Ahuja’s “Animal Death as National Debility” focuses on his analysis of the intersections of speciesism, racism, and ableism in Syrian war narratives. Ahuja insightfully untangles a media-driven, over-determined portrayal of the Syrian uprisings that began in 2011, as well as the subsequent war that was framed as one of the world’s first “climate wars.” The appropriation

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Rachel Adams is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her most recent books are Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery (2014) and the coedited Keywords for Disability Studies (2015). This essay is based on material in her forthcoming book, Critical: Care, Narrative

The novel looms large on the horizon of global literary studies. It not only travels well, but is also widely perceived as futureoriented and open-ended, ready to absorb within its polymorphous ambit the indeterminacy of the present. In April 2019, New Literary History hosted a symposium on “The Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives,” with eight scholars who have expertise in various literary regions—East

Abstract:At first glance, psychoanalysis and ordinary language philosophy bear little resemblance. The apparent focus of psychoanalysis on the inner self might seem to jar with the appeal to the ordinary. Indeed, since Ludwig Wittgenstein voiced his suspicions about Sigmund Freud, philosophers have largely agreed that the two disciplines are, despite converging in some instances, ultimately incompatible

Abstract:This essay explores the ways in which experimental writers who work as professors must reconcile the difficulty of their creative work with the explicatory demands of pedagogy. It takes as its main case study the way in which Jorie Graham's poetry exhibits a deep ambivalence about epistemological authority that can be meaningfully tied to the solidification of her academic career. Her work

Abstract:The essay examines Kwame Anthony Appiah's ethical cosmopolitanism in the context of twenty-first century global migrations, rising nationalisms, and religion in both its violent and peaceful forms. It reads Appiah's concept of situated cosmopolitism as "universalism plus difference" in Cosmopolitanism in relation to current theories of the "new" cosmopolitanism and diaspora; debates in religious

Abstract:Literary critics have long drawn extensively on continental theory, whereas they have taken little interest in analytic philosophy. At times, they have critiqued analytic philosophy as apolitical or pedantic. More often, they ignore its existence. Perhaps they have done so, in part, because its methods have been ill-suited to their projects. Throughout the past few decades, literary critics

Abstract:Epiphany, in narrative, seems to be the opposite of pace. Pace is a narrative’s large forward temporal movement; epiphany, its temporary timelessness. Pace extends chronologically from past toward future; epiphany lingers in an eternal present. Is there no coexistence of these two narrative phenomena? No movement of pace in epiphany, no epiphanic presence in pace? At stake in these questions

Abstract:This essay considers Audre Lorde’s work in and for the feminist magazine Chrysalis alongside Theodor Adorno’s late essays on culture and administration. By analyzing Chrysalis within the twentieth-century history of independent print media, and also by looking to Lorde’s conflict with the magazine, this essay argues that Chrysalis exhibits what Adorno calls an “administrative view” in its

Abstract:A predominant misunderstanding of the philosophical importance of paying attention to our ordinary language is that it supplies us with a standard of correctness. In contrast to this view, it is arguedhere that everyday and ordinary language are so difficult to bring into view and that this is something both J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein maintained as well. It is precisely the failure

Abstract:Contemporary philosophers have devoted considerable attention to W. E. B. Du Bois's definition of race in "The Conservation of Races" (1897). Indeed, they have given more attention to Du Bois's definition of race in that essay than to his treatment of any other philosophical issue elsewhere in his writings. Nearly all that attention can be traced to Kwame Anthony Appiah's controversial, early

Abstract:For the "plotters" at the forefront of this article—literary characters whose plots spark narrative into being—the act of plotting constitutes an arduous effort to secure a better life, higher status, greater recognition, and a stable sense of identity. The promise of plotting is, for these knowing characters, a belief that their striving will finally pay off, the consoling yet often deluded

Abstract:Based on research in the Jacques Derrida collection acquired by Princeton University in 2015, this article takes an expansive view of what is considered to be a manuscript through close readings of the material makeup of literary artifacts. In particular, Derrida’s copy of Hélène Cixous’s first book, interleaved with surprising documents, and a handful of small notes Cixous gave to Derrida

Abstract:Over the last two decades, cognitive scientists working in embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded cognition (the 4Es) have sought to understand mental processes in ways that take us “out of our heads.” They argue that the body and environment beyond the brain are integral components of cognitive processing. In this article, Moses explains how the “postcognitivist” models of mind they are

Abstract:Who is Kwame Anthony Appiah? This is a question that he addresses with some frequency in his writings and lectures. He often reminds his intellectually heterogeneous audiences, which include lawyers, literary critics, museum-goers, and others, that he's first and foremost a philosopher. To this self-description, we might add the adjective "analytic." His earliest books were highly technical

Abstract:In a wide-ranging discussion Homi Bhabha and Anthony Appiah reflect on the present moment in the humanities, in African-American Studies, in philosophy and literary studies, and in politics around the world. Among the topics they discuss are: honor and dignity and their relation to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; teaching in an increasingly diverse university; the role of the Internet

Abstract:Why are readers of novels so frequently disappointed about film adaptations? This essay explores the grounds for this enduring question, focusing on filmed versions of illusion-creating novels. It does so by presenting a psychological hypothesis of the most common reasons and supports it with a comparative media phenomenology and reception aesthetics. Readers who have grown fond of a specific

Abstract: There is, of course, more than one question posed by the elusive notion of sensibility, especially if we consider it both in its contemporary deployment and in its rich conceptual history. The question I pose here is occasioned by the recent renewal of interest in aesthetic education and, more precisely, in efforts to renew criticism itself by returning to the psychological paradigm of s

Abstract:In "Boundaries of Culture," the Presidential Address at the 2017 Modern Language Association Convention, Kwame Anthony Appiah gave an impressively far-ranging account of the state of literary studies, starting with Johann Gottfried von Herder's notion of the Volksgeist and the origins of literary study in the triad of the literary, the national, and the humane, turning to such current theories

Abstract:In 1983, Jacquelin Dolcé, Gérard Dorval, and Jean Miotel Casthely published an intellectual history of Haiti titled Le Romantisme en Haïti: La Vie intellectuelle, 1804–1915. The work opens with a rather bold statement: "Western thought is so preponderant among young people that it would seem to have expressed everything, anticipated everything."1 They go on to lament that because of this,

Abstract:This essay takes the issue’s temporal prompt—“Romanticism, Now and Then”—as a chance to think about forms of rhythmic and rhetorical self-difference in the poetry of William Blake, read by way of the poetry of Ed Roberson. Both are poets who present the reader with overlapping forms of time in human and natural worlds. I draw on social theories (Du Bois, Mead, Fabian, Silva) and critical reading

Abstract:The prosodic innovations of free verse, prose poetry, and concrete poetry that overwhelmed poetic practices in the later nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century were grounded in Romantic ideas and practices with vernacular language. While the key agents of change were Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, John Thelwall’s involvement with the British Elocutionary Movement was equally crucial

Abstract:The survival of musical works as participants in cultural life depends upon the reenactment of patterned sounds through performance or playback. But what precisely is reproduced for listeners in such transhistorical resoundings? Music has at least since the Romantic era been conceived of as, among other things, a stimulus to feeling, whether in the form of a generalized “aesthetic experience”

Abstract:From the sinuous curves of the Rococo to Raphael’s grotteschi and its ancient predecessors, the roots of the modern arabesque are manifold. Yet the arabesque has a surprising root in the avant-garde writing and metaphysics of the German Romantics. Looking to the arts for inspiration, these philosophers and writers turned to the arabesque to quench their thirst for a synthesis of man and nature

Abstract:William Cullen Bryant’s abstraction of the British Romantic poetics he has been accused of merely borrowing had lasting effects on the lyricization of transatlantic poetics and on current ideas of Romantic lyric (specifically on versions of “the” Romantic lyric taught in American English departments) and on the naturalization of lyric reading. Bryant’s lyricized racism is and was inherent

Abstract:Are artworks alive? it is necessary to specify, first of all, what is meant by this question. One answer might point out, cheerfully, that works of art are still being produced, and that older works are still being exhibited, performed, archived, and anthologized, and hence still have an audience, a public, a readership. Art is alive insofar as it is still around and, moreover, insofar as

Abstract:Can James Joyce's Ulysses be read with the ears instead of the eyes? This essay considers what difference it makes to listen to one of the modernist era's most formally experimental narratives. Its use of the term "accessible modernism" encapsulates attempts to make a literary movement notorious for its difficulty accessible in alternative formats to people with disabilities. Sound recording

Abstract:In this paper I propose to reconsider theories of diegetic space that rely on explicit framing (i.e., "two people walk into a room" or "in Spain"). Rather than looking for maps, I define space in terms of lexical categories denoting objects. The emphasis on objects leads to a method for literary archaeology, informed by cognitive theory and anthropology. If the universe is made of atoms, a

Abstract:When, in an essay on the poet Théodore de Banville, Charles Baudelaire declares that “hyperbole and apostrophe are the forms of language which are not only most agreeable but also most necessary” in lyric, he leaves little room for understatement. Is understatement less necessary, less pleasing in lyric? What should one make of all the various moments in lyric poetry when poets moderate their

Abstract: This essay begins to imagine a theory of difficulty grounded in Romantic poetry but broadly portable into other eras and forms. On my account, the difficult Romantic poem deflects attention by saying more or less what it means, especially when what it means is to condemn features of the historical present. That is, its rhetorical and moral simplicity is lodged in an obvious antagonism to

Abstract:In 2008, the phrase "big data" shifted in meaning. It turned from referring to a problem and an opportunity for organizations with very large data sets to being the talisman for an emerging economic and cultural order that is both celebrated and feared for its deep and pervasive effects on the human condition. Economically, the phrase now denotes a data-mediated form of commerce exemplified

This essay considers philosophical and aesthetic issues at stake in dealing with ephemeral arts such as performed music and exhibited film. Taking inspiration from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s writings on presence culture and meaning culture, it explores possible stances towards beautiful objects – stances that precisely do not treat them as texts to be explained – including extreme attitudes such as silence

"There is no greater work of art than a great portrait," Henry James flatly declared in his essay on John Singer Sargent of 1887. This is an extraordinary statement, especially from an artist who is himself known above all for the representation of human consciousness rather than appearances. Not only did one of the century's greatest writers thus sweepingly undo the traditional hierarchy of word and

Abstract:The concepts offered by quantitative analyses operate across scales in ways that are often foreign to literary study. They demand new kinds of abstraction: ones that can take into account minute effects in single texts replicated across a corpus that numbers in the hundreds, or thousands. Establishing metrics, finding patterns and linking these metrics and patterns with meaningful concepts

Abstract:This essay examines contemporary theorizations of intellectual scale, by asking how we can move, with integrity, from particular experiences to universal claims. To do so, I return to the "Fool's Cap Map," an allegorical print from the early modern period and show how the image goes beyond traditional tropes of macrocosm and microcosm by invoking and inventing a cosmopolitan critical subjectivity

Abstract: “Enchantment” is undergoing a reassessment across several disciplines. Against traditional fears associated with enchantment, contemporary scholars such as Rita Felski, Jane Bennett, and Akeel Bilgrami link it to the potential for developing ethical relationships and attitudes toward our work as literary scholars, our world, and others. In this essay I argue that the writing of Henry David

Abstract:For decades, many scholars in the humanities have set themselves against generalizations, valuing instead what is local, resistant, exceptional, nuanced, situated, concrete, embodied, and specific. Both close reading and historicizing, two of the major methods in literary studies, emphasize singularity, strangeness, and heterogeneity. This essay argues that the antigeneralizing imperative

Abstract: What charm is we, by definition, can’t quite say: it notoriously eludes the language that would fix it analytically into semantic place. But its ineffability or discursive resistance occupies a theoretically complex and historically informative relation to the antique or outlandish quality – I call it irreference – of the language of magic charms: the spells whereby a sorcerer uses words

Abstract:The concept of Eurasia is a muddle. In this article it is argued, following the British social anthropologist Jack Goody, that the landmass exhibits important commanalities, which date back to the agrarian empires and urban cultures of the Bronze Age. Europe is better understood as the macro-region "Western Eurasia" than as a continent, equivalent to the whole of Asia. This recognition is

In his memoir essay, “Edmund Wilson in Benares,” Pankaj Mishra records a unique intellectual failure: his inability to write an original piece on Edmund Wilson, a critic who had enthralled him for several years. This failure took place in 1995, the year of Wilson’s centenary, which had prompted Mishra to try and write something about the American critic, ideally an “exposition of Wilson’s key books

The origin of this essay is a sense of disappointment at what had seemed to me at first one of the most interesting of recent developments in literary studies. I mean here the reemergence, on a critical scene dominated since the alleged death of "high theory" by historicism, of a self-conscious formalism, a "new formalism" to borrow the term employed by Marjorie Levinson in her 2007 PMLA review—"What

Abstract: This essay takes a historical approach to a current problem: how to read and respond to the argumentative practices of the moral and political controversialist in a context where it is vividly clear that some of the norms that frame and regulate “free speech” are contested by the controversialist. Thanks to Amanda Anderson and others, we have rich critical vocabularies for describing the

Abstract:Responding to the recent exhortation by the historian David Armitage to return to a history of "big ideas" traced over long periods of time, this paper examines reasons for the resistance to his advice voiced by both textualist and contextualist intellectual historians. Discussing the alternatives to traditional history of ideas in "conceptual history" and "metaphorology," it argues for the

This paper explores the distinctive character of esthetic experience in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Muses, by focusing on the relation between the sensory dimension of aesthetics (sense) and its communicable or linguistic meaning (sense). These dimensions of sense are irreducible to ordinary sensation and linguistic sense, giving aesthetic experience a distinctive

This article addresses the intersection of literary form and historical change, and both advocates and elaborates upon a critical methodology that Ralph Cohen once dubbed a “process theory” of genre. I draw upon two primary examples from the 1790s—the georgic poetry of the Romantic laborer-poet Robert Bloomfield and the revision history of William Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems—and I adapt Cohen’s

Abstract: This essay examines the status of the example and the exemplary in two senses: first, as the place, function, and value of the literary example in computational humanities; and, second, as the exemplary author, the author that stands in for and represents a much wider school or field. When it comes to digital humanities, Franco Moretti—rightly or wrongly (but this is part of the contested