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A vital and timely reminder that modern life owes as much to outlandish thinking as to dominant ideologies What do the Nag Hammadi library, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, speculative feminist historiography, Marcus Garvey’s finances, and maps drawn by asylum patients have in common? Jonathan P. Eburne explores this question as never before in Outsider Theory, a timely book about outlandish ideas. Eburne brings readers on an adventure in intellectual history that stresses the urgency of taking seriously—especially in an era of fake news—ideas that might otherwise be discarded or regarded as errant, unfashionable, or even unreasonable. Examining the role of such thinking in contemporar...
Corpses mark surrealism's path through the twentieth century, providing material evidence of the violence in modern life. Though the shifting group of poets, artists, and critics who made up the surrealist movement were witness to total war, revolutionary violence, and mass killing, it was the tawdry reality of everyday crime that fascinated them. Jonathan P. Eburne shows us how this focus reveals the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the thought and artwork of the surrealists and establishes their movement as a useful platform for addressing the contemporary problem of violence, both individual and political. In a book strikingly illustrated with surrealist artworks and their ...
Idiosyncratic essays use their “exploded” forms to examine how inquiry functions Insect galls, time, memory systems, orgone energy, and a bookstore that doesn’t yet exist. These disparate topics have persistently fascinated scholar Jonathan P. Eburne, yet each defied his previous efforts at classification through scholarly writing, resulting in five essays suspended in process. In Exploded Views, Eburne returns to these essays with the metaphorical tool of the exploded-view diagram, expanding them into entirely new, hybrid forms that unpack their inspirations and trace the wayward paths they followed. An experiment into the nature of inquiry that spelunks, rather than shies from, the r...
The technological innovation and unprecedented physical growth of the cold war era permeated American life in every aspect and at every scale. From the creation of the military-industrial complex and the beginnings of suburban sprawl to the production of the ballpoint pen and the TV dinner, the artifacts of the period are a numerous and diverse as they are familiar. Over the past half-century, our awe at the advances of postwar society has softened to nostalgia, and our affection for its material culture has clouded our memories of the enormous spatial reorganizations and infrastructural transformations that changed American life forever.
Historicizing Theory provides the first serious examination of contemporary theory in relation to the various twentieth-century historical and political contexts out of which it emerged. Theory—a broad category that is often used to encompass theoretical approaches as varied as deconstruction, New Historicism, and postcolonialism—has often been derided as a mere "relic" of the 1960s. In order to move beyond such a simplistic assessment, the essays in this volume examine such important figures as Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt, and Edward Said, situating their work in a variety of contexts inside and outside of the 1960s, including World War II, the Holocaust, the Algerian civil war, and the canon wars of the 1980s. In bringing us face-to-face with the history of theory, Historicizing Theory recuperates history for theory and asks us to confront some of the central issues and problems in literary studies today.
An exhilarating, genre-bending exploration of curiosity’s powerful capacity to connect ideas and people. Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what’s left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems—the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to...
The first decades of the twentieth century were pivotal for the historical and formal relationships between early cinema and Cubism, mechanomorphism, abstraction, and Dada. To examine these relationships, Jennifer Wild’s interdisciplinary study grapples with the cinema’s expanded identity as a modernist form defined by the concept of horizontality. Found in early methods of projection, film exhibition, and in the film industry’s penetration into cultural life by way of film stardom, advertising, and distribution, cinematic horizontality provides a new axis of inquiry for studying early twentieth-century modernism. Shifting attention from the film to the horizon of possibility around, b...
Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositions—collages of text and gestural painting across a variety of media—quickly made Basquiat one of the most important and widely known artists of the 1980s. Reading Basquiat provides a new approach to understanding the range and impact of this artist’s practice, as well as its complex relationship to several key artistic and ideological debates of the late twentieth century, including the instability of identity, the role of appropriation, and the boundaries of expressionism. Jordana Moore Saggese argues that Basquiat, once known as “the black Picasso,” probes not on...
Uses literature to understand and remake our ethics regarding nonhuman animals, old human beings, disabled human beings, and cloned posthumans Literary Bioethics argues for literature as an untapped and essential site for the exploration of bioethics. Novels, Maren Tova Linett argues, present vividly imagined worlds in which certain values hold sway, casting new light onto those values; and the more plausible and well rendered readers find these imagined worlds, the more thoroughly we can evaluate the justice of those values. In an innovative set of readings, Linett thinks through the ethics of animal experimentation in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, explores the elimination of ...
Until attention shifted to the Middle East in the early 1970s, Americans turned most often toward the Maghreb—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and the Sahara—for their understanding of “the Arab.” In Morocco Bound, Brian T. Edwards examines American representations of the Maghreb during three pivotal decades—from 1942, when the United States entered the North African campaign of World War II, through 1973. He reveals how American film and literary, historical, journalistic, and anthropological accounts of the region imagined the role of the United States in a world it seemed to dominate at the same time that they displaced domestic social concerns—particularly about race relations—on...