By: Chelsea Wall

I wanted to use this opportunity to gather some sources regarding the reconciliation (or lack thereof) of the dueling temporalities inherent in postcolonial spaces between the encroachment of modernity and its negative effects on postcolonial communities and the lure of reconnecting with a tradition and culture present before the colonial encounter.

Amor, Monicia, Okwui Enwezor, Gao Minglu, Oscar Ho, Kobena Mercer, and Init Rogoff. “Liminalities: Discussions on the Global and the Local.” Art Journal (57.4) 29-49. Web. 30 Oct. 2014.

This article is a series of essays that discuss various issues of artists working in Latin America, Africa, and China. I am particularly interested in Okwui Enwezor’s essay, “Between Localism and Worldliness,” which examines the affect of diaspora and migration on the identity of African artists and intellectuals attempting to negotiate the temporalities of the Western world and cyberspace with maintaining a connection with the home space. He uses internal migration patterns to illustrate how new temporalities within one’s own home country and culture can render citizens alienated and distant from its social procedures and concludes that the liminality of diaspora can be “seen as potential subversions of nationality – ways of sustaining connections with more than one place while practicing nonabsolutist forms of citizenship.”

Dasgupta, Rana. Capital: The Eruption of Delhi. New York: Penguin Press HC, 2014. Print.

Dasgupta’s novelistic portrait of Delhi as a booming metropolis puts into perspective the myriad of ways in which multiple temporalities can operate and conflict within one city. Between interviews with the corrupt mega-rich of the business sector and tours of the internal squalor of the city of itself, it becomes evident that more than half of the city, living in slums and sleeping on the medians of the streets, is operating on a temporality which capitalism has yet to infiltrate with which the ultra-rich are unable or unwilling to acknowledge or engage with.

Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Harvey, whom I didn’t know was actually a faculty member here, analyzes the contradictions of capital and their wider social implications in fostering a world divided by social injustices. He divides the contradictions into “foundational,” “moving,” and “dangerous” with foundational crises being inherently built into the system of capitalism and unavoidable in any of its incarnations, moving crises being constantly changing, some of which build over time and become a form of slow violence in themselves, and dangerous crises (one of which includes capitalism’s relationship to nature and another being universal alienation) being those that pose a danger to the system of capitalism. I felt this source could provide beneficial background and another angle through which I could approach temporality in postcolonial spaces.

McLeod, John. “‘Wheel and Come Again: Transnational Aesthetics Beyond the Postcolonial.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 7.2 (2001): 85-99.

McLeod draws attention to the problematic methodologies of postcolonialism and its tendency to become an overarching concept that lacks a grasp of the nuances of locality and an insensitivity to forms of colonialism that differ over time and space and which limit it in reading the complexities and politics of culture in former colonies. He offers transnationalism as a solution due to its insistence on the relationship between new forms of identity and economic networks of cultural production and suggests that the liminal positioning of transnational communities provide a space in which radical critique and social change can take place.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.

Nixon’s book Slow Violence gives an outline of some of the dueling temporalities faced by the advent of capitalism and toxic industry outsourcing to the underdeveloped world. He argues that we, in the Western world, conceive of violence as a singular, spectacular event and neglect to conceptualize the lingering, more insidious effects of violence that wreak havoc on native communities with economic ties to the land. His theory of slow violence is helpful in framing the nature of the temporalities at work in the postcolonial state. Furthermore, I am interested in his conception of “writer-activists” as liminal states in that they provide a strong linkage to underdeveloped countries while operating within the Western world, thereby balancing the two temporalities and attempting to unite them.

Varma, Rashmi. “UnCivil Lines: Engendering Citizenship in the Postcolonial City.” NWSA Journal 10.2 (1998): 32-55.

Varma takes a feminist approach to the problem of creating identity in the postcolonial state, arguing that decolonization projects were intimately tied to conceptions of masculinity that problematized the urban woman, noting that representations of the alienated postcolonial intellectual torn between dueling temporalities have been male in origin, with the voice of the middle-class urban India woman being conspicuously silenced.

Burton, Stacy. “Bakhtin, Temporality, and Modern Narrative: Writing ‘the Whole Triumphant Murderous Unstoppable Chute.” Comparative Literature 48.1 (1996): 39-64. Web. 1 Nov. 2014.

This article engages with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Frederic Jameson to identify the ways in which our unconscious grappling with space and time intimately affect narrative form, noting that it is often the struggle with “multiple, interrelated senses of time” that animates or drives a narrative (46). Though she focuses primarily on a Bakhtinian reading of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which is not typically considered a postcolonial novel, her rendering of the way that the characters negotiate temporal disjunctions and become limited in their efforts to narrate history, especially her treatment of Benjy as a character who is “extratemporal” are still salient to the exploration of dueling temporalities within modernity, as well as within narrative forms themselves. She ends with a nod towards postcolonial literature, suggesting that a Bakhtinian notion of “chronotopes” becomes vastly helpful in critiquing the ideology of imperialism in postcolonialism.

Sorensen, Eli Park. “Naturalism and Temporality in Ousmane Sembene’s Xala.” Research in African Literatures 41.2 (2010): 222-243. Web. 1 Nov. 2014.

In this piece, Sorensen explores the temporal flow of the novel Xala, a tale of the obstacles placed in the path towards Senegal’s emergence as an independent national identity. The novel draws on Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in order to exemplify that a nation in the hands of a colonized bourgeoisie made of “mimic men” that simply occupy the channels left empty by the colonizing power is destined for neocolonial exploitation. He explores the multiple ways in which this bourgeoisie, embodied in the figure of El Hadji, must actively forge a present in which the deeds and environment of the past is forgotten or deliberately ignored, rendering them actors in an imaginary and wholly impotent world. Furthermore, El Hadji is cursed with a gala, a curse that renders him literally impotent, and therefore must travel to villages on the margins of his bourgeoise community, villages that exist upon a temporality that he has turned his back on and repressed to exist in the postcolonial world, and is unable to reconcile himself to. Through the notion of the xala, which operates across the disjunctive temporal spaces, the two worlds are able to be united, though it is in a negative sense. This piece serves to illustrate the dangers of refusing to negotiate the dueling temporalities of the modern postcolonial state.

Roy, Arundhati. Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014. Print.

This collection of essays by writer-activist Roy outlines the rampant chaos wrought by the underclass and natural resources of India by modern techno-capitalism. She investigates how capitalism has reinforced the caste system as well as gender, race, religious, and ethnic conflicts in addition to creating the demand to clear vast swaths of lands of people and resources to make way for zones of business activity. She also implicates NGOs and international foundations in making economic might politically and culturally legitimate. This is another source that outlines the ways in which global capitalism makes the divide between temporalities in postcolonial spaces ever more sharp and detrimental to the masses.

Bhambra, Gurminder K. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. Print.

Bhambra uses a postcolonial approach to deconstruct and reconstruct our understanding of modernity, cautioning that the way in which we understand the past has implications for social theories developed today. She acknowledges that implicit in postcolonial theory is the continued privileging of the Western world and seeks to remedy the assumptions of linearity in modernity theory by constructing a comparison of “multiple modernities.” Understanding these multiple modernities and the way they interact is fundamental to understanding the development of multiple temporalities within the same geographical space.

By: Kate Eickmeyer

The following are some articles I looked at over the weekend while considering whether to develop one of my old papers into an abstract for the upcoming GC ESA conference on trance. These sources vary in topic as a result of considering a few different papers; they are loosely connected in terms of trance, altered consciousness, and the spiritual/”oceanic” vs. the psychoanalytic/rational as states of trance. I’ve essentially treated this as a list for my own reference for future projects, so apologies for some utilitarian shorthand and the wide scope.

Bloom, Harold, Ed. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. New York: Norton, 1970. Perhaps a bit of an old saw, but always good to revisit, this text is a classic collection of essays on consciousness amongst the romantics and has insights into any angle on the subject. Geoffrey Hartman’s essay, “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness,’” is an especially useful discussion of subjective states of consciousness and their alteration in the context of the sublime. Hartman’s essay and others in the book are relevant to development of an existing paper on trance states in Wordsworth’s The Prelude (one of the candidates for an abstract).

Deleuze, Gilles. “Bartleby, Or, The Formula.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1997. 68-90. This is Gilles Deleuze’s evidently famous essay on “Bartleby,” although I overlooked it when I wrote a seminar paper on Sartre and corporate professional culture with reference to “Bartleby” several years ago. Deleuze’s reading of Bartleby’s apparent madness as a haze of private, individual logic (or, I would say, trance) and his characterization of Bartleby and Ahab as beings of “Primary Nature” are interesting, although I question some of his conclusions. Clearly worth another look.

Epstein, Mark. “On the Seashore of Endless Worlds: Transitional Experience and the Sense of Identity.” The Middle Way 88.1 (2013) 7-23. Epstein is a psychotherapist and something of a popular writer on Buddhism. I’ve come across some interesting contemporary articles on Buddhism and this one deals directly with Freud’s “oceanic,” so it brings perspective to bear on a paper I wrote on Freud’s “oceanic feeling” and the altered states of consciousness produced by the liminal moments of death and dying in King Lear and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Epstein offers a lucid comparison of Freudian and Buddhist conceptions of the ego and states of consciousness and then turns his discussion to British psychotherapist D.W. Winnicott’s work on object relations. While perhaps not the most traditional academic work, Epstein’s piece is full of interesting ideas about liminal states of consciousness (a.k.a. trance) and ways to approach Freud and Buddhism in a critical way. The article also might be food for thought concerning a paper I’m incubating on the intersections of Buddhism and Romance in Enlightenment utopian fiction.

Harper, Margaret Mills. “Nemo: George Yeats and her Automatic Script.” New Literary History 33.2 (2002): 291-314. Having done work on the concept of “irreducibility” in Yeats, no exploration of literature and trance would be complete without some attention to George and W.B. Yeats and automatic writing. While Harper’s article alone doesn’t resolve the question of whether the scholarly earth has been scorched already on this subject, it does contain some good analysis of George’s experiments with automatic writing and the requisite state of altered consciousness. Harper’s article also includes some interesting coverage of George’s relationship to W.B. and the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Obeyeskere, Gananath. The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Vast and fascinating survey of eastern and western approaches to consciousness with many insights into trance, including dreaming, visions, memory, and liminality associated with death and dying. Obeyeskere’s breadth is wide enough to cover a lot of bases, including all of those relevant to my projects: Yeats and Madame Blavatsky, Blake and the Romantic Poets, Freud, Jung, Nietzche and post-Enlightenment European interpretations of Buddhism. All the classic trance-related phenomenology under the sun, or so it seems.

Sapienza, Claudio. “Il sentimento oceanico e il Sé Cosmico nella creazione artistica contemporanea.” PsicoArt: Rivista on line di Arte e Psicologia 3.3 (2013): 1-25. Sapienza’s article discusses Freud’s “oceanic feeling” in the context of contemporary art. Invoking Schiller and a number of other metaphysical thinkers, Sapienza investigates the direct engagement of nature to produce an aesthetic of the “oceanic” in the works of Graham Metson, Ana Mendieta, Giuseppe Penone and James Turrell, among others. Sapienza covers traditional works concerning nature and the universal in the gallery context as well as earthworks and land art such as Stonehenge, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. The aesthetics of the “oceanic feeling” is another interesting angle on trance, and this article will also be useful for another nascent project on place-based art forms.

Simmons, Janette. “The Oceanic Feeling and a Sea Change: Historical Challenges to Reductionist Attitudes to Religion and Spirit From Within Psychoanalysis.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 23.1 (2006): 128-142. Simmons discusses Freud’s “oceanic” and everything the title so thoroughly describes. Her views on the historical relationship between spirituality and psychoanalysis also have implications for affect theory and audience reception to the legacies of the romantics and the enlightenment. Again, we have the intersection of subjective, first-person experience of consciousness, psychoanalysis, and spiritualism.

Smith, Dominic. “Beyond Bartleby and Bad Fatih: Thinking Critically with Sartre and Deleuze.” Deleuze Studies 7.1 (2013) 83-105. Smith provides an excellent history of the critical disputes over “Bartleby” and brings Deleuze’s article into conversation with Sartre’s ideas of bad faith and good faith from Being and Nothingness. Smith posits Bartleby’s behavior as bad faith and then suggests moving past that idea into Deleuze’s emphasis on the political implications of Bartleby’s actions. I have a number of concerns about Smith’s readings of both Sartre and Deleuze and would take a different approach to the subject, but this article makes for a good and recent reference point for the state of scholarship on “Bartleby.” Without getting into too much detail, I’d argue that Bartleby is in good faith (and awake), and the narrator is in bad faith (and in a trance), to again put it in terms of the ESA conference.

Vasquez Rocca, Adolfo. “Sartre: Teoría fenomenológica de las emociones. Existencialismo y conciencia posicional del mundo Nómadas.” Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas 36.4 (2013). Vasquez Rocca’s article about phenomenology, emotions, existentialism and the world’s postcolonial consciousness suggests political angles on altered consciousness.

Vidler, Anthony. “Bodies in space/subjects in the city: psychopathologies of modern urbanism.” Differences: A Jounal of Feminist Cultural Studies 5.3 (Fall 1993): 31. Vidler gives us another approach to Freud in terms of modern spaces, and a discussion linking the “oceanic” and existentialism in terms of the subject’s engagement with urban environments. Virginia Woolf is Vidler’s main literary reference point and his slant is feminist; trance states in Woolf’s work are indeed interesting.

By: Iris Cushing

I am using this annotated bibliography assignment as a way to gather materials for a paper I’m working on for our Postwar Women Writers and Intellectuals course. The paper looks at two texts of Susan Sontag’s: her iconic collection of essays, Against Interpretation, published in 1966 (and consisting of writing she’d been making for the previous seven years); and Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963, edited by her son David Rieff. I’d like to take a look at what Sontag was writing privately in the years she was writing Against Interpretation,  and how the formation of her signature aphoristic style emerged in her journals and in her responses to the literature and art she was exposed to at that time. Specifically, I would like to trace the influence of French cinema, theory and philosophy on the development of Sontag’s unique style of writing and thinking. I am approaching this bibliography as an opportunity to gather a wide swath of materials, the study of which will certainly lead to a narrower scope in terms of the what information I’ll use. ~Iris

Berman, Jeffrey. Dying in Character: Memoirs on the End of Life. Amherst: University of Massachussets Press, 2013. Print.

Jeffrey Berman is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University of Albany, and has authored numerous books around the themes of grief and loss as they relate to literary figures. Chapter 5 of this book is titled  “I Have Never Been Tempted to Write about my own life”: Susan Sontag, David Rieff, and Swimming in A Sea of Death. The title referred to here is Sontag’s son’s memoir about his mother’s 2004 death from cancer. The chapter deals with Sontag’s extreme (and well-known) reticence about exposing any details of her private life, which Reiff had to face in his decision to publish Reborn and the subsequent volume of Sontag’s journals, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh. Since Reiff was small child being raised by Sontag at the time she was writing Against Interpretation, his perspectives on his mother’s life will be useful to me. I am interested in Berman’s analysis of Reiff and Sontag’s relationship in the context of other literary life writing by critics and theorists, such as Roland Barthes and Edward Said.

Ching, Barbara, and Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A, eds. Scandal of Susan Sontag. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 29 October 2014.

Barbara Ching, a contemporary culture scholar and associate professor of English at the Univerisity of Memphis, co-edited this book of essays on Sontag with Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, an associate professor of women’s studies and English at Penn State University. This book, published at exactly the same time as Sontag’s journals (October 2009), compiles critical essays by scholars on Sontag’s life, writings and greater influences. Both Terry Castle’s essay on “Notes on Camp” and Jay Prosser’s essay on Against Interpretation and the Illness books (Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors) address questions of Sontag as a public intellectual in the early 1960s; I am interested in comparing those analyses of Sontag with what emerges in her private writing. Wayne Koestenbaum’s essay in the book takes up her aphoristic writing style and its evolution over the course of her writing career.

Kaplan, Alice Yeager. Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis. Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2012. Print.

In this book, Alice Yeager Kaplan, the John M. Musser Professor of French and chair of the Department of French at Yale University, takes up three iconic American women’s experiences living in Paris in the Sixties. As far as Sontag is concerned, this book covers the time spent in Paris, as she was doing graduate work in Philosophy at Oxford,  that she writes about in Reborn; Paris was, naturally, the site of much of Sontag’s discovery of the French theory, literature and cinema that she writes about in Against Interpretation. I am especially interested in Kaplan’s analysis of the perspective that Paris offered Sontag on New York (and America in general).

Lopate, Phillip. Notes on Sontag. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Print.

This book, by well-known critic, essayist, writer (and fellow public intellectual) Phillip Lopate, uses both Lopate’s personal encounters with Sontag and an in-depth biographical study to examine Sontag’s ongoing influence on cultural criticism since the 1960s. I am interested in Lopate’s analysis of Sontag’s “taste for aphorism” in her writing, as well as his anecdotes about meeting her in the time she was writing Against Interpretation (and keeping the journals published as Reborn). I am also interested in comparing Lopate’s thoughts on Sontag as a person with those of Sigrid Nunez and David Rieff.

Muriel, ou le Temps d’un retour. Dir. Alan Resnais. Perf. Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Kerien, Nita Klein. Argos Films/Arte France Développement, 1963. Film.

This film, directed by French New Wave/Left Bank director Alan Resnais, is one of the numerous films that Sontag–a notorious Francophile–wrote about in Against Interpretation. It was Resnais’ third film, after Hiroshima, Mon Amour and L’Année dernière à Marienbad; Sontag cites it as Resnais’ most difficult and complex in terms of its attempt to combine what his previous films had done independently:  “deal with substantive issues” (the Algerian war among them) as well as “attempt to project a purely abstract drama.” This film in its original language will be useful to my project, as it is something that Sontag watched and wrote about in her journal when it was released in 1963. The ambivalence she expresses about it publicly is characteristic of her rhetorical style.

Nunez, Sigrid. Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. New York : Atlas & Co. : Distributed to the trade by W.W. Norton, 2011. Print.

This memoir by novelist and professor Sigrid Nunez documents the years she lived with Susan Sontag and her son, David Rieff, whom Nunez was dating. I am interested in Nunez’s take on Sontag as a friend and mentor, as well as how Sontag negotiated the line between public and private writing and thought in the years following the publication of Against Interpretation.

Reiff, David. Swimming in A Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008. Print.

David Rieff, Susan Sontag’s only child, is a political policy analyst, Senior Fellow at the New School for Social Research’s World Policy Institute, and a Fellow at NYU’s New York Institute for the Humanities.

Sontag held on to her life until its very end; her tenacity in the face of intense physical suffering (as a result of the blood cancer which led to her death) resonates with her lifelong interest in the various phenomenologies of pain, illness, atrocity, and human rights. I am interested in Rieff’s memoir about her life (and death) primarily because of its portrayal of her encounters with the moral and ethical questions that would guide her thinking and writing at the time she was making Against Interpretation. I am also interested in Rieff’s contentious decision to publish Reborn and As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh after Sontag’s death, considering how notoriously private of a person she was.

Rush, Fred. Review of Notes on Sontag by Phillip Lopate and Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 68 No. 2 Spring 2010. Print.

This article by Fred Rush, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, reviews both Lopate’s memoir about Sontag and Sontag’s journals themselves. It provides a useful comparison between writing about Sontag as a near-mythic public figure and a private, complicated person.

Solway, David. Random Walks: Essays in Elective Criticism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Print.

David Solway is a poet, essayist and professor of English at John Abbot College. In this book’s chapter on Sontag, “Never on Sontag,”  Solway takes up the titular essay in Against Interpretation and examines the rhetorical relationship between the essay’s discrete sections, arriving at the conclusion that the essay’s “intended ideological payload” is “erotics replacing hermaneutics.” I think Solway’s take on Sontag’s use of aphoristic language could contribute meaningfully to my examination of Sontag’s use of aphorism in her “public” published prose.

Sontag, Susan. As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Print.

This is the second edition of Sontag’s journals, tracing the years that include the publication of Against Interpretation and follow the publication of her first novel, The Benefactor. This book is Sontag’s notation of day-to-day life as her lifelong dream of becoming a full-time writer–a dream articulated in great detail in Reborn–was being realized.

Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Perf. Anna Karina and Sady Rebbot. Panthéon Distribution, 1962. Film.

This film, a lesser-known work by French New Wave Director Jean-Luc Godard, was another that Sontag wrote about in Against Interpretation, calling it “one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of.” This was another film that made a significant impact on her in the time span covered in Reborn. In Against Interpretation, she makes use of a series of numbered propositions to create her critique of Godard’s film, something she does at other points in the book (such as in “Notes on Camp”) and in other forms in her journals. Like Resnais’ Muriel, seeing this film in its original language will give me a sense of the experience Sontag was having at the time she was formulating her style and identity as a writer.

By: Catherine Sara Engh

I’ve annotated sources for two different papers that I’m working on. One is on representations of the frivolous woman of fashion, a social type pictured in James Gillray’s satirical prints and a minor character in Jane Austen’s early novels. The other paper is on trance, negative emotions and acts of first-person narration in Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s lyric poetry. I’ve listed theoretical sources first, Austen/Gillray sources second and Coleridge/Wordsworth sources last.

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Print.

Sianne Ngai treats twentieth century art as a privileged location for the exploration of negative feelings. The negative feelings that Ngai identifies–envy, irritation, anxiety, animatedness–emerge where agency is suspended. These feelings are either objectless or ambivalent about their object. Unlike the “vehement passions” of canonical literature–anger, fear, elation–ugly feelings are weak. They do not occur suddenly, but persist over time. Central to Ngai’s argument is her definition of literary ‘tone’ as neither the subjective emotions a text calls up in the reader nor an emotion inside a text that the reader can analyze at a remove, but some combination of both. Ugly feelings manifest where there exists some confusion about the subjective or objective status of a state of being, a confusion that is the basis for that condition of not knowing how one is feeling. Ngai’s project is more theoretical than historical–she does not write a history of ugly feelings. Rather, she lays the groundwork for an approach to literary criticism that may motivate further historical research. Ugly Feelings is a useful source for those interested in bringing the problems of negative feeling to bear on their work.

Brison, Susan. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002. Print.

Susan Brison’s book is a first hand account of her experience of rape and its aftermath–the judicial process, the responses of her friends and family, her growing involvement in the activist community and her decision to have a child. Her first-hand account of her “working through” is accompanied by her research in the fields of cultural analysis, feminist criticism, philosophy and neurology. Brison posits that traumatic experience is tantamount to a radical loss of a self. Because Brison sees the self as intersubjective, the telling of one’s story to an audience of sympathetic listeners is essential to the trauma victim’s reconstruction of a self. Telling one’s story helps one regain a sense of control over one’s life. Brison’s first person account practices this essential component of her argument. She understands the self as narrative but also as embodied–because trauma is lodged in the body, it cannot be easily overcome by the mind. Brison situates her book inside a tradition of autobiographical accounts of rape and in relation to the fields of trauma studies, feminist criticism and philosophy. Her book is original for its integration of autobiography with extensive and diverse research. A must-read for feminists interested in issues of gender and embodiment.

Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton UP, 2003. Print.

Alex Woloch intervenes in a debate between literary critics over the interpretation of character. Placed at the intersection of story and discourse, his concepts of character-space and character-system integrate conflicting accounts of character given by structuralists and humanists. With chapters focusing on the novels of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Henri de Balzac, Woloch argues that the nineteenth century realist novel is often aware of the disjunction between a minor characters’ implied being and the manifestation of this being in the fictional universe. Woloch claims that the realist novel situates a well-developed central consciousness in an extensive social world inhabited by minor characters and, in doing so, tells us of a social system in which theories of democracy and human rights were maturing as inequality persisted. Woloch’s authority is grounded in the numerous 18th century realist novels he reads–he moves fluidly from Middlemarch to Madame Bovary to In Search of Lost Time–and in the work of relevant theorists–Luckas, Marx, Barthes, Watt, Forster. This book will be of special interest to those interested in narratology and/or realist aesthetics and the 19th century novel.

Donald, Diana. The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Age of George III. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Print.

Diana Donald’s book gathers British satirical prints produced and sold during the reign of George the III, or, as she says, in the “golden age of caricature.” She argues that the mixed aristocratic, middle-class and working class audience for the prints and the juxtaposition of educated allusion with impolite subject matter in the prints themselves make it difficult to situate the caricature prints of Gillray, Cruikshank, Rowlandson and others as either ‘high’ or ‘low’ art. Donald traces the formal origins of the style developed by caricaturists during this period and her close readings of the prints are materially grounded in the production and distribution processes. This book gathers a vast range of caricatures that are otherwise hard to access and organizes the images in respective chapters on social and political satire. Donald was the first scholar to write a book on this material and her text is a must-see for anyone interested in graphic satire in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Harding, D.W. Regulated Hatred and Other Essays on Jane Austen. Ed. Monica Lawlor. London: Athlone, 1998. Print.

“Regulated Hatred” is the title of a lecture on Jane Austen that the psychologist and literary critic D.W. Harding gave in 1935. “Regulated Hatred” changed the course of Austen criticism by replacing the Victorian’s “gentle Jane”–an authoress who, above all, valued civility–with an Austen who sharply, even mercilessly, criticized the conventions of her society. The collection of essays included here were written over the course of sixty years; some published in Harding’s lifetime, some not. The scope of the book is limited by Harding’s biographical/psychological approach but his observations on the formal qualities of Austen’s novels remain relevant. This book will be valuable to anyone interested in the history of Austen criticism or the formal attributes of her work.

Beer, John. “Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and the State of Trance.” The Wordsworth Circle 8.8 (1977): 121-38. Print.

Beer’s basic claim in this essay is that there was a system behind William Wordsworth’s and S.T. Coleridge’s usage of the term “trance.” Beer focuses, for the most part, on the early poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge–the Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude and Coleridge’s conversation poems. But he also incorporates material from the journals of Dorothy and the notebooks and letters of Coleridge. Drawing on the etymology of the word “trance,” Beer proposes that, in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poetics, the word may refer to the noun “entrance”–a passage of some kind–and to the verb “entrance”–a transport of feeling. Also important is the affiliation of trance with death, a signification that will later be picked up by Keats. Through close readings, Beer argues that as Wordsworth and Coleridge became disenchanted in personal relationships, the social and sexual implications of the term were de-emphasized and trance was associated with childhood and the psychological extremes of calm and agitation. The absence of contemporary “theory”–much of which hadn’t been written in 1977–and the emphasis on close readings of verse and prose make for an essay remarkably different in approach to what is now published in the same journal.

Berkeley, Richard. Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

Richard Berkeley critiques Thomas McFarland’s analysis of Coleridge’s encounters with German philosophy in Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969). McFarland sees Coleridge’s interpretive dilemma as one between two ways of doing philosophy–philosophical inquiry as originating with the phrase ‘I am’ (rationalism, Jacobi) or ‘it is,’ (pantheism, Spinoza). Berkeley sees this as too simple an approach to the problem, one that distorts the philosophy of Spinoza and Jacobi and the controversy over pantheism that Coleridge would have been familiar with. In Berkeley’s view, the pantheism controversy orbited around the status of reason in Spinoza’s philosophy. Coleridge was not wrestling with two ways of doing philosophy, as McFarland claims, but with conflicting ways of interpreting Spinoza. In Chapter one, Silence and the Pantheistic Sublime in Coleridge’s Early Poetry Berkeley argues that Coleridge’s early conversation poems–“the Eolian Harp,” “On Leaving a Place of Retirement”–articulate a tension between reason and faith that was at the heart of the pantheism controversy. Berkley shifts the conversation about Coleridge and pantheism from one about influences to one about anxieties over the status of reason. This book intervenes in a very specific area of Coleridge studies and will be of interest to anyone working on Coleridge or Spinoza.

Larkin, Peter. “‘Frost at Midnight’–Some Coleridgean Intertwinings” The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge 26. (2005): 22-36. Web. <http://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/Coleridge-Bulletin.html>.

Larkin generates a phenomenological reading of Coleridge’s 1798 conversation poem ‘Frost at Midnight.’ Drawing on the work of Avatal Ronnell, Larkin compares a good reading of a beautiful poem to a greeting–rather than overwhelming a poem with our learning, we should allow our experience of the poem to enable us to ask new questions, to bring what we know into conversation with the poem. What emerges is not a finalized and definitive explication, but a precarious questioning process. The structure of Larkin’s essay enacts this ‘greeting.’ He reads ‘Frost at Midnight’ and then considers the affinities between Coleridge’s thought and the claims of phenomenology. He applies the work of Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible to ‘Frost at Midnight,’ finding phenomenological reversals–or intertwinings–between a perceiving subject and its object in ‘Frost at Midnight.’ Central to his reading is the idea that the subject–Coleridge–perceives in objects the forms of transcendence but that something of the object world remains hidden and inaccessible. Larkin’s authority derives from his knowledge of philosophical concepts and contexts–the influences and precedents to Coleridge’s and Merleau-Ponty’s thought. He speaks fluently about Coleridge’s concept of the primary and secondary imagination and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘the flesh.’ Much Coleridge criticism that I have come across–books like Berkeley’s Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason and Ramonda Modiano’s Coleridge and the Concept of Nature–limit the extrinsic material they bring to bear on Coleridge’s writing to work written in or before Coleridge’s time. Larkin’s application of more contemporary claims of phenomenology to Coleridge’s work is refreshing.

Fulford, Tim. Landscape, Liberty and Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

In Landscape, Liberty and Authority, Tim Fulford takes a new historicist approach to the poetry and prose of Thompson, Cowper, Gilpin, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Landscape, Liberty and Authority is concerned with ‘discourses on landscape’–literary representations of nature but also writing that uses the motifs of landscape description to make critical and political arguments. The poets and writers Fulford discusses ground their authority in the landscape, which emerges as a site where power struggles, particularly over the status of gentlemanly taste, erupt. Fulford maintains that Coleridge and Wordsworth were the first to explicitly attack the aesthetic and political values of the gentleman. However, these romantic poets, like Thompson and Cowper before them, maintained a vexed relationship to a readership that still espoused many of the values they were criticizing. Fulford brings an extensive knowledge of political contexts–party politics, the politics of enclosure and the French Revolution–to bear on his readings. He is great at working through ideological nuances, uncovering influences and explaining how these writer’s social/political stances differed from those of writers who came before them.

Ann, Bermingham. “The Picturesque Decade.” Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860. Berkeley: U of California, 1986. Print.

Ann Bermingham conducts an Althusserian reading of English landscape paintings from 1740-1860, focusing on the landscapes of Gainsborough, John Constable, the picturesque painters and the Pre-Raphaelites. Bermingham stages Landscape and Ideology as an intervention in a field of art history that, in 1986, typically situated landscape painting in a familiar history of stylistic development. Traditional approaches problematically assume historical neutrality. In contrast, Bermingham believes that there exists a relationship between landscape paintings and the dominant social and economic values of a time when the growth of industrial capitalism was changing the socio-economic order in the English countryside. In chapter two, “The Picturesque Decade,” Bermingham discusses the social anxieties of Knight and Price–gentlemen whose system of landscape gardening privileged rusticity and an appearance of wildness. She elaborates the paradox of a situation in which the very men who were enclosing the land were building gardens that nostalgically returned to a time before the land was enclosed. Since Landscape and Ideology was published, ideological approaches to landscape have become more common–Fulford’s book is a good example of a similar approach applied to representations of landscape in poetry.

 Sources in French

Gould, A. (1975). The English Political Print, From Hogarth to Cruikshank. Revue de L’Art (France), (30), 39-50, 98-101. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1320614744?accountid=7287

Focusing on stylistic development, this article traces a history of the British political print and engraving, starting with Hogarth and ending with Rowlandson and Cruikshank. Gould argues that Gillray paved the way for the political cartoon, placing him at odds with Diana Donald. While Donald emphasizes Gillray’s importance, she situates him at the latter end of the heyday (1760-1820) of political caricatures in England. For Donald, Gillray was a particularly well-educated and skilled innovator of the form, but one who was nonetheless influenced by cartoonists who came before him. Gould, as is now common, starts his discussion of political prints with Hogarth. This article came before Diana Donald’s book and demonstrates that scholarly work was being done in France on this medium before the 90s.

Emma Eldelin, “Exploring the Myth of the Proper Writer: Jenny Diski, Montaigne and Coleridge”, TRANS- [En ligne], 15 (2013). Web. <http://trans.revues.org/751>

This essay explores the relationship between the British author Jenny Diski’s On Trying to Keep Still (2006) and two epigraphs that frame this book. One is from Coleridge’s poem ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’ and one is from Montaigne’s Essays. Eldelin is interested in how the epigraphs integrate Diski’s book in a literary tradition, comment on the text and mark her genre. She sees both epigraphs as enunciations related to the plight of the solitary writer and explores what it means to bring the voices of old texts to bear on a contemporary piece of writing. This article is unique in its focus on epigraphs and in its movement across periods and genres. Research-wise, I suspect this essay would not be considered rigorous enough to be published in a journal like Studies in Romanticism or The Wordsworth Circle.

By: Erin Glass

Below are a list of sources that are helping me think through Social Paper (SP), a software platform I’m working on with the Digital Fellows.  Essentially, we aim to build a free, open source socialized writing environment that will enable students to easily share, manage, track and “socialize” the entirety of their writing across their graduate school career.  There are several key aspects that differentiate SP from current methods and tools. 1) Instead of distributing and producing writing across multiple “siloed” channels (class blogs, seminar papers, etc) which inhibit a coherent perspective (as well as efficient control) of one’s developing body of work, all student writing will “live” on the student’s online workspace. For every piece of writing, the student will determine whether it is associated with a class, topic, working group, so that relevant peers may be notified of their work. 2) For every piece of writing, the student will have full control of the level of publicity. Students may choose to share the work only with a select group, such as a class, a few trusted peers, a professor, or alternately, may choose to have their work completely public.  3) Like Google Docs, the tool will allow for peer commenting and discussion in the margins, but unlike Google Docs and other free commercial tools, students can rest easy that their content will not be mined for corporate use.  4) The activity generated on SP — from the submission of writing to the commenting on peers papers — will be surfaced (according to the student’s privacy settings) through personalized activity streams with the hope of raising awareness in the student community of the work being produced by their peers.

This theoretical motivations driving the development of this tool draw on two bodies of research: 1) the social production of knowledge  2) a critique of technocapitalism as it relates to the tools, methods, culture of practice, and law used to carry out scholarly communication (though I will emphasize that we should extend our thinking of scholarly communication to include the transmission of knowledge among students, not just professional academics).

Bowers, C. A. The False Promises of the Digital Revolution. How Computers Transform Education, Work, and International Development in Ways That Undermine an Ecologically Sustainable Future. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. Print.

Bowers writes on education, ecojustice and the commons. His work is important to me as it offers a critical perspective on the development of digital technologies and their social consequence.  In this work he argues that while digital technologies have rapidly improved our ability to generate and communicate knowledge, they have also contributed to the “individually-centered form of consciousness” which is “unable to grasp the short- and long-term consequences” of the environmental degradation taking place. Bowers demonstrates the “myths, misconceptions, and silences” inherited in language that have contributed to a hubristic, placeless rhetoric of technological progress that woefully, if not willfully, misunderstands the true challenges at hand.  Though this work is not about scholarly communications in itself, it is important in its dramatic reframing of the stakes of education and, in a post-McLuhanian manner, provides useful analysis for understanding the impact of digital technologies on the production, possibility, and meaningfulness of human thought.

Dewey, Anne Day, and Libbie Rifkin. Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry. Print.

This collection of essays examines the social production of postwar American poetry, primarily through the theorization of “friendship” as a fertile, though not always unconflicted, site of creativity.  The topics presented here range from letter correspondences, small literary magazines, collaborative poetry writing, literary communities and radical collectivities working in the digital age. I’m interested in this work, as well as Dewey’s work on the construction of public voice in Black Mountain Poetry, for its tracing the various modes of friendship, community and intellectual exchange that contribute to creative productivity.

Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U, 2014. Print.

Drucker writes about the history of graphic design and digital humanities. In this work, Drucker provides a “visual epistemology,” or principles for analyzing graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to help us understand how interfaces mediate the user’s interaction and knowledge production. Drucker’s historical analysis of the “screen,” is critical for exposing the non-neutrality of GUIs today.  Combining Drucker’s visual epistemology with Bower’s critique of the “individually-centered” form of consciousness reinforced by digital technologies, how might we imagine new GUIs that would better emphasize the social role of knowledge production?

Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Print.

Elbow is known for his work in composition studies, particularly his theorization of the writing process  as outlined in this now classic work.  Here he observes that writing for peer review can significantly enhance a student’s growth — not to mention their excitement — in writing.  Elbow’s emphasis on the benefit of a social environment to share one’s writing and feedback is one of the key motivations of building Social Paper.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: New York UP, 2011. Print.

Now the Director of Scholarly Communications at the Modern Language Association, Fitzpatrick writes about the challenges and opportunities facing the publishing scholar in the changing landscape of academic publishing. Drafts of this work were first presented online through CommentPress, a free and open source software component which enables users to comment on paragraphs of long form texts, making the work both a theoretical and performative exploration in new models for peer review in academic publishing.  Though this work focuses on peer review, and other issues of scholarly publication, as related to professional academic, the tools, practices, and critiques are applicable to questions concerning communication among students.

Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. 1975. Print.

Ivan Illich offers an anarchist’s critique of education and the tools and practices used to carry it out. In Deschooling Society, he writes, “The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” Though I have not yet read Tools for Conviviality, I’m hoping it explores this theme in greater depth, as a means of thinking through how we can better shape our platforms of knowledge transmission to cultivate “learning, sharing, and caring.”

Lovink, Geert, and Miriam Rasch. Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013. Print.

Though I have yet to read this reader (freely available on the web through Network Cultures)  I’m excited by the prospect of a series of contemporary essays that directly attempt to theorize and critique the social media phenomenon.  The essays here discuss a wide range of topics related to social media — such as privacy, labor, rhetoric, affect, and political movements — which are critical to think through when formally integrating a social media structure into the production of graduate student writing.

Stallman, Richard. Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston, MA: Free Software Foundation, 2002. Print.

Richard Stallman is a computer programmer and free software activist. Stallman is a fierce supporter of privacy rights and Free Software. Stallman coined the term, and started the Free Software Movement, as a means to fight the restrictions built into proprietary software which domesticate and manipulate the user for corporate gain. Though Stallman is a controversial figure, he is useful in thinking about how subtle restrictions in software can give corporations and political entities vast power over the civic body, not only through surveillance but though the user’s learned passivity. In these essays, Stallman defines Free Software and argues why it is worth fighting (and programming) for.

Taylor, Astra. The People’s Platform: And Other Digital Delusions. New York: Metropolitan, 2014. Print.

Taylor here critiques the premise that “the digital transformation” is a “great cultural leveler, putting tools of creation and dissemination in everyone’s hands and wresting control from long-established institutions and actors.”  Taylor’s work seeks to show that the business imperatives underlying our technology has a dramatic effect on how we interact online and who, in the end, actually benefits from those interactions.  I’m interested in this work to see how Free and Open Source software might resolve some of these concerns, or whether they will pose equally problematic issues.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything: (and Why We Should Worry). Berkeley: U of California, 2011. Print.

Vaidhyanathan’s work on Google is important to me, because, despite my critical concerns for Google, their series of produces — Gmails, Google search, and Google Drive — are hands down the most important tools that I use as a student, a worker and curious, interested citizen. In the development of Social Paper — which is messy, frustrating, and full of compromises —  there have been times that I’ve wondered whether my critique of Google was rather alarmist, and that it was a waste of energy to try to create something that they will probably offer, and much more sophisticatedly, within a few years. Vaidhyanathan, and other writers discussed in this annotation, have been exceedingly helpful in these moments, by reaffirming the need to question the motives of the companies that are gaining an unprecedented amount of control in the most minute aspects of our professional and private lives.