The essays, manifestos, rants, screeds, pleas, soliloquies, telegrams, broadsides, eulogies, songs, harangues, confessions, laments, and acts of poetic terrorism in these two volumes - which collectively form an academic "rave" - were culled, with some later additions, from roundtable sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2012 and 2013, organized by postmedieval: a journal for medieval cultural studies and the BABEL Working Group ("Burn After Reading: Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval Studies," "Fuck This: On Letting Go," and "Fuck Me: On Never Letting Go") and George Washington University's Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute ("The Future We Want: A Collaboration"), respectively. Gathering together a rowdy multiplicity of voices from within medieval and early modern studies, these two volumes seek to extend and intensify a conversation about how to shape premodern studies, and also the humanities, in the years ahead. Authors in both volumes, in various ways, lay claim to the act(s) of manifesting, and also anti-manifesting, as a collective endeavor that works on behalf of the future without laying any belligerent claims upon it, where we might craft new spaces for the University-at-large, which is also a University that wanders, that is never just somewhere, dwelling in the partitive - of a particular place - but rather, seeks to be everywhere, always on the move, pandemic, uncontainable, and always to-come, while also being present/between us (manifest). This is not a book, but a blueprint. TABLE OF CONTENTS Vol. 1: Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval Studies, edited by Eileen A. Joy and Myra Seaman Heather Bamford: INTENTIONALLY GOOD, REALLY BAD - Frank Battaglia: SEEING A FOREST AS WELL AS TREES - Bettina Bildhauer: NET WORTH - Martha Easton + Maggie Williams: OUR FEMINISM, OUR ACTIVISM - Ruth Evans: BE CRITICAL - Joshua R. Eyler: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MEDIEVAL STUDIES - Lara Farina: STICKING TOGETHER - Matthew Gabriele: WAGING GUERRILLA WARFARE AGAINST THE 19TH CENTURY - Gaelan Gilbert: MEDIEVAL STUDIES IN THE SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD - Noah D. Guynn: RADICAL RIDICULE - David Hadbawnik: BURNED BEFORE WRITING - Guy Halsall: HISTORY AND COMMITMENT - Cary Howie: ON NEVER LETTING GO - Shayne Aaron Legassie: THE GOTHIC FLY - Erin Maglaque: FUCK POSTCOLONIALISM - Material Collective: WE ARE THE MATERIAL COLLECTIVE - Thomas Mical: MEDIEVAL SURREALIST MANIFESTO - Chris Piuma: DE CATERVIS CETERIS - Daniel C. Remein: 2ND PROGRAM OF THE ORNAMENTALISTS - Christopher Roman: A MEDIEVAL: MANIFESTO - Eva von Contzen: HOMO NARRANS - Erik Wade: HISTORICISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS - Lisa Weston: 'TIS MAGICK, MAGICK THAT WILL HAVE RAVISHED ME Vol. 2: The Future We Want: A Collaboration, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Anne Harris + Karen Eileen Overbey: FIELD CHANGE/DISCIPLINE CHANGE - L.O. Aranye Fradenburg + Eileen A. Joy: PARADIGM CHANGE/INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE - J. Allan Mitchell + Will Stockton: TIME CHANGE/MODE CHANGE - Lowell Duckert + Steve Mentz: WORLD CHANGE/SEA CHANGE - Chris Piuma + Jonathan Hsy: SPECTRAL VOICE CHANGE/LANGUAGE CHANGE - Julie Orlemanski + Julian Yates: COLLECTIVE CHANGE/MOOD CHANGE

Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts fiercely defends the liberal arts in and from an age of neoliberal capital and techno-corporatization run amok, arguing that the public university's purpose is not vocational training, but rather the cultivation of what Fradenburg calls "artfulness," including the art of making knowledge. In addition to sustained critical and creative thinking, the humanities develop the mind's capacities for real-time improvisational communication and interpretation, without which we can neither thrive nor survive. Humanist pedagogy and research use play, experimentation and intersubjective exchange to foster forms of artfulness critical to the future of our species. From perception to reality-testing to concept-formation and logic, the arts and humanities teach us to see, hear and respond more keenly, and to imagine, or "model," new futures and possibilities. Innovation of all kinds, technological or artistic, depends on the enhancement of the skills proper to staying alive. Bringing together psychoanalysis, neuroscience, animal behavioral research, biology & evolutionary theory, and premodern literarature (from Virgil to Chaucer to Shakespeare), Fradenburg offers a bracing polemic against the technocrats of higher education and a vibrant new vision for the humanities as both living art and new life science. Contrary to recent polemics that simply urge the humanities to become more scientistic or technology-focused, to demonstrate their utility or even trophy their uselessness, Staying Alive does something remarkably different: it argues for the humanism of a new scientific paradigm based on complexity theory and holistic and ecological approaches to knowledge-making. It urges us to take the further step of realizing not only that we can promote and enhance neuroplastic connectivity and social-emotional cognition, but also that the humanities have always already been doing so. "Nature always exceeds itself in its expressivity" - which is to say that living is itself an art, and artfulness is necessary for living: for adaptation and innovation, for forging rich and varied relationships with other minds, bodies and things, and thus, for thriving - whether in the boardroom or the art gallery, the biology lab or the recording studio, the alley or the playground, the book or the dream. Staying Alive contains companion essays by Donna Beth Ellard (Rice University), Ruth Evans (Saint Louis University), Eileen A. Joy (BABEL Working Group), Julie Orlemanski (University of Chicago), Daniel C. Remein (New York University), and Michael D. Snediker (University of Houston). TABLE OF CONTENTS Eileen A. Joy: Prelude: Hands Off Our Jouissance: The Collaborative Risk of a Shared Disorganization // Chapter 1: Driving Education: A Crash Course // Fugue 1: Julie Orlemanski: An Army of Lovers // Chapter 2: Living the Liberal Arts: An Argument for Embodied Learning Communities // Fugue 2: Daniel C. Remein: Human-Tongued Basilisks // Chapter 3: Breathing with Lacan's Seminar X: Expression and Emergence // Fugue 3: Ruth Evans: The Object Breath // Chapter 4: Life's Reach: Territory, Display, Ekphrasis // Fugue 4: Donna Beth Ellard: Ekphrastic Beowulf: Defying Death and Staying Alive in the Academy // Coda: Michael D. Snediker: Fuzzy Thinking

With essays by Eileen A. Joy, Mary K. Ramsey, Edward Said, Claire Sponsler, Nicholas Howe, Allen J. Frantzen, John D. Niles, John Moreland, Alfred K. Siewers, James W. Earl, Janet Thormann, John M. Hill, Jeffrey J. Cohen, Carol J. Clover, Clare A. Lees, Mary Dockray-Miller, Shari Horner, Michel Foucault, Carol Braun Pasternack, Gillian Overing, Seth Lerer, Susan Kim, and Michelle R. Warren