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Proceedings from two Speculative Medievalisms symposia, held at
King's College London (Jan. 2011) and The Graduate Center, City
University of New York (Sep. 2011), and organized by The Petropunk
Collective (Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and
Michael O'Rourke). These interdisciplinary events were dedicated to
dialogue and cross-contamination between traditional concepts of
speculatio, present-minded premodern studies, and contemporary
speculative realist and object-oriented philosophies. In its
medieval formulation, speculatio signifies the essentially
reflective and imaginative operations of the intellect. Here the
world, books, and mind itself are all conceived as specula
(mirrors) through which the hermeneutic gaze can gain access to
what lies beyond it. "To know is to bend over a mirror where the
world is reflected, to descry images reflected from sphere to
sphere: the medieval man was always before a mirror, both when he
looked around himself and when he surrendered to his own
imagination" (Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas). Correlatively, speculative
realism, as the term suggests, is characterized by the
self-contradictory intensity of a desire for thought that can think
beyond itself - a desire that proceeds, like all philosophy, in a
twisted and productive relation to the phantasm of the word. Aiming
to rise above and tunnel below the thought-being or self-world
correlation, speculative realism "depart s] from the text-centered
hermeneutic models of the past and engage s] in daring speculations
about the nature of reality itself" (The Speculative Turn).
Speculative Medievalisms, like some weird friar-alchemist in an
inexistent romance, plays the erotic go-between for these
text-centered and text-eccentric intellectual domains by trying to
transmute the space between past and present modes of speculation
from shared blindness to love at first sight. Possibly succeeding,
the volume brings together the work of a motley crew of
philosophers and premodernists into prismatic relation. Contents:
Kathleen Biddick, "Toy Stories: Vita Nuda Then and Now?" - Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen, "Sublunary" - Graham Harman, "Aristotle With a Twist"
- Anna Klosowska, "Transmission by Sponge: Aristotle's Poetics" -
J. Allan Mitchell, "Cosmic Eggs, or Events Before Everything" -
Kellie Robertson, "Abusing Aristotle" - Anthony Paul Smith, "The
Speculative Angel" - Nick Srnicek, "Abstraction and Value: The
Medieval Origins of Financial Quantification" - Eugene Thacker,
"Divine Darkness" - Scott Wilson, "Neroplatonism" - Julian Yates,
"Shakespeare's Kitchen Archives." With response and post-script
essays by: Liza Blake, Patricia Clough, Drew Daniel, Eileen A. Joy
and Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, Michael O'Rourke, and Ben
Woodard.
Although widely beloved for its playfulness and comic sensibility,
Chaucer's poetry is also subtly shot through with dark moments that
open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into
which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom,
scenes and events where everything could possibly go horribly wrong
or where everything that matters seems, if even momentarily,
altogether and irretrievably lost. And then sometimes, things
really do go wrong. Opting to dilate rather than cordon off this
darkness, this volume assembles a variety of attempts to follow
such moments into their folds of blackness and horror, to chart
their endless sorrows and recursive gloom, and to take depth
soundings in the darker recesses of the Chaucerian lakes in order
to bring back palm- or bite-sized pieces (black jewels) of bitter
Chaucer that could be shared with others . . . an assortment, if
you will. Not that this collection finds only emptiness and
non-meaning in these caves and lakes. You never know what you will
discover in the dark. Contents: Candace Barrington, "Dark
Whiteness: Benjanim Brawley and Chaucer" -- Brantley L. Bryant
& Alia, "Saturn's Darkness" -- Ruth Evans, "A Dark Stain and a
Non-Encounter" -- Gaelan Gilbert, "Chaucerian Afterlives: Reception
and Eschatology" -- Leigh Harrison, "Black Gold: The Former (and
Future) Age" -- Nicola Masciandaro, "Half Dead: Parsing Cecelia" --
J. Allan Mitchell, "In the Event of the Franklin's Tale" -- Travis
Neel & Andrew Richmond, "Black as the Crow" -- Hannah Priest,
"Unravelling Constance" -- Lisa Schamess, "L'O de V: A Palimpsest"
-- Myra Seaman, "Disconsolate Art" -- Karl Steel, "Kill Me, Save
Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye" -- Elaine Treharne, "The
Physician's Tale as Hagioclasm" -- Bob Valasek, "The Light has
Lifted: Pandare Trickster" -- Lisa Weston, "Suffer the Little
Children, or, A Rumination on the Faith of Zombies" -- Thomas
White, "The Dark Is Light Enough: The Layout of the Tale of Sir
Thopas." This assortment of dark morsels also features a prose-poem
Preface by Gary Shipley.
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