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Past Issues

55, 1 (2024)

Winter 2024

  • Simon Reader, “Idols of the Fragment: Barthes and Critique”
  • Ruth Murphy, “Let me look again: The Moral Philosophy and Literature Debate at 40”
  • Laura E. Tanner and James Krasner, “Aesthetic Affairs: Art, Architecture and the Illusion of Detachment”
  • Magda Szcześniak, “Feeling Moved: Upward Mobility Stories in Socialism”
  • Jessica Marian, Elliot Patsoura, and Joe Hughes, “The Work of Interpretation: Critique and the Review Form, 1946-1967”
  • Marco Caracciolo, “Metaphorical Figures for Moral Complexity”
  • William Revere, “Medieval Futures and the Postwork Romance”

54, 4 (2023)

Autumn 2023

  • Nancy Yousef, “Philosophy, Literature, and the Avoidance of Reading”
  • Debjani Ganguly, “Drone Form and Techno-Futurities”
  • Eric Bulson, “Measuring Mimesis”
  • Ben Glaser, “White Things: Form, Formalization, and the Use of Prosody”
  • Rachel Greenspan, “Naming Argentina: The Subject of Torture and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis”
    *Winner of the 2022 Ralph Cohen Prize
  • Christina Lupton, “Jacques Rancière, J. M. Coetzee, and Doing Things Oneself”
  • Gerard Passannante, “Othello and the Formalism of Compulsion”
  • Nathan TeBokkel, “Pastoral Authority”

54, 3 (2023)

Polymathy

  • Herbert Tucker and Bruce Holsinger, “Polymathy: Introduction”
  • Kevin Hart, “Saying Everything”
  • Ahmed H. al-Rahim, “Early Medieval Arabic Polymathy: A Preliminary Sketch”
  • Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Expansive Energy: An Alternative Portrait of Denis Diderot”
  • Kathryn A. Neeley, “The Peculiar Illumination of the Polymathic Mind: Mary Somerville, William Whewell, and the Disciplinary Formation of the Sciences”
  • Fakrul Alam, “‘A Living Growth’: Rabindranath Tagore and Polymathy”
  • Stephen Nachmanovitch, “Being Whole”
  • Merve Emre, “Sons and Mothers: or, The Polymath and the Philologist”
  • Peter Burke, “Response”

54, 2 (2023)

Spring 2023

  • Susan Fraiman, “Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare”
  • Samantha Pergadia, “Slaughterhouse Intimacies”
  • Emily Apter and Katie Kitamura, “Interpreters in Court” (Creative Writing and Critical Thought II)
  • Zoë Roth, “How to Survive Totalitarianism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt”
  • Wolfram Schmidgen, “Appreciation After Critique”
  • Dustin D. Stewart, “Coupling Men in Couplet Space: Pope to Gunn”
  • Derek Woods, “Genre at Earth Magnitude: A Theory of Climate Fiction”
  • Fredrik Renard, “The Homelessness of the Novel: Friedrich Blanckenburg and Novel Poetics”

Literary Cybernetics: A New Literary History Forum

Coeditors: Heather A. Love and Lea Pao

  • Heather A. Love and Lea Pao, Introduction, “Literary Cybernetics: History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity”
  • Jack W. Chen, “On Poems (System and Environment)”
  • Paul Jaussen, “The Art of Distinction”
  • Megan Ward, “The Marriage Plot, Again: A Feedback Loop”
  • Marc Kohlbry, “New Noise?”
  • Ada Smailbegović, “‘2 < n < infinity’: A Multilayered Phyllo Dough of the Analog and the Digital in Alison Knowles and James Tenney’s The House of Dust”
  • Aaron Jaffe, “The Double Repatriations of Cybernetics and Media Theory: Vilém Flusser and Heinz von Foerster”
  • Avery Slater, “‘Hermenautics’: Towards a Disinformation Theory”
  • Michael F. Miller, “‘Stop Asking for Life to Be a Poem’: On Cybernetic Instrumentality”
  • Lea Pao, “Ways of Cybernetic Thinking”

Respondents: 

  •  Bruce Clarke, “Staying Alive: Cybernetic Persistence”
  • N. Katherine Hayles, “Literary Cybernetics: The Point (of the Spear)”

53, 4 and 54, 1 (2023)

Culture, Theory, Data

  • Ted Underwood, Laura McGrath, Richard Jean So, Chad Wellmon, “Culture, Theory, Data: An Introduction”
  • Katherine Bode, “Doing (Computational) Literary Studies”  
  • Alison Booth, “But Why Always the Novel? Midrange Reading Samples of Persons and Texts”  
  • Sarah Bruno and Jessica Marie Johnson, “‘Que Recogan Este Memoria’: Black Puerto Rican Data”  
  • Michael Gavin, “Why Distant Reading Works”  
  • N. Katherine Hayles, “Inside the Mind of an AI: Materiality and the Crisis of Representation”
  • Long Le-Khac, Maria Antoniak, and Richard Jean So, “#BLM Insurgent Discourse, White Structures of Feeling and the Fate of the 2020 ‘Racial Awakening’”  
  • Caroline Levine, “Literary Studies and Collective Life”  
  • Hoyt Long, “Learning to Live with Machine Translation”  
  • Joan Lubin, “Medium Specific Sexuality”  
  • Laura B. McGrath, “‘Books about Race’: Commercial Publishing and Racial Formation in the 21st Century”
  • Tess McNulty, “Content’s Forms”
  • Laura K. Nelson, “Situated Knowledges and Partial Perspectives: A Framework for Radical Objectivity in Computational Social Science and Computational Humanities”  
  • Andrew Piper and Sunyam Bagga, “Toward a Data-Driven Theory of Narrativity”  
  • Dennis Yi Tenen, “Distributed Agency in the Novel”  
  • Matt Warner, “A Queer Way of Counting: Bibliography and Computational Approaches to the Queer Novel”  

Respondents:

  • Roopika Risam, “Our Paratextual Presents, Our Computational Literary Futures”  
  • Clayton Childress, “Bringing Computation into Cultural Theory: Four Good Reasons (and One Bad One)”  

53, 3 (2022)

Summer 2022

  • Emily Steiner, “Neck Verse”
  • Aleksandar Stević, “The Homological Imagination: Toward a Critical History of Political Formalism”
  • Seo Hee Im, “Pain and Prejudice in the World Literary Market”
  • Ingrid Becker, “Socio/Poetics”
  • Keidrick Roy, “Well-Wrought Black Thought: Speculative Realism and the Specter of Race”
  • Henry Staten, “The Body-Mind Split: Cavell vs. Wittgenstein”
  • Stephanie Burt and Emmy Waldman, “What Comics Can Say about Lyric, or, Reading with Gwenpool”

53, 2 (2022)

Spring 2022

  • Stephanie Ann Frampton, “Rhetorics of Becoming: Between Metamorphosis and Metaphor”
  • Victoria Googasian, “Feeling Fictional: Climate Crisis and the Massively Multi-Protagonist Novel”
  • Sara Fernandes and Lydia Saleh Rofail, “Perpetual Becoming, Deferred Arrival: The Author-Hero in the Age of Digital Celebrity”
  • Jason de Stefano, “The Gospel of Creativity”
  • Carolyn Dinshaw and Garth Greenwell, “Queer Theory/Queer Fiction” (Creative Writing and Critical Thought I)
  • Doyle Calhoun, “Dead Narrators, Queer Terrorists: On Suicide Bombing and Literature”
    • Winner of the 2021 Ralph Cohen Prize
  • Zhao F. Ng, “The Kingdom and the Pilgrim’s Way: Epic, Irony, and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

53, 1 (2022)

Winter 2022

  • Hannah Weaver, “Interpolation as Critical Category”
  • Adrienne Ghaly, “What Does Biodiversity Loss Feel Like? Realism in the Age of Extinction”
  • Arthur Rose, “Recovering Franz Kafka’s Asbestos Factory”
  • Cajetan Iheka, “Intricate Intimacies: Reading the Transatlantic Queer in Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names
  • Andrew M. McClellan, “Lil Wayne, Imitatio, and the Poetics of Cannibalism”
  • Garrett Stewart, “Verbal Fframe-Advance: Toward a Cinematographic Sentence”
  • Tobias Skiveren, “Postcritique and the Problem of the Lay Reader”

52, 3/4 (2021)

Race and Periodization

  • Urvashi Chakravarty and Ayanna Thompson, “Race and Periodization: Introduction”
  • Margo Hendricks, “Coloring the Past, Considerations on Our Future: RaceB4Race”
  • Mary Rambaran-Olm, “A Wrinkle in Medieval Time: Ironing out Issues Regarding Race, Temporality, and the Early English”
  • Haruko Momma, “The Theater of Race and Its Supporting Actors: A Tale of Two Islands”
  • Farid Azfar, “Leviathan and the Asiento: A Counter-History of the Racial Contract”
  • Nicole Lopez-Jantzen, “Historiography, Periodization, and Race: Italy between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Europe and Africa”
  • Nizar F. Hermes and Mary Beth Allen, “A Tale of Two Sultans: Franco-Moroccan ReInventions of Mūlāy Ismāʿīl and his Marriage Proposal to La Princesse de Conti”
  • Su Fang Ng, “Making Race in the Early Modern East Indies”
  • Wan-Chuan Kao, “In the Lap of Whiteness”
  • Carol Meija LaPerle, “Ill-Will as Racialized Affect: Early Modern Volition, Critical Race Theory, and Shakespearean Ill-Will”
  • Kyle Grady, “Emphasis and Elision: Early Modern English Approaches to Racial Mixing and their Afterlives”
  • Ruben Espinosa, “Traversing the Temporal Borderlands of Shakespeare”

52, 2 (2021)

Spring 2021

  • Audrey Wasser, “Critical Thinking”
  • Christopher Braider, “Squaring the Circle: Aesthetics and Its History”
  • Shaj Mathew, “Ekphrastic Temporality” (2020 Ralph Cohen Prize winner)
  • Rachael Scarborough King, “The Scale of Genre”
  • Wayne Stables, “What is the Matter? A Meditation on Illegible Writing”
  • Helen Solterer, “A Timely Villon: Anachrony and Premodern Poetic Fiction”
  • Avery Slater, “Primo Levi’s Chernobyl: Ecology and Trauma in The Reawakening

52, 1 (2021)

New Literary History: 52.1

Winter 2021

  • Joel M. Childers, “The Romance of Criticism”
  • Cecilia Feilla, “Future Perfect History: Historiography and Republican Space-Time in French Revolutionary Theater”
  • David Kurnick, “Jane Austen, Secret Celebrity, and Mass Eroticism”
  • John Lurz, “The Sorceress’s Apprentice: Roland Barthes and the Criticism of Magic”
  • Rita Felski, “Recognizing Class”
  • Ana Schwartz, “Anne Bradstreet, Arsonist?”
  • Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould, “Ajnabi, Or the Xenological Uncanny in Iranian Modernism”
  • Eric Weiskott, “Futures Past: Prophecy, Periodization, and Reinhart Koselleck”

51, 4 (2020)

Animality/Posthumanism/Disability

Special issue edited by Michael Lundblad

  • Michael Lundblad, “Animality/ Posthumanism/ Disability: An Introduction”
  • Sunaura Taylor, interviewed by Sara E. S. Orning, “Being Human, Being Animal: Species Membership in Extraordinary Times”
    • Judith Butler, “Companion Thinking: A Response”
  • Rachel Adams, “The Art of Interspecies Care”
    • Jack Halberstam, “Beyond Caring: Human-Animal Interdependency: A Response
    • Rachel Adams, “We Have Laws for That: A Response to Jack Halberstam”
  • Matthew Chrulew, “Abnormal Animals”
    • Dinesh Wadiwel, “Restriction, Norm, Umwelt: A Response”
  • Michael Lundblad, “Disanimality: Disability Studies and Animal Advocacy,
    • Nirmala Erevelles, “The Political Economy of Disanimality: A Response”
  • Jan Grue, “On the Transhumanist Imaginary and the Biopolitics of Contingent Embodiment”
    • David T. Mitchell, “Where Are You Taking Us? A Response”
  • Cary Wolfe, “The Biopolitical Drama of Joseph Beuys”
  • Neel Ahuja, “Animal Death as National Debility: Climate, Agriculture, and Syrian War Narrative”
    • Jasbir K. Puar, “Atmospherics of War: A Response”

51, 3 (2020)

Summer 2020

  • Nan Z. Da, “Other People’s Books”
  • Atti Viragh, “The Grammar of Instress: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Philosophers of Mind (Winner, 2019 Ralph Cohen Prize)
  • Joseph Albernaz, “Fragmentary Domestic: Wordsworth’s Image of the Common”
  • Joshua Billings, “Nietzsche’s Philology of the Present”
  • Brian Glavey, “Lyric Wilt, or, The Here and Now of Queer Impotentiality”
  • John Hoffmann, “The Volk against Fascism: Socialist Realism and the Aesthetics of Expressionism”
  • Walt Hunter, “The American Poetic Subprime: Contemporary Poetry, Race, and Genre”
  • Brian Michael Norton, “Aesthetics, Science, and the Theater of the World”

51, 2 (2020)

The Global Novel

  • Debjani Ganguly, “Introduction”
  • Michael Allan, “Dying to Read: Reflections on the Ends of Literacy”
  • Baidik Bhattacharya, “Radical Illegibility and Democratic Futures: Reading Orhan Pamuk and J. M. Coetzee”
  • Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “On Not Knowing: Lahiri, Tawada, Ishiguro”
  • Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “The Persistence of the Transcultural: A Latin American Theory of the Novel from the National-Popular to the Global”
  • Daniel Y. Kim, “Translations and Ghostings of History: The Novels of Han Kang”
  • Ranjana Khanna, “Touching the Corpse: Reading Sinan Antoon”
  • Debjani Ganguly, “Catastrophic Form and Planetary Realism”
  • Sarah Nuttall, “Pluvial Time/Wet Form”

51, 1 (2020)

Winter 2020

  • Heather Houser, “Shimmering Description and Descriptive Criticism”
  • Linda M. Austin, “Psychometric Wunderkammern: Word-Association Testing and the Aesthetics of Creative Genius”
  • Morgan Day Frank, “Don’t Read.”
  • Michael Krimper, “Beckett Ongoing and the Novel”
  • Elaine Auyoung, “What We Mean By Reading”
  • Heather Steffen, “Imagining Academic Labor in the US University”
  • Joshua Landy, “In Praise of Depth: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hidden”
  • Michael Dango, “Filtering: A Theory and History of a Style”
  • Michelle Karnes, “The Possibilities of Medieval Fiction”
Medieval Fictionalities: An NLH Forum
  • Sarah M. Allen and Jack W. Chen, “Fictionality in Early and Medieval China”
  • Carol Symes, “Medieval Fictions vs. the Fetish of Modernity”
  • Carissa M. Harris, “Pastourelle Fictionalities”
  • Sara S. Poor, “The Fuss about Fiction: A View from Medieval German Studies”
  • Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Fake News”
  • Brandon W. Hawk, “Apocrypha and Fictionality”
  • Monika Fludernik, “Medieval Fictionality from a Narratological Perspective”
  • Michelle Karnes, “Synchronous Fictions”
  • Julie Orlemanski, “What We Ask of Fiction”

50, 4 (2019)

Poetry and Race

  • Jahan Ramazani, “Poetry and Race: An Introduction”
  • Evie Shockley, “On Seeing and Reading the ‘Nothing’: Poetry and Blackness Visualized”
    » ex patria
  • Urayoán Noel, “The Queer, Migrant Poemics of #Latinx Instagram”
    » White Latinidad
    » Hay(na)ku Boricua
    » Transversal
  • Josephine Nock-Hee Park, “The Poetics of Consolation: Japanese Aesthetics and American Incarceration”
  • Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, “Theories of African Poetry”
  • Tsitsi Jaji, “Zimbabwe in Verse: Anthologizing the Nation as Alternative Historiography”
    » baba’s voice mail.
  • Vidyan Ravinthiran, “(Indian) Verse and the Question of Aesthetics”
    » My Sri Lankan family
    » And so
  • J. Edward Chamberlin, “Chanting Down Babylon: Poetry and Race”
  • Lorna Goodison
    » So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art?
    » To Make Various Sorts of Black
    » Sugar
    » The Journey of the Three Dreads

50, 3 (2019)

In Brief

  • Irina Dumitrescu and Bruce Holsinger, INTRODUCTION
  • Sherif Abdelkarim, SĪRAH
  • Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́, PANEGYRIC
  • Stephanie Burt, SONG
  • Tim Cassedy, DEFINITION
  • Jennifer Chang, FRAGMENT
  • Brooke Conti, PRAYER
  • Megan L. Cook, BLAZON
  • Rita Copeland, ENTHYMEME
  • Irina Dumitrescu, EPIGRAM
  • Denis Ferhatović, RIDDLE
  • Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright, FABULA
  • Roberta Frank, DRÓTTKVÆTT
  • Florian Fuchs, NOVELLA
  • Diana Fuss, FLASH
  • Cary Howie, MEDITATION
  • Andrew Hui, APHORISM
  • Andreas Huyssen, MINIATURE
  • Eric Jarosinski, TWEET
  • Seth Lerer, SCRIBBLE
  • Nicola Masciandaro, GLOSS
  • John H. Muse, MICRODRAMA
  • Haun Saussy, JUEJU
  • Jim Seitz, SYLLABUS
  • Haruo Shirane, HAIKU
  • Elizaveta Strakhov, RONDEAU
  • Jesús R. Velasco, MICROBIOGRAPHIES
  • Louise Wilson, DEDICATION
  • Madeline L. Zehnder, COMPANION

50, 2 (2019)

Spring 2019

  • Julie Orlemanski, “Who Has Fiction? Modernity, Fictionality, and the Middle Ages”
  • Jerome McGann, “From Cultural Memory to Living Word: On Mather’s Magnalia”
  • Ariana Reilly Codr, “After Ever After: The Marriage Plot’s Farewell to Its Reader”
  • David Dwan, “Important Nonsense: Yeats and Symbolism”
  • Matthew Burroughs Price, “Old Formalisms: Character, Structure, Action”
  • Simone Stirner, “A Technique of Closeness, an Art of Straying: Reading with Walter Benjamin”
  • Lucas Thompson, “Method Reading”

50, 1 (2019)

NLH at 50

  • Bruce Holsinger, “New Literary History at 50: Reflections and Futures”
  • Jeffrey J. Williams, “The Rise of the Critical Interview”
  • Liesl Yamaguchi, “Sensuous Linguistics: On Saussure’s Synesthesia”
    Winner of the Ralph Cohen Prize for 2018
  • Erica Weaver, “Premodern and Postcritical: Medieval Enigmata and the Hermeneutic Style”
  • Ingrid Nelson, “Poetics of the Rule: Form, Biopolitics, Lyric”
  • Michael North, “The Afterlife of Modernism”

– – – –

  • Ralph Cohen (1917-2016), “On the Presuppositions of Literary Periods”
  • John L. Rowlett, “Ralph Cohen on Literary Periods: Afterword as Foreword”

See Earlier Volumes >>