The Fiction-Making Animal: Revisiting Literary Anthropology

Representations board member Ian Duncan will give the 2021 Wolfgang Iser lecture on June 30, 2021 (9:00am PDT). The talk, entitled “The Fiction-Making Animal: Revisiting Literary Anthropology,” will be streamed over Zoom here.

Professor Duncan is the author of “Natural Histories of Form: Charles Darwin’s Aesthetic Science” (Representations 151, 2020) and “George Eliot’s Science Fiction” (Representations 125, 2014). His most recent book, Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution, came out in 2019.

Samera Esmeir on “the struggle of the dispossessed” in Palestine

In response to recent and ongoing events in Israel and Palestine, Representations board member Samera Esmeir has written about the resistance to defeat and persistence for Open Democracy. Her essay, “The Palestinians and the Struggle of the Dispossessed,” chronicles the continuous fight against dispossession by Palestinians against Israeli dispossession.

For another way of historically contextualizing the contemporary resistance to settler colonialism in Palestine in affective and literary terms, see Nouri Gana’s essay in Representations 143, “Afteraffect: Arabic Literature and Affective Politics,” which “discusses the politics of affect in post-1967 Arabic literary and cultural production.”

Samera Esmeir is also the editor of Critical Times. Find the most recent issue here.

 

Kent Puckett on J. M. Keynes

J. M. KEYNES AND THE VISIBLE HANDS by Kent Puckett

at Public Books

“…For Keynes, hands are not only something to see or to look at. Hands are also something for which the seeing is, in and of itself, significant.”

Kent Puckett is a long-time member of the Representations editorial board and the author of War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945 and other books. His “Rand Narratology” appeared in our Winter 2020 issue.

Image: Members of the Commission of the League of Nations created by the Plenary Session of the Preliminary Peace Conference, Paris, France, 1919. Wikimedia Commons.

Weird Scholarship Meets Weird Studies

Literally. We just found out that Phil Ford, one of the authors in our just-released Weird Scholarship virtual issue, is also the co-host of the podcast Weird Studies, whose most recent show is “On Ishmael Reed’s ‘Mumbo Jumbo,’ or, Why We Need More Magical Thinking.”

For more on our virtual issue (available free for a limited time), visit Representations at UC Press. And check out the the full roster of episodes from Phil Ford and co-host, J. F. Martel, at Weird Studies.

Weird Scholarship

Read Representations’ new special virtual issue, “Weird Scholarship: From Curious to Rare,” free for a limited time.

Of the many cross-disciplinary and topical strands that have emerged from nearly forty years of Representations in print, one stands out: a kind of research that perhaps originated in the journal’s pages and remains difficult to find elsewhere–what might fondly be called “weird scholarship.” We invite you to dip into a virtual issue featuring some of the most representative examples in this vein, available free of charge for a limited time.

The essays selected for this virtual issue highlight examples from the early years of Representations, by which the contours of New Historicism became known, and many examples from more recent issues, which show how the conversation among disparate discourses has born strange and wonderful fruit.

Weird Scholarship: From Curious to Rare

Table of Contents

Introduction

Terry Castle. The Female Thermometer, no. 17, 1987

István Rév. In Mendacio Veritas (In Lies There Lies the Truth), no. 35, 1991

Nathaniel Mackey. Other: From Noun to Verb, no. 39, 1992

Elaine Scarry. On Vivacity: The Difference Between Daydreaming and Imagining Under-Authorial-Instruction, no. 52, 1995

Michel Zink. Nerval in the Library, or The Archives of the Soul, no. 56, 1996

Jessica Riskin. Eighteenth-Century Wetware, no. 83, 2003

Sue Waterman. Collecting the Nineteenth Century, no. 90, 2005

Phil Ford. Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica, no. 103, 2008

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby. Negative-Positive Truths, no. 113, 2011

Carolyn Steedman. Cries Unheard, Sights Unseen: Writing the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis, no. 118, 2012

D. Vance Smith. Fallacy: Close Reading and the Beginning of Philosophy, no. 140, 2017

New Issue, Representations 150

NOW AVAILABLE

Representations 150, Spring 2020

In recognition of the impact of Covid-19 on campus instruction and the rise of unplanned distance learning, UC Press is pleased to make Representations and all of its online journals content free to all through June 2020. 

ABBY HOLEKAMP
Who Are Vera and Tatiana? The Female Russian Nihilist
in the Fin de Siècle Imagination

MARK TAYLOR
The Lower Criticism

ANNA SHECHTMAN
The Medium Concept

HELEN DEUTSCH
“True Wit Is Nature”: Wimsatt, Pope, and the Power of Style

ELLEN LOCKHART
Lupus tonalis


Upcoming in Representations 151: Kathryn Crim on Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems, Ian Duncan on Darwin’s aesthetic science, Danielle Simon on Italian television, Paulina Hartono on the sound of Chinese Communist radio, and Todd Olson on zoological osteology and art-historical method in early twentieth-century France. Available in August.

Winning Essay

Trisha Urmi Banerjee wins Richard Stein Prize for “Austen Equilibrium” 

INCS: Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies has just announced the winner of its Richard Stein Prize for best article published in 2018, Trisha Urmi Banerjee’s Austen Equilibrium,” published in Representations 143 (Summer 2018).

Reviewers for the prize noted the essay’s “smart, well-structured, interdisciplinary argument and use of game theory” and its engagement with “the under-theorized nature of Austen’s ‘economy of writing.’” One reviewer noted: “I think Banerjee’s reading intervenes in an impressive number of critical conversations (about Austen’s style, narrative time, realism) and cuts across different kinds of methodologies (formal, historical, theoretical), in a clear, compelling, and even exciting way.” Another described how the essay “uses innovative methodologies to take on big ideas and develops them with real clarity and significance.”

Of the essay, Banerjee herself writes: “By proposing a quantitative game-theory model of the marriage plot in Jane Austen’s Emma, the essay demonstrates that free-market moral philosophy underwrites Austen’s representation of matrimony and key formal elements of her writing—particularly, matters of verbal profusion. Her famed stylistic ‘economy’ is revealed to be structured by the emerging capitalist economy that Adam Smith theorized in The Wealth of Nations. Establishing the correspondences among several kinds of economy, the essay unites economic and formal approaches to Austen’s work.”

TRISHA URMI BANERJEE received her PhD in English from Harvard University and is now based in Paris. “Austen’s Equilibrium” derives from her second book project, which uses economic modeling and theory to understand the “economics” of narrative language and structure.

Short and Sweet

Representations‘s Shorter Formats

Representations has long been known for its rigorous and substantial scholarly articles. But flying lower under the radar are our shorter interventions, published occasionally as Field Notes and Untimely Reviews.

Field Notes, brief commentaries on the state of the disciplines, have been appearing in the journal periodically over the last decade. These short essays typically arise in response to specific current issues in the intellectual arena. Recent Field Notes include Bernard Stiegler’s essay “The Digital, Education, and Cosmopolitanism” and Brianne Cohen’s “Slow Protest in the Occupation of Cambodia’s White Building.”

Now, in our most recent issue, we’ve launched our first Untimely Review, a new feature for reengaging with important critical works of the past, with Whitney Davis’s “Triple Cross: Binarisms and Binds in Epistemology of the Closet.” 

We welcome submissions in either of these categories–and, of course, we continue to welcome submissions of full-length articles as well. See our submission guidelines.