SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907151
Avril Tynan
{"title":"Anticipating Illness: The Illusion of Health in Knock ou Le Triomphe de la Médicine","authors":"Avril Tynan","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a907151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a907151","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Knock ou Le Triomphe de la Médicine [ Knock, or the Triumph of Medicine ] (1923) is a satirical play by Jules Romains parodying the hierarchical power relationship between patient and doctor and the supposed infallibility of science in the early twentieth century. Drawing on the phenomenological work of German physician Herbert Plügge (1970), I argue that the play exploits the physical interconnections between the healthy body and the sick body to present health as a deceptive state of hidden or imminent illness. By anticipating illness, the play shatters the illusion of health in ways that are ethically, psychosocially, and biomedically salient.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907152
Aihua Chen
{"title":"Literature: Why It Matters by Robert Eaglestone (review)","authors":"Aihua Chen","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a907152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a907152","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Literature: Why It Matters by Robert Eaglestone Aihua Chen Eaglestone, Robert. Literature: Why It Matters. Polity Press, 2019. 123pp. Is literature a worthy topic of study in an era fixated on science, technology, and information? This has become a subject of debate in recent years, especially as enrollment in college literature courses has declined. J. Hillis Miller has noted that “all who love literature are collectively anxious today about whether literature matters” (13), insisting that it does since it has “three essential human functions: social critique, the pleasure of the text, and allowing a materialization of the imaginary or an endless approach to the unapproachable imaginary” (31). Other literary scholars concur with Miller, though from differing perspectives, including Dennis J. Sumara in Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters (2002) and Mark William Roche in Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (2004). In his recent monograph, Literature: Why It Matters, Robert Eaglestone joins this discussion, offering a timely and judiciously formulated manifesto in defense of literary studies that is groundbreaking in the way it treats literature as a living object whose study can inspire ongoing conversation. Eaglestone presents his argument in four segments: “What is Literature?” “Studying Literature,” “Why Does Literature Matter?” and “What Does Literature Teach?” In his first chapter, Eaglestone reveals the limitations of traditional approaches to defining literature as fiction and narrative, that is, as something “made up.” He argues instead that literature is undefinable and exists as a kind of “living conversation” (6). For Eaglestone, literature, like a conversation, is a form of communication among many parties. In this case, the conversation engages the text, the reader, and the author in discussions of nearly everything. Learning about literature involves understanding the form of that discussion in the same way one comes to understand how speakers create meaning in dialogue with one another. And like conversation, readers’ creative response to a literary text fully engages their minds, their hearts, their feelings about the past, and their hopes for the future. In Eaglestone’s view, literature is “not timeless but time-full.” It involves “a past, visible in various ways, including the historical context of a work and the ‘family trees’ of influence and genre; a person (it’s always read now); and a future (that would be you, joining [End Page 118] the conversation)” (20). As in actual conversation, questions of equality and freedom matter a great deal since “literature is a crucial part of our constant dialogue about humanity’s ever-changing self-understanding — not about what we are but about who we are” (22). In the second chapter, Eaglestone asks questions concerning how we go about “Studying Literature.” Here, he extends the metaphor introduced in the preceding chapter of literature constituting a living","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907147
Gai Farchi
{"title":"Impersonal Belongings: Annie Ernaux’s Poetics of Chiffonnage","authors":"Gai Farchi","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a907147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a907147","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Contemporary French author Annie Ernaux makes salvaging, recycling, and defying obsolescence into a materialist poetics. Ernaux aligns her textual collages with a late-capitalist incarnation of the Parisian ragpicker. The overlap of the two main tropes in Ernaux’s oeuvre, the axis of reminiscence (embodied here mainly in the works The Years and A Girl’s Story ) and the axis of everyday experience in late capitalistic Paris and its suburbs ( Exteriors , Things Seen ), assemble into a poetics of chiffonnage . In both axes, residues of the everyday are recycled into writing, an effort that reframes the tradition of ragpicking from its context in nineteenth-century Paris into a discourse of waste and recycling.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495547","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907148
Philip Mills
{"title":"Parasites, Viruses, and Baisetioles : Poetry as Viral Language","authors":"Philip Mills","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a907148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a907148","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Austin’s (in)famous characterization of poetry as parasitical has been subject to many interpretations, from Derrida’s considering it a limit of and a central problem in Austin’s theory to Cavell’s attempt to reintegrate poetic uses of language within the framework of Ordinary Language Philosophy. In this essay, I argue that poetry, rather than being excluded from the realm of the performative, can be considered as a performative dispositif that acts upon ordinary language and, through it, upon our forms of life. To reevaluate poetry, I suggest moving from the ‘parasite’ metaphor (poetry is passively feeding on ordinary uses of language) to a ‘virus’ metaphor (poetry is actively disrupting ordinary uses of language). By building on works of French theorists and poets Christophe Hanna, Franck Leibovici, and Manuel Joseph among others, I explore how poetry reveals the virality of language.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907150
Ryan Prewitt, Max Accardi
{"title":"Cultural Necromancy: Digital Resurrection and Hegemonic Incorporation","authors":"Ryan Prewitt, Max Accardi","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a907150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a907150","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay follows the recent discourse on two phenomena: the tendency of hegemony to incorporate subversive cultures, and the digital reanimation of prominent dead people. At the intersection of these phenomena lies what we call “cultural necromancy,” a special case of hegemonic incorporation that aesthetically manipulates the physical presence of a deceased figure in the service of power. This essay explores historical analogues to cultural necromancy and how the digital age has accelerated the process through examples ranging from medieval saints to Lenin’s mausoleum to the Tupac hologram. It then examines cultural necromancy’s implications for counterculture and resistance.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907153
Niall Gildea
{"title":"A Partial Truth (Poems 2015–19) by Christopher Norris (review)","authors":"Niall Gildea","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a907153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a907153","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: A Partial Truth (Poems 2015–19) by Christopher Norris Niall Gildea Norris, Christopher. A Partial Truth (Poems 2015–19). The Seventh Quarry Press, 2019. 133pp. “No interval but some event takes place.” (Norris, “Freeze-Frame,” A Partial Truth) A Partial Truth, a collection of thirty-seven pieces, is the seventh volume of poetry by philosopher and literary theorist Christopher Norris. Nobody familiar with Norris’s distinguished career will be surprised to learn that his recent turn to versification is not a repudiation of intellectual and rhetorical seriousness, but a re-emphasis of the same using resources not typically found in academic prose. Norris, an interdisciplinarian long before that term became a slogan, has in his work clocked up considerable epistemological mileage across diverse terrain, his critical friendship with deconstruction leading him to important interventions in analytic and Continental philosophy, institutional critique, philosophy of science and mathematics, legal studies, music, politics and, after all, creative criticism. Creative criticism is a relatively embryonic genre, until recently typified generally by a prose that owes a debt to Jacques Derrida’s Cir-confession, Glas and La carte postale. This is a style that foregrounds the philosophical unsaid – the repressed autobiographical, desirous, and otherwise messy constituents of that canon. It does so in part by jettisoning the academic politesse, and let’s say timidity, which help maintain such statutes of limitation. In a more specific way, creative criticism may be understood as a Romantic development set in train by the “Yale School” of deconstruction and its fellow travelers, straining in their own ways against the subordinate role of the reader and critic instituted by the likes of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot. In the foreword to his 2017 volume The Winnowing Fan, Norris at once compliments this “strong” critical rebelliousness (xii), and critiques its ecstatic, quasi-apocalyptic hubris, provisionally aligning his own creative criticism with the “poetic diction” (xxi) of eighteenth-century figures such as Dryden and Pope. It is an analogy with caveats – not least Norris’s stated allergy to the “air of arrogance” (Tempus-Fugitives ix) of [End Page 122] their heavily end-stopped tendentiousness – but one which schematizes a poetics that both carries a definite argument and could not make this argument otherwise than in a manner reliant on verse’s formal properties. Note, however, the fact that Norris takes his distance from both strong criticism and those eighteenth-century essayists on the grounds of their shared self-assurance. A steadier presiding influence is William Empson, whose enmity towards Eliotic New Criticism, which “fixes a prescriptive gulf between poetry and other kinds of discourse,” makes him a political forebear, dissenting from modern forms of literary historical doctrinalism, specifically “that whole anti-rationalist complex of i","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1353/sub.2022.0022
C. Crews
{"title":"After Extinction ed. by Richard Grusin, and: Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction by David Farrier (review)","authors":"C. Crews","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"156 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43089666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1353/sub.2022.0028
Ellen Spolsky
{"title":"Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet: Rebuilding the Bildungsroman","authors":"Ellen Spolsky","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet – an almost continuous rave of interconnected love and desire, anger and violence – is also a story of the protagonist’s struggle to make sense of her life by writing it. She turns a traditional genre of a young person’s coming of age into a neurologically realistic portrait of the growth of an artist by multiplying narrative voices and by ignoring conventional bounds of narrative probability. Her story of the growth of a creative mind adumbrates well the picture of brains and their processes currently being described and developed as a “predictive processing” model. Work in neurobiology and neurophysiology has been producing empirical demonstrations of the centrality of failure to successful human cognition.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"71 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41766519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}