Category Archives: Guest Posts

Thinking Elsewhere: A Response to Sonita Sarker by Way of Some Notes on Universality

By | January 25, 2022
0 Comment

The first thing to note about Sonita Sarker’s essay is that it offers a necessary challenge to and reorientation of the various definitions of responsible reading that appear throughout this volume. Responsible reading can and should take on any number of meanings, even contradictory meanings, in the chapters that appear here. But what responsible reading should never suggest is a “mandatory curriculum” that becomes a burden that the reader “does not ask to carry but becomes hers to bear.”

Response to Matthew Gannon: “Adorno as a Reader: Writing the Mediation of Literature and Philosophy”

By | January 20, 2022
0 Comment

This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading with posts from the collection’s contributors. In this guest post by Fabio Akcelrud Durão, he responds to Matthew Gannon’s chapter on Writing the Mediation of Literature and Philosophy.

Response to Roger Rothman

By | January 18, 2022
0 Comment

This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading with posts from the collection’s contributors. Guest post by Kathryn Carney In “Absolutely Small: Anarchism and the Aesthetics of Affirmation,” Roger Rothman draws on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic thought and Gustav Landauer’s Weimar vein of utopian anarchism to argue for importing anarchist politics… Read More »

Response to Masami Sugimori’s “Weak Theory, ‘Responsible’ Reading and Literature Criticism”

By | January 12, 2022
0 Comment

This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading with posts from the collection’s contributors. In this guest post by Daniel Aureliano Newman, he responds to Masami Sugimori’s chapter on Weak Theory, “Responsible” Reading, and Literary Criticism.

Theory-as-Prosthesis: A Response to Kathryn Carney

By | December 10, 2021
0 Comment

Kathryn Carney’s “theory-as-prosthesis” is a critical-phenomenological model constructed on the discontinuities of being in relation with another, whether that be a person, a text, or a field-level debate. The prosthesis is adopted as a metaphor in an obverse sense, not as a well-fitted supplement but rather as a figure of variability that remains “both a part of and distinct from the body, as each aspect—the body and the prosthetic, the actual and the virtual, the spatial and the temporal—interpenetrates the other without altogether integrating” (Carney #).

Affect/s Theory: A Response to Yan Tang

By | December 9, 2021
0 Comment

This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading with posts from the collection’s contributors. Post by Roger Rothman With great concision, Yan Tang sketches a necessary genealogy of affect theory—now roughly a quarter century in the making—and makes a compelling case that the theorists we may end up referring… Read More »

Response to Fabio Akcelrud Durão: “Responsible Reading of Theory”

By | December 7, 2021
0 Comment

Fabio Akcelrud Durão’s essay “Responsible Reading of Theory” engages with a number of large and fundamental questions regarding the identity, purpose, and future of theory. The answers that it offers are so rich and complex that a responsible reading of the entirety of that essay would require a monograph. For that reason, this response will focus on just the first paragraph of the first of the essay’s three sections and consider how that paragraph defines the relationship between theory and literature.

Reading Afrolatina/o/x Literature Requires a Locally Emergent Intersectionality

By | December 6, 2021
0 Comment

Considerations of the insufficiency of the category Latina/o/x is not new, particularly as concerns social justice and reparative projects that seek material redress for the centuries-long racial, ethnic, and culture-based oppressions against this dynamic and complex population. In fact, this is a primary consideration of many works across the diverse field of Latina/o/x Studies. Thus, when we read and discuss scenes of sexual violence in Latina/o/x and Afrolatina/o/x literatures, we must approach each instance locally.

Why Are We Silent? #MeToo in South Asia Subcontinent and Diaspora: A Conversation

By | December 3, 2021
0 Comment

This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at #MeToo and Literary Studies with posts from the collection’s contributors. Guest post by Somia R. Bibi and Nidhi Shrivastava In this conversation, Somia R. Bibi and Nidhi Shrivastava discuss the limitations of the #MeToo movement in the South Asian subcontinent and diaspora. In particular,… Read More »

“Not a Story To Pass On By: Sapphire’s The Kid”

By | December 2, 2021
0 Comment
Image of a book review of #MeToo and Literary Studies

This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at #MeToo and Literary Studies with posts from the collection’s contributors. Guest post by Robin E. Field Precious Jones was introduced to readers 25 years ago, when Sapphire’s debut novel Push was released in June 1996. Almost immediately Precious became as beloved a figure as her inspiration,… Read More »