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Against Sustainability responds to twenty-first-century environmental crisis not by seeking the origins of U.S. environmental problems, but by returning to the nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to many of our most familiar environmental solutions. In readings that juxtapose antebellum and contemporary writers such as Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton, George Catlin and Louise Erdrich, and Herman Melville and A. S. Byatt, the book reconnects sustainability, recycling, and preservation with nineteenth-century U.S. contexts such as industrial farming, consumerism, slavery, and settler colonial expansion. These readings demonstrate that the paradigms explored are compromised in their attempts to redress environmental degradation because they simultaneously perpetuate the very systems that generate the degradation to begin with. Alongside the chapters that focus on defamiliarization and critique are chapters that reveal that the nineteenth century also gave rise to more unusual and provisional environmentalisms. These chapters offer alternatives to the failed paradigms of recycling and preservation, exploring Henry David Thoreau’s and Emily Dickinson’s joyful, anti-consumerist frugality and Hannah Crafts’s and Harriet Wilson’s radical pet keeping model of living with others. The coda considers zero waste and then contrasts sustainability with functional utopianism, an alternative orienting paradigm that might more reliably guide mainstream U.S. environmental culture toward transformative forms of ecological and social justice. Ultimately, Against Sustainability offers novel readings of familiar literary works that demonstrate how U.S. nineteenth-century literature compels us to rethink our understandings of the past in order to imagine other, more just and environmentally-sound futures.

How do we read after the so-called death of literature? If we are to attend to the proclamations that the representational apparatuses of literature and politics are dead, what aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities remain for us today? This book brings together works of continental philosophy and critical theory (Emmanuel Levinas, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière) and works of art from Argentina (J. L. Borges, Juán José Saer, Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Albertina Carri, the Internacional Errorista) in order to practice what Graff Zivin calls anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability in works of philosophy and art. Rather than “applying” concepts from the former in order to understand or elucidate the latter, the book aim to expose works of philosophy, literary theory, narrative, poetry, film, and performance art/activism to one another. The work of aesthetic or political expression, then, does not appear as an object of study in the conventional sense, but rather as a possible source of philosophical and political thought itself. Ethical and political concepts such as identification and recognition, decision and event, sovereignty and will, are read as constitutively impossible, erroneous, through these acts of interdisciplinary and interdiscursive exposure.

Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Spanning most of the 20th century, this study investigates poems by Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen (two “Objectivist” writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s), Clark Coolidge and Tina Darragh (two “Language Poets” with books from the 1970s and 1980s, respectively), and Harryette Mullen (a post-Black-Arts writer who flourished in the 1990s). By reverse-engineering poems, this study sets the critical record straight on multiple counts. Moreover, reading these poems in tandem with their source texts puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde poems are nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. When read from the right perspective, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, or hopelessly cryptic suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent. Indeed, beyond the particular arguments and local readings, Dictionary Poetics argues that the new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics maps and articulates the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned. In the process, this book demonstrates that new ways of reading can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open otherwise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels.

The Fact of Resonance returns to the imperial and colonial contexts in which Anglophone and francophone narrative theory developed, seeking an alternative sonic premise for theorizing narrative form. The exclusion of postcolonial sound and acoustics is foundational not only to modernist studies, but to narrative theory, novel theory, and the strains of film theory they orient. The study is primarily focused on Joseph Conrad and concerns the bearing of his multilingual formation and attunement to the gender and race of sound in colonial encounter. To return to Conrad is to return to the repressed of colonial sound. Bringing new methodologies of sound studies and postcolonial studies to bear upon older models of narrative and close reading, the book argues the novel to be a sound technology. This technology captures not “facts,” but a fact of resonance, which is both a physical sound and a strategy of relation across difference. The book develops a methodology of reading for resonance, while also developing a vocabulary for the acoustic unconscious of texts. These readings focus on the way that imaginary sound and voice circulate within and between texts, from page to psyche, from colonial site to metropole, and across race and gender. The book follows the resonances between Conrad and a series of writers and artists, including Chantal Akerman, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the transatlantic and transpacific are resonance, less a place than an event.

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. In The Geological Unconcious, Jason Groves traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown, let alone the technologies that could forecast those changes. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, the author traces out a geological unconscious—in other words, unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—where it manifests in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period where this novel geological epoch, though arguably already underway, remains unnamed and otherwise unmarked. These close readings also unearth an entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of cotemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters on which The Geological Unconcious lingers, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination becomes apparent. While The Geological Unconcious does not explicitly set out to imagine alternatives to fossil capitalism, in elaborating a range of such encounters and in registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, it points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.

This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence appears and persists in early modern French tragedy, a genre long understood as passionless and refusing all violence. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, can serve as a paradigm for this violence. An alternative to western philosophy’s ethical paradigm of Antigone, the Medean presence offers a model of radically persistent and disruptive outsiderness—for classical theater and its wake in literary theory. In the Wake of Medea explores a range of artistic strategies integrating violence into drama: rhetorical devices like ekphrasis, dramaturgical special effects, and shifts in temporal structures. The full range of this Medean presence appears in literal treatments of Medea (Médée, La Conquête de la Toison d’Or) and in tragedies figuratively invoking a Medean presence (Hercule mourant, Phèdre, Athalie). Of interest to specialists, political theorists, and students of theater, it explores works by well-known dramaturges (Racine, Corneille) alongside a breadth of neoclassical political theater (spectacular machine plays, Neo-Stoic parables, didactic Christian theater). In the Wake recognizes the Medean force within these tragedies, while also exploring why violence remains so integral to literature and arts today.

Eight decades after Ask the Dust first appeared, John Fante’s Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views shows how and why the once-forgotten novel continues to earn its place among the signal works of twentieth-century world literature in our own moment of the twenty-first. Gathered here are twenty responses to the novel from a wide variety of contributors, both American and Italian, including scholars, journalists, filmmakers, creative writers, translators, archive workers, a musicologist, a choreographer, and an American Indian who discovered the book while incarcerated in a California maximum-security prison. In recognizing the novel’s enduring attractions and evolving critical challenges, editors Cooper and Donato have orchestrated the volume’s contents to address both academic audiences and the countless word-of-mouth fans who have made Ask the Dust a perennial international classic. With its array of essays, interviews, talks, memoirs, and correspondence—including an important letter by Fante, newly discovered and published here for the first time—the volume raises Fante studies to a commanding level of significance through its diversity of perspectives on the cornerstone of the author’s oeuvre. Italian American to its core, the picaresque brio of Ask the Dust resonates all the more profoundly today as readers debate, reinterpret, and embrace the abiding truths of Arturo Bandini’s struggle with immigrant dreams, ethnic tensions, romantic love, existential demons, and the better angels of his inherited Catholic faith against the backdrop of that “sad flower in the sand,” the Depression-era city of Los Angeles.

The book examines the “middling” work performed by writers of the Romantic period such as Lessing, Kleist, P. B. Shelley, and Hölderlin. It traces their attempts to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle, which begin with dislodging terms such as medium, moderation, and mediation from their conventional roles as self-evident, self-effacing tools that conduct from one pole to another or provide a compromise between two extremes. What they offer instead is a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that recognize their centrality to the concept of relation. This produces a profound medial ambivalence that underpins romanticism’s re-writing of conceptual pairs such as origin and destination, speaker and addressee, deficit and surplus, self and other. In this light, we might also ask what it means for us to recognize our mediated relationship to romanticism. To address this question, the readings consider romantic writing in the context of a double juxtaposition: alongside the legacy of romantic middling in the twentieth century but the classical sources about the middle that romanticism draw on. The challenge is to see romanticism as neither ancient nor modern, but as the historical hinge upon which such distinctions turn, the mirror in which our own image is mediated and cast back to us.

The essays in Noir Affect articulate the importance of understanding negative affect and argue that noir is a privileged medium for doing so. Ranging, in its discussion, among a range of media and national contexts, the volume sees noir as a contemporary phenomenon as much as a historical one. Reconceptualized as defined by negative affect, noir becomes a crucial site for thinking about death, decay, anxiety, rage, sadness, guilt, shame, resentment, loss, and the erotic attachment to death. It also becomes a locus of protest and refusal against the boosterish rhetorics of capitalism. The essays in the book argue for the social and political work done by noir affect. Taken together, they make the argument for noir as a vibrant contemporary medium. They also make the argument for negative affect as a crucial political dynamic, one that is underappreciated in many theories of affect. Readers will emerge from the collection with a new understanding of both noir and affect.

Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor is the first book-length study of O’Connor’s attitude toward race in her fiction and correspondence and is the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of her thoughts on the subject. O’Connor lived and wrote in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights movement. In one of her letters, O’Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the U.S.: “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.” This double-mindedness also manifests itself in O’Connor’s fiction. Drawing on critical whiteness studies, this study analyzes the ways in which O’Connor critiques the unjust racial practices of the South in her stories and other writings yet unconsciously upholds them; explores O’Connor’s ambivalence with regard to contemporary politics; considers the influence of theology and the Catholic Church on O’Connor’s attitudes; examines the complex role played by “Africanist” presence in the construction of white consciousness in O’Connor’s stories; and explores the theme of thwarted communion between the races in her fiction and correspondence. The study concludes that O’Connor’s race-haunted writing serves as the literary incarnation of her uncertainty about the great question of her era and of her urgent need, despite considerable reluctance, to address the fraught relationship between the races.

Sociality under the sign of liberalism has seemingly come to an end—or, at least, is in dire crisis. Xenocitizens returns to the antebellum United States in order to intervene in a wide field of responses to our present economic and existential precarity. In this incisive study, Berger challenges a shaken but still standing scholarly tradition based on liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, the book uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum writers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models for thinking about personhood and sociality as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. Today, the old liberal-national model of citizen is not only problematic, but also tactically anachronistic. And yet, standard liberal assumptions that undergird the fading realities of humanist and democratic traditions often linger within emerging scholarly work that seeks to move past them. Innovatively reorienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, Xenocitizens offers us a new nineteenth century—pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.