CUNY Academic Commons

This essay by Colin Jager engages Percy Shelley’s avowed atheism, the historical context for his ‘unbelief,’ and its manifestations in his poetry. I found the article on JSTOR while doing research for a professor. While it’s outside of my area of interest, I found it interesting for its readings of Shelley’s poetry qua atheistic poetry and for its…[Read more]

This is “The Dictionary of Borges,” by Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes. The two scholars created what amounts to a comprehensive series of annotations for Borges’s oeuvre. Because of the range and obscurity of Borges’s allusions, the dictionary is interesting for its own sake. I found it on the University of Pittsburg’s Borges Center.

This is a link to a recording of one of Borges’s lectures given at Harvard in 1967/8, this one, as the title suggests, on metaphor. My interest stems from Borges’s theme here, borrowed from the Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones and similar to suggestions that Borges makes elsewhere, that all words are…[Read more]

This recent essay by William S. Allen explores the idea of “negative transcendence” in the work of Maurice Blanchot, paying close attention to his response to Jean Paulhan and Franz Kafka. Allen describes negative transcendence in almost Derridean terms: “it is a chthonic rather than an ethereal transcendence…rather, it returns to immanence rat…[Read more]

This is a chapter from the Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, written by Peter Fifield. It focuses on the history of Beckett and philosophy and the various ways in which future scholarship might fruitfully approach Beckett’s texts vis-a-vis philosophy. I accessed it through CUNY’s database of Cambridge Companions online.

This is a 1973 recording of Billie Whitehall’s rendition of “Not I,” the Samuel Beckett play written the year before. Billie Whitehall describes her close collaboration with Beckett in developing and staging what she interprets as the “inner scream,” a disembodied woman’s mouth speaking a fragmented monologue. She gives a wonderful description of…[Read more]

This is just one of Blake’s many plate etchings, a process that he developed as a reversal of traditional relief etching and which allowed him to print his poems and etchings together as a uniquely hybrid art form. After recently reading Bataille, who uses Blake’s verse as an epigraph, I realized how impoverished Blake’s poetry can seem when…[Read more]

This is an essay on the now ubiquitous question of the relationship between context and utterance, approached through the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. In it, de Berg makes the claim that an utterance is meaningless out of context. I found it through Google Scholar (English language material on Luhmann is in short supply) and ultimately JSTOR.

This is a chapter from The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett by one of my favorite critics, Jean-Michel Rabaté. The chapter deals with ethics in Beckett as an unreason: “He postulates an irrational imperative that just states the need to keep on saying, living, and creating.” This, Rabaté argues, constitutes an alternative to the darker side o…[Read more]

I accessed this through the Modernist Journals Project. This is the contents page of an issue of the early Twentieth Century literary magazine, The Smart Set. While it was the first American publication to publish F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, it also fed into and helped to create the pulp fiction boom that gave rise to the modern popular…[Read more]

This is an article by my former mentor Sam Slote on the appropriateness of genetic scholarship for the study of Finnegans Wake. Genetic scholarship often functions on a theoretical framework that relies on post-structuralist understanding of the inherent instability of any text. In the words of Jean-Michel Rabaté: “Therefore the ‘genreader’ will…[Read more]

Because it is impossible (and illegal) to download these images, I’ve simply pasted the URL above. The link is directed to the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce collection; the library has very helpfully digitalized a great deal of its extensive manuscripts. The specific images you will see if you scroll down are handwritten drafts of the…[Read more]

Continuing the theme of Borges and pragmatism vs. Borges and post-structuralism, I searched Borges and William James on the “Criticism” section of The University of Pittsburg’s “Borges Center.” The site is an open source for Borges scholarship with a large collection of critical articles on Borges in both Spanish and English. The editor is the…[Read more]

Through a JSTOR search on Sartre’s relationship to structuralism, I found a more recent (1992) interview with Jurgen Habermas conducted by CUNY’s Richard Wolin. This felicitous find provided me with a useful framework for Sartre’s famous interview in Telos–beyond Sartre’s relationship to structuralism, the interview provides Habermas’s take on…[Read more]

This article by Nietzsche scholar Mason Golden covers Nietzsche’s marginalia on his German language translations of Emerson’s texts. The connection between Nietzsche and Emerson is interesting as a philosophical alignment of Anglo-American pragmatism (or proto-pragmatism) and continental thought. I became interested in the connection when writing…[Read more]

This is a transcript of Einstein’s 1919 letter to the public requested and published by The London Times. It concerns his theory of general relativity, which had been published in 1915, but which only became well-known in May of 1919, when scientists such as Arthur Eddington confirmed Einstein’s exactitude in predicting how light would bend around…[Read more]