CUNY Academic Commons

Ugly Feelings is a study of negative emotions in the modern era, which Sianne Ngai characterizes as a state of affective equivocation trapped within an inability to exert ones agency, a claim which echoes […]

Early in The Immortality of the Soul, William of Auvergne moves from a theological explanation of why the soul must exist to a practical one. The soul and the body are mutually affective, he argues; they not only […]

On the first page of The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff claims that “the right to look is the right to the real”– in other words, looking and being looked at in such a way that the autonomy of both parties is […]

Affective Medievalism is a kind of manifesto for medieval studies and medievalism studies. It begins with a paradox pointed out by Paul Strohm and others about medievalism: attempts to get at the “real” medieval […]

So long a nyght ne felte I nevere noon
As was that same, to my jugement.
Whoso that thoghty is, is wo begoon;
The thoghtful wight is vessel of torment;
Ther nis no greef to him equipollent.
He graveth deepest […]

Knapp argues that bureaucratic identity and scribal labor in the fifteenth century contributed to the literature and overall vernacular landscape. He uses Thomas Hoccleve’s writing, particularly the Series and the […]

Lennard J. Davis’s work has been formative for the corpus of disability studies. His concept of the norm was one of the first keywords I came across when I began learning about the field, and it is a concept I […]

Claire Trenery positions this work as an answer to overly reductive dialogues about medieval madness. She is interested in 12th century miracle stories about individuals being cured of their madness, of which she […]

In her book Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer looks to develop a way of talking about disability that recognizes its status as a political identity, and that also imagines a future for disabled people. Attitudes […]

Cohen argues that medieval pain is an individual phenomenon but also something that’s communal and shared. People either accepted pain as a holy experience, deliberately sought out pain, or ran from pain. Medical […]

In Disability Aesthetics, Siebers defines aesthetics as what bodies feel in the presence of other bodies. Works of art that engage with bodies, especially in regard to modern art, are also engaging with […]

Spoilers for Arrival (2016) and Thomas Hoccleve’s Series
I watched Arrival for the first time last night, after about 2 years of people telling me to watch it. It’s a film that is all about humans coming into […]

In The Melancholy Muse, Carol Falvo Heffernan’s central argument is that Chaucer and Shakespeare, as emblematic authors of their respective periods, had extensive knowledge of the medical discourse of their day […]

Frederic Jamison’s statement that it is impossible to imagine alternatives to capitalism under capitalism hangs behind this book, which seems to assert that responses to adverse events (including capitalism, but […]

Mitchell argues that we are experiencing a “pictoral turn” which is actually a return to pictures as an interplay between people, institutions, and looking. It is the realization that spectatorship is as important […]

This is one primary text I am using that doesn’t contain an explicit mention of sorrow or melancholy. I am mainly interested in it because of its associations with earth and the extended descriptions of […]

I am reading this immediately after Book of the Duchess, so I guess it’s inevitable that there will be some crossover between the two. The most immediate difference from that poem, although they begin almost […]

I finished reading Camera Lucida this morning later than I meant to, because I got distracted by reading this article in Esquire by Jeff Sharlet titled “All That We’ve Lost”. Sharlet has spent this year tweeting […]

My interest in “Book of the Duchess” is chiefly on this passage, the narrator’s description of his feeling, which comes in the first few lines of the poem:

Al is ylyche good to me —
Joye or sorowe, wherso hyt […]

The Ruins Lesson is a history of the social and artistic function of ruins from late antiquity to the twentieth century, mostly focused on the Roman empire, the Renaissance, and the Romantics. She is interested in […]