This article explores the influence of Derek Mahon’s melancholic poetry on a younger generation of Irish poets. Drawing on Peter Schwenger’s The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects (2006), it argues that Mahon’s influential early poems deliberately provoke melancholy in order to insist upon the subject’s alienation from the world. It traces how the poets Justin Quinn and David Wheatley take on and reject aspects of Mahon’s influence, with a focus on this melancholy. Quinn rejects Mahon’s melancholy and comes (...) to insist emphatically upon connectedness, resulting in his development of a poetics pledged to traditional forms and full rhymes. Wheatley hews fast to early Mahon’s insistence on a gap between us and the world, inflecting that gap with a keen consciousness of environmental crisis. His trajectory, in contrast with later Mahon, is towards an embrace of disjunctive modernist techniques as a means of acknowledging our disconnectedness from the world. Attending to the ways in which Quinn and Wheatley work with and against Mahon’s influence sheds light on the ‘Metre generation’ as one whose poetic inheritance enables a sophisticated and exciting use of form as a tool with which to think through the individual’s relationship to the world. (shrink)

It is well-known by now that Derrida’s book Of Grammatology turned out to bear an ironic title, insofar as it develops very little what a grammatology could be. Rather than inaugurating the science of this arche-writing, Derrida concludes that such a thing would be impossible, for a variety of reasons. I’m interested, however, in the consequences of arche-writing for both animals and literature. A careful reading of Derrida can demonstrate that he has always been a patient thinker of the status (...) of animality even before his more openly ›animalist‹ late texts. Derrida himself states in his lecture »But as for me, who am I?« that ›the theme of the animality of writing‹ had always been one of his main concerns. Therefore, can the animality of writing make possible a Derridean thinking of the animal alongside that of writing? Or, in other words, can his work on arche-writing be read as a thesis of an arche-animality? If writing as a technique of embodiment reverberates with animalised meaning, what would a literary theory look like that focused on the arche-animality that makes possible the bodily signs of texts? A literary theory attentive to the animality of writing could no longer determine that only some texts are zoopoetic – animality would be a condition of textuality. But, on the other hand, a radical thinking of the animality of writing beyond the metaphysics of body and soul threatens to turn signs into mere things, representing nothing. My main argument is that most of what has come to be known as Literary Animal Studies performs in its methods precisely the opposite of what it aims to do with its object. And this enmeshing of method and object is precisely what I argue that an animalistic theory of literature provides. I hope to show that a dismissal of literary form is itself a speciesist procedure. But more than that, and as some sort of proof, I shall argue that we inherit signification itself – that is, the push into ›reality‹ effected by form – from animality, to the extent that to overlook the procedure of signification is to miss what it means to be an animal, either diminishing it to a Thing, or neutralising the very discourse of species that produces the difference between ›the human‹ and ›the animal‹. I start with a review of an array of position papers by literary scholars defining what they see as Literary Animal Studies, highlighting where I believe they fall short and where they point towards an animalistic understanding of signification. Following that, I offer my approach to Literary Animal Studies by grounding it on a theoretical discussion of the interrelatedness of textuality and animality – which results in what I name a zoogrammatology. Beyond that, however, I suggest that zoogrammatology might be in fact impossible, an impossibility that I hope demonstrates how complex the issue of animality can be for literary scholars and philosophers. The productive critical struggle resulting from zoogrammatology is then briefly illustrated with a reading of Ted Hughes’ The Though-Fox which focuses on the graphemic technique employed by the poem to mimic a fox’s footprints, with consequences to the poetic project of representing animality. (shrink)

Posthumanism, the story often goes, needs no theorizing. How could it? Only the most foolish or self-absorbed cultural critic would spend time speculating about something that was actually staring him or her in the face. "'Man,'" as Steve Beard confidently puts it, "does not have to be theorized away; the intersection of consumerism and techno-culture has already done the job" (1998, 114). All that was solid has melted into air. Posthumanism has finally arrived, and theory, like "Man" "himself," no longer (...) has a place. (shrink)

This article explores a minor work by Adrian Rifkin, a work which focuses primarily on his research method of parataxis, but which this article reads for what it offers to a reconsideration of pedagogy, or ‘teaching and learning’. The article argues that Adrian Rifkin has long been a ‘Rancièrean’ within UK cultural studies, and that this history has yet to be fully assessed. The importance of Rifkin’s Rancièrean pedagogical and research methods is laid out by discussing his interventions in the (...) context of the growing (strangle)hold of prescriptive and reductive quasi-managerialist ‘teaching and learning’ protocols within academia. The article aspires to draw attention to this significant but under-acknowledged Rancièrean force within British cultural studies (avant la lettre), but not just for the sake of it: it does so in order to offer counter-arguments and counter-positions for anyone seeking to contest or resist the stultifying tendencies within educational practices. (shrink)

This ‘fabulous’ essay sketches a hauntological bond of debts between Shakespeare and Derrida as a complex intertextual scene of translation across languages and literatures (but also philosophy and psychoanalysis), times and cultures. Starting from Derrida's essay ‘What is a “Relevant” Translation?’, Cixous explores via numerous voices, cloaks and masks (Celan, Joyce, Genet, Blanchot, Marx, Freud, Poe, Socrates but also Cixous's own father Georges, etc.) the spectral ‘visor effect’ of texts and languages concealing one another, or burrowing secretly underground like moles, (...) in Derrida's Hamlet-like passion for the Bard. (shrink)

The article explores the relationship between enjoyment and film to advance a theory of cinema based on an innovative use of Lacanian theory. Until now, psychoanalytic film theory has privileged the Lacanian category of the Imaginary and the corollary question of audience identification. In so doing, it has overlooked the order of the Real, which in Lacan overlaps with enjoyment. The article assesses whether cinematic fiction is able to evoke enjoyment as the disavowed core structuring not only film but also (...) our perception of social reality itself. The main focus is Lacan's theory of sexual difference, understood as a universal antagonism that cuts across any attempt at symbolizing reality. By conflating sexual difference and the cinema of Federico Fellini, the aim is to identify a specific cinematic context where the excess of representation becomes visible. (shrink)

The opportunity to review this assembly of recently published texts is testament to a growing readership for scholarly engagement with science fiction (SF) as well as to the rich resource that science fiction offers to both women’s studies and to feminists working within longer‐established academic disciplines.1 The collection edited by Marleen S. Barr is a somewhat idiosyncratic but nonetheless lively assemblage of fiction, critique, and personal essay that claims to “chart science fiction’s newest new‐wave trajectory” (ix), while the anthology edited (...) by Judith A. Little collects over twenty pieces of short fiction and novel extracts to provide resources for thinking through philosophical issues in the context of gendered utopias and dystopias. Sherryl Vint’s Bodies of Tomorrow draws on feminist philosophy and literary scholarship in close readings of key SF texts published in the last twenty years to make a plea for an ethical posthumanism that takes full account of human embodiment, and Lisa Yaszek’s Galactic Suburbia is a deceptively clear reevaluation of the contribution made to both feminism and science fiction by women writing science fiction after the Second World War and before the women’s liberation movement. (shrink)