Heidegger's Being and Time is an underappreciated venue for pursuing work on the role narrative plays in self‐understanding and self‐constitution, and existing work misses Heidegger's most interesting contribution. Implicit in his account of Dasein (an individual human person) is a notion of the narrative self more compelling than those now on offer. Bringing together an adaptive interpretation of Heidegger's notion of “thrown projection”, Wolfgang Iser's account of “the wandering viewpoint”, and more recent Anglo‐American work on the narrative self, I argue (...) that we read our ongoing existences in the same way that, mid‐story, we read a narrative. Reading is a better master metaphor than authorship, narration, plot, or character to guide investigations of narrative's relation to the self. It is not merely a metaphor, however, as the hermeneutic structures involved in interpreting existence and a narrative from the middle are the same. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that members of the Women's Caucus of ACT UP/la formed a boundary between themselves and male members to increase the WC's power within the feminist-friendly organization. The WC's boundary-making strategies—formalizing women's space and reinscribing gender difference—combatted “slippage” of ACT UP/la's focus away from women's issues precipated by men's greater numbers in the group. ACT UP/la's feminist-friendly politics, legitimated WC efforts, and caused male members to defer to the WC; the WC became “official women,” gaining control (...) over their agenda, over their participation within ACT UP/la, and over male contributions to the WC itself. Boundary making had an unintended effect, compartmentalization, whereby women's issues became the sole responsibility of the WC. I conclude that the WC's boundary making in ACT UP/la's feminist-friendly milieu was at once successful and problematic, and that the efforts of feminists in such organizations deserve greater scrutiny. (shrink)

Abstract:What would Wittgensteinian fiction—not overtly about or influenced by him, but that resonates with his thought—look like? Lydia Davis has avowed, but never explained, her admiration for Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her short and fragmentary fictions are attuned to how grammar and usage reveal our forms of life. Alongside briefer discussion of Adam Ehrlich Sachs and other contemporary American writers, I characterize both Wittgenstein and Davis as uncanny grammarians: though we live in language, we are never fully at home in it. Both (...) press on our ordinary language in an extraordinary way, defamiliarizing the familiar to more explicitly understand it. (shrink)

Christopher Nolan’s seems a spy thriller in which a government operative saves the world. As others have noted, it is in a larger sense about climate change—even though it mentions it but once. Where the film has been dismissed as not saying anything substantial, or even read as promoting an activist message, I argue it is most coherently interpreted as a reactionary defense of the status quo. The film is about a war between the present and future, its heroes those (...) who beat back time travelers trying to prevent us from destroying the planet. If audiences are not passive recipients of propaganda, but critical and cognitive, then blockbusters need to distract them from unavowable larger meanings by redirecting interpretive energies into the details; plot holes are not a bug, but a feature. The meticulous, puzzle-box construction of Nolan’s films, which encourages elaborate fan theorizing, distracts both viewers and Nolan himself from their ideological content. (shrink)