John Champagne | Pennsylvania State University (original) (raw)

Papers by John Champagne

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2009

Only for you today! Discover your favourite homo academicus book right here by downloading and ge... more Only for you today! Discover your favourite homo academicus book right here by downloading and getting the soft file of the book. This is not your time to traditionally go to the book stores to buy a book. Here, varieties of book collections are available to download. One of them is this homo academicus as your preferred book. Getting this book b on-line in this site can be realized now by visiting the link page to download. It will be easy. Why should be here?

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2020

Champagne's latest work is an erudite monograph at the intersection of Italian Studies, queer the... more Champagne's latest work is an erudite monograph at the intersection of Italian Studies, queer theory, literary criticism, history, and art history. The author argues that his book, unveiling contradictions and ambiguities of Fascist Italy, 'might restore to the ventennio a however circumscribed heterogeneity, instability, or even dialecticism that an adjective like totalitarian risks occluding' (18). To that aim Champagne analyses a few examples of the extensive artistic production of writer Giovanni Comisso, painter and writer Filippo de Pisis, and painter Corrado Cagli. These three queer modernist artists did not self-identify as fascists but at the same time were not critics of the dictatorship. Champagne's book, avoiding both 'condemnation' and 'rehabilitation' of Comisso, de Pisis and Cagli, pushes us to refrain from drawing easy connections between politics and art, and emphasizes how, by analysing the works and lives of these three individuals, we can come to realize the complex non-linearity of politics, art, and sexuality in Mussolini's Italy. The book is organized in an introduction, four chapters and, in the author's words, one 'quasi conclusion'. The theoretical framework of the book is delineated in the first chapter, where Champagne explains how this work 'un-historicizes' sexualities, deconstructs categories, destabilizes identities, and rejects-without losing sight of continuities-teleological constructions of queerness. The scholar suggests that looking at the interwar period, it is possible to identify at least five concomitant and intersecting models of homoeroticism: 'modern sodomite', 'third-sex', 'homosexual/queer', 'pederastic couple', and 'warrior-brother model'. Champagne argues that 'ventennio era works of literature and art'-as clearly shown in his analysis of Comisso, de Pisis and Cagli-are 'rich with evidence of this unrationalized coexistence'. Furthermore, he underscores, the examination of these different models allows us 'to revise our understanding of the homosexual's genealogy' (38). Scrutinizing these 'modes of homoerotic subjectivity' it is indeed possible to de-homogenize the category of 'the' homosexual (38). In chapters 2, 3, and 4 Champagne looks at the artistic production of Comisso, de Pisis and Cagli. Chapter 2 analyses Comisso's Gioco d'infanzia-written in the early 1930s and published in 1965-and Il porto dell'amore (1924). Chapter 3 is focused on de Pisis's La città delle 100 meraviglie (1917), Roma al sole and Le memorie del marchesino pittore (both written in the 1930s but published posthumously), and a few male nudes painted between the end of 1920s and the early 1930s. Chapter 4 looks at Cagli's works of art, dissecting in particular the ceramics JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES

California Italian Studies, 2017

An understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete... more An understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modern gay and antihomophobic theory.

In an essay entitled "Teaching Deconstructively," Barbara Johnson provides the followin... more In an essay entitled "Teaching Deconstructively," Barbara Johnson provides the following definition of the teaching of literature: Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take in evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it. This is the only teaching that can properly be called literary; anything else is history of ideas, biography, psychology ethics, or bad philosophy. Anything else does not measure up to the rigorous perversity and seductiveness of literary language. (Johnson 1985, 140) Johnson adds in a footnote that "this is not meant to imply that nothing should be read outside the text at hand, or that a text is unconnected to any discourse outside itself," as the "inside" and "outside" of a text are themselves...

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2016

The changing status of HIV disease has significantly influenced cinematic representation of sex b... more The changing status of HIV disease has significantly influenced cinematic representation of sex between men and the pleasures these representations offer. This article examines two different cinematic explorations of 'risky' sex: one, the documentary Chemsex, on the combining of sex and drugs; the other, raw (condomless) porn – including auto-porn, porn made by the people engaged in the sex being filmed. It argues that, because the sexual is the site of so much ambivalence, its representation engages sensibilities far more nuanced than the term pleasure suggests. This article will be published in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film Volume 14 Number 2

Choice Reviews Online, 1995

Page 1. THE ETHICS Of MARCjINALITY A New Approach to Gay Studies Foreword Donald Pease ... The Et... more Page 1. THE ETHICS Of MARCjINALITY A New Approach to Gay Studies Foreword Donald Pease ... The Ethics of Marginality A New Approach to Gay Studies John Champagne Foreword by Donald E. Pease M IN NE SO TA University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London ...

The Modern Language Review, 2016

This essay uses Dunnett's study to continue a discussion of the necessity of comp... more This essay uses Dunnett's study to continue a discussion of the necessity of complicating our collective sense of the construction of masculinity under Italian fascism.

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2016

Il populismo russo (Turin: einaudi, 1952) to Utopia e riforma nell’illuminismo (Turin: einaudi, 1... more Il populismo russo (Turin: einaudi, 1952) to Utopia e riforma nell’illuminismo (Turin: einaudi, 1970), and pushed one of the most influential european enlightenment scholars to study the political history of Russian radicalism as well. in conclusion, the publication of these materials is an important contribution to several aspects of twentieth-century intellectual history. Both venturi’s manuscripts and the collected comments add new details to the biographic trajectory of one of the most important european historians. They also help readers discover interesting elements in the debate that was carried on among anti-Fascist intellectual exiles between the two wars, and offer some clues concerning the idea of society that was moving them to the struggle against dictatorship. Any scholar interested in the political and intellectual history of the 1920s and 1930s, even in a european and not only an italian dimension, may find significant information and documents in this book.

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, 2015

Standing in Rome’s Galleria Borghese between the withered St. Anne of the Madonna dei Palafrenier... more Standing in Rome’s Galleria Borghese between the withered St. Anne of the Madonna dei Palafrenieri and the languid Boy with a Basket of Fruit, my colleague Sharon and I annually restage for our students the same argument: “Don’t tell me this guy wasn’t gay,” she insists. “All the men are attractive; all the women look like hags or virgins.”1 My riposte, equally exasperated, is to remind her of the difference between homosexual behavior and identity and that the historical record, fleeting as it is, suggests that Caravaggio had carnal relations with both sexes; there is even evidence of a fight over a woman (Puglisi 29).

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, 2015

The films of Grimaldi and Amelio constitute two different responses to the melodramatic sensibili... more The films of Grimaldi and Amelio constitute two different responses to the melodramatic sensibility as it is reworked via a queer ethos. Ferzan Ozpetek’s films provide yet another. Born in Turkey and educated in Italy, Ozpetek explores expatriation, isolation, “migrating” sexual and gender identities, and the forming of alternative communities. Tike Amelio and Grimaldi, Ozpetek “queers” not only male/female and heterosexual/homosexual but also Italian/other, intertwining issues of national and sexual identity.

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, 2015

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s 2012 Cesare deve morire/Caesar Must Die documents a performance of S... more Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s 2012 Cesare deve morire/Caesar Must Die documents a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by the annual theater laboratory of the high-security section of Rome’s Rebibbia prison. Beginning with a sequence of the production’s final moments, the film then flashes back to when the actors—men who are serving sentences for organized crime and murder—audition. For their auditions, the men must recite their name, place of birth, paternity, and city of residence, but according to two different scenarios. First, they are to imagine that they are at a border crossing and in the process of leaving their wives. The director explains, “You would like to say good-bye to her, to cry with her. But you have to give us your personal information.”1 He continues: “The second time, the same situation, but this time, we force you to give us your details. So, the first time you are crying, the second time you are angry.”

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, 2015

If tragedy produces fear and pity, and comedy moves us through laughter and the promise of rebirt... more If tragedy produces fear and pity, and comedy moves us through laughter and the promise of rebirth, the melodramatic sensibility is perhaps best characterized by longing and regret. In a world where future happiness is guaranteed by religious conviction, longing is abated—by prayer, the performance of good works, and the reassurance of heavenly reward. Regret instead is expunged via the sacrament of penance and the conviction to “sin no more”; as long as they live, believers inhabit the possibility of repentance, forgiveness, grace, and salvation.1 In a secular world, minus such reassurances, longing and regret are but two sides of (modern) melancholia, melodramatic excess an attempt to signify the intensity of these affects. Brooks suggests that “melodrama represents both the urge toward resacralization and the impossibility of conceiving sacralization other than in personal terms” (Melodramatic 16). Characters in melodrama often seek to challenge unjust social conventions or to battle with their own past and the way it has trapped them, but because their struggle is a personal one, they often fail. This is perhaps the most profound way in which melodrama speaks of the unfairness of life, for one’s fellow human beings can be unforgiving, dreams die, and justice does not always triumph.

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

Modernism/modernity, 2014

860 to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” to theorize Woolf’s attitude to sexua... more 860 to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” to theorize Woolf’s attitude to sexual difference and introduces the concepts which will be so key to the remaining readings in his study: deterritorialization and the becoming-woman of writing, which, Ryan notes, bears an affinity with Woolf’s subversive concept of androgyny in their shared rejection of patriarchy and phallogocentrism. Drawing on these concepts, Ryan coins the neologism “tri-s,” pronounced tries, which he defines as a reading strategy emerging from Woolf’s refusal to allow figures of twos and threes to contain the energy they generate within their formal frames, but rather to follow their lines of flight outwards towards “other subjects and objects, bodies and environments” (77). Chapter 3 continues in this vein, queering certain objects in Orlando as a “reconceptualisation of desire as depersonalised and shared among human and non-human forms” (20). Ryan’s particular gifts as a critic are on full display in his highly original queering (queer-ring) of Orlando’s wedding ring. Chapter 4 turns to animal studies (a field of growing interest on its own, as well as in the burgeoning study of eco-criticism), which strives to consider nonhuman animals without setting them apart as the human’s Other or subordinate. Earlier critics of Flush, Woolf’s novel told from the perspective of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, have suggested Woolf treats the animal as an allegory, a metaphor, or a symbol. In his discussion of Flush, Ryan refutes these readings and considers various contested issues which are thought to comprise the boundary between the human and the nonhuman (nudity, mirrors, and the gaze) to show that Woolf’s portrait of Flush not only is not anthropomorphic, but it subverts the human-animal hierarchy and reveals the biases and limitations of a purely human, language-based worldview. Ryan extends this rethinking of human-centered hierarchies with a final chapter that addresses posthumanism and the materiality of “life itself,” another Woolfian power trope. Ryan reads Woolf’s own thinking about atoms and physics, first through the philosophy-physics of her contemporary Niels Bohr and then through Deleuze, and finds that the “immanent, posthuman ontology” of The Waves reveals the dense entanglement of the human with the nonhuman (21). Deleuze’s concept of the haecceity, an event “formed of aggregates of bodies, objects, and spaces” and “‘consist[ing] entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect or be affected’” (189–90), nicely pulls the strands of the chapter together and provides a seductive framework for thinking of certain “moments of being” in Woolf as moments of “becoming-cosmic” (190). In his introduction, Ryan points out the limitations of a routinized way of doing theory that reduces texts to “examples of theoretical concepts” (6). This puts the reader on alert: will Ryan be able to pull off anything different? But for a few moments, which are few and far between (a discussion of becoming-minoritarian in Flush does get a bit wrapped up in its own vocabulary), Ryan provides a fresh, vigorous reading-together of Woolf and theory that is deeply rewarding for the Woolf scholar, and to the wider community of scholars in literary studies and beyond.

Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method, 2012

1. Philosophy, Method and the Arts 2. The Moralized Economy in Hard Times 3. The Blues Subject: C... more 1. Philosophy, Method and the Arts 2. The Moralized Economy in Hard Times 3. The Blues Subject: Counter-Memory, Genre, and Space 4. Zones of Justice: A Philo-Poetic Engagement 5. For an anti-Fascist Aesthetics 6. The Micropolitics of Justice: Language, Sense and Space 7. A Continuing Violent Cartography: From Guadalupe Hidalgo to Contemporary Border Crossings 8. The Presence of War: "Here and Elsewhere"

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2009

Only for you today! Discover your favourite homo academicus book right here by downloading and ge... more Only for you today! Discover your favourite homo academicus book right here by downloading and getting the soft file of the book. This is not your time to traditionally go to the book stores to buy a book. Here, varieties of book collections are available to download. One of them is this homo academicus as your preferred book. Getting this book b on-line in this site can be realized now by visiting the link page to download. It will be easy. Why should be here?

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2020

Champagne's latest work is an erudite monograph at the intersection of Italian Studies, queer the... more Champagne's latest work is an erudite monograph at the intersection of Italian Studies, queer theory, literary criticism, history, and art history. The author argues that his book, unveiling contradictions and ambiguities of Fascist Italy, 'might restore to the ventennio a however circumscribed heterogeneity, instability, or even dialecticism that an adjective like totalitarian risks occluding' (18). To that aim Champagne analyses a few examples of the extensive artistic production of writer Giovanni Comisso, painter and writer Filippo de Pisis, and painter Corrado Cagli. These three queer modernist artists did not self-identify as fascists but at the same time were not critics of the dictatorship. Champagne's book, avoiding both 'condemnation' and 'rehabilitation' of Comisso, de Pisis and Cagli, pushes us to refrain from drawing easy connections between politics and art, and emphasizes how, by analysing the works and lives of these three individuals, we can come to realize the complex non-linearity of politics, art, and sexuality in Mussolini's Italy. The book is organized in an introduction, four chapters and, in the author's words, one 'quasi conclusion'. The theoretical framework of the book is delineated in the first chapter, where Champagne explains how this work 'un-historicizes' sexualities, deconstructs categories, destabilizes identities, and rejects-without losing sight of continuities-teleological constructions of queerness. The scholar suggests that looking at the interwar period, it is possible to identify at least five concomitant and intersecting models of homoeroticism: 'modern sodomite', 'third-sex', 'homosexual/queer', 'pederastic couple', and 'warrior-brother model'. Champagne argues that 'ventennio era works of literature and art'-as clearly shown in his analysis of Comisso, de Pisis and Cagli-are 'rich with evidence of this unrationalized coexistence'. Furthermore, he underscores, the examination of these different models allows us 'to revise our understanding of the homosexual's genealogy' (38). Scrutinizing these 'modes of homoerotic subjectivity' it is indeed possible to de-homogenize the category of 'the' homosexual (38). In chapters 2, 3, and 4 Champagne looks at the artistic production of Comisso, de Pisis and Cagli. Chapter 2 analyses Comisso's Gioco d'infanzia-written in the early 1930s and published in 1965-and Il porto dell'amore (1924). Chapter 3 is focused on de Pisis's La città delle 100 meraviglie (1917), Roma al sole and Le memorie del marchesino pittore (both written in the 1930s but published posthumously), and a few male nudes painted between the end of 1920s and the early 1930s. Chapter 4 looks at Cagli's works of art, dissecting in particular the ceramics JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES

California Italian Studies, 2017

An understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete... more An understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modern gay and antihomophobic theory.

In an essay entitled "Teaching Deconstructively," Barbara Johnson provides the followin... more In an essay entitled "Teaching Deconstructively," Barbara Johnson provides the following definition of the teaching of literature: Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take in evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it. This is the only teaching that can properly be called literary; anything else is history of ideas, biography, psychology ethics, or bad philosophy. Anything else does not measure up to the rigorous perversity and seductiveness of literary language. (Johnson 1985, 140) Johnson adds in a footnote that "this is not meant to imply that nothing should be read outside the text at hand, or that a text is unconnected to any discourse outside itself," as the "inside" and "outside" of a text are themselves...

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2016

The changing status of HIV disease has significantly influenced cinematic representation of sex b... more The changing status of HIV disease has significantly influenced cinematic representation of sex between men and the pleasures these representations offer. This article examines two different cinematic explorations of 'risky' sex: one, the documentary Chemsex, on the combining of sex and drugs; the other, raw (condomless) porn – including auto-porn, porn made by the people engaged in the sex being filmed. It argues that, because the sexual is the site of so much ambivalence, its representation engages sensibilities far more nuanced than the term pleasure suggests. This article will be published in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film Volume 14 Number 2

Choice Reviews Online, 1995

Page 1. THE ETHICS Of MARCjINALITY A New Approach to Gay Studies Foreword Donald Pease ... The Et... more Page 1. THE ETHICS Of MARCjINALITY A New Approach to Gay Studies Foreword Donald Pease ... The Ethics of Marginality A New Approach to Gay Studies John Champagne Foreword by Donald E. Pease M IN NE SO TA University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London ...

The Modern Language Review, 2016

This essay uses Dunnett's study to continue a discussion of the necessity of comp... more This essay uses Dunnett's study to continue a discussion of the necessity of complicating our collective sense of the construction of masculinity under Italian fascism.

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2016

Il populismo russo (Turin: einaudi, 1952) to Utopia e riforma nell’illuminismo (Turin: einaudi, 1... more Il populismo russo (Turin: einaudi, 1952) to Utopia e riforma nell’illuminismo (Turin: einaudi, 1970), and pushed one of the most influential european enlightenment scholars to study the political history of Russian radicalism as well. in conclusion, the publication of these materials is an important contribution to several aspects of twentieth-century intellectual history. Both venturi’s manuscripts and the collected comments add new details to the biographic trajectory of one of the most important european historians. They also help readers discover interesting elements in the debate that was carried on among anti-Fascist intellectual exiles between the two wars, and offer some clues concerning the idea of society that was moving them to the struggle against dictatorship. Any scholar interested in the political and intellectual history of the 1920s and 1930s, even in a european and not only an italian dimension, may find significant information and documents in this book.

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, 2015

Standing in Rome’s Galleria Borghese between the withered St. Anne of the Madonna dei Palafrenier... more Standing in Rome’s Galleria Borghese between the withered St. Anne of the Madonna dei Palafrenieri and the languid Boy with a Basket of Fruit, my colleague Sharon and I annually restage for our students the same argument: “Don’t tell me this guy wasn’t gay,” she insists. “All the men are attractive; all the women look like hags or virgins.”1 My riposte, equally exasperated, is to remind her of the difference between homosexual behavior and identity and that the historical record, fleeting as it is, suggests that Caravaggio had carnal relations with both sexes; there is even evidence of a fight over a woman (Puglisi 29).

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, 2015

The films of Grimaldi and Amelio constitute two different responses to the melodramatic sensibili... more The films of Grimaldi and Amelio constitute two different responses to the melodramatic sensibility as it is reworked via a queer ethos. Ferzan Ozpetek’s films provide yet another. Born in Turkey and educated in Italy, Ozpetek explores expatriation, isolation, “migrating” sexual and gender identities, and the forming of alternative communities. Tike Amelio and Grimaldi, Ozpetek “queers” not only male/female and heterosexual/homosexual but also Italian/other, intertwining issues of national and sexual identity.

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, 2015

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s 2012 Cesare deve morire/Caesar Must Die documents a performance of S... more Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s 2012 Cesare deve morire/Caesar Must Die documents a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by the annual theater laboratory of the high-security section of Rome’s Rebibbia prison. Beginning with a sequence of the production’s final moments, the film then flashes back to when the actors—men who are serving sentences for organized crime and murder—audition. For their auditions, the men must recite their name, place of birth, paternity, and city of residence, but according to two different scenarios. First, they are to imagine that they are at a border crossing and in the process of leaving their wives. The director explains, “You would like to say good-bye to her, to cry with her. But you have to give us your personal information.”1 He continues: “The second time, the same situation, but this time, we force you to give us your details. So, the first time you are crying, the second time you are angry.”

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, 2015

If tragedy produces fear and pity, and comedy moves us through laughter and the promise of rebirt... more If tragedy produces fear and pity, and comedy moves us through laughter and the promise of rebirth, the melodramatic sensibility is perhaps best characterized by longing and regret. In a world where future happiness is guaranteed by religious conviction, longing is abated—by prayer, the performance of good works, and the reassurance of heavenly reward. Regret instead is expunged via the sacrament of penance and the conviction to “sin no more”; as long as they live, believers inhabit the possibility of repentance, forgiveness, grace, and salvation.1 In a secular world, minus such reassurances, longing and regret are but two sides of (modern) melancholia, melodramatic excess an attempt to signify the intensity of these affects. Brooks suggests that “melodrama represents both the urge toward resacralization and the impossibility of conceiving sacralization other than in personal terms” (Melodramatic 16). Characters in melodrama often seek to challenge unjust social conventions or to battle with their own past and the way it has trapped them, but because their struggle is a personal one, they often fail. This is perhaps the most profound way in which melodrama speaks of the unfairness of life, for one’s fellow human beings can be unforgiving, dreams die, and justice does not always triumph.

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

Modernism/modernity, 2014

860 to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” to theorize Woolf’s attitude to sexua... more 860 to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” to theorize Woolf’s attitude to sexual difference and introduces the concepts which will be so key to the remaining readings in his study: deterritorialization and the becoming-woman of writing, which, Ryan notes, bears an affinity with Woolf’s subversive concept of androgyny in their shared rejection of patriarchy and phallogocentrism. Drawing on these concepts, Ryan coins the neologism “tri-s,” pronounced tries, which he defines as a reading strategy emerging from Woolf’s refusal to allow figures of twos and threes to contain the energy they generate within their formal frames, but rather to follow their lines of flight outwards towards “other subjects and objects, bodies and environments” (77). Chapter 3 continues in this vein, queering certain objects in Orlando as a “reconceptualisation of desire as depersonalised and shared among human and non-human forms” (20). Ryan’s particular gifts as a critic are on full display in his highly original queering (queer-ring) of Orlando’s wedding ring. Chapter 4 turns to animal studies (a field of growing interest on its own, as well as in the burgeoning study of eco-criticism), which strives to consider nonhuman animals without setting them apart as the human’s Other or subordinate. Earlier critics of Flush, Woolf’s novel told from the perspective of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, have suggested Woolf treats the animal as an allegory, a metaphor, or a symbol. In his discussion of Flush, Ryan refutes these readings and considers various contested issues which are thought to comprise the boundary between the human and the nonhuman (nudity, mirrors, and the gaze) to show that Woolf’s portrait of Flush not only is not anthropomorphic, but it subverts the human-animal hierarchy and reveals the biases and limitations of a purely human, language-based worldview. Ryan extends this rethinking of human-centered hierarchies with a final chapter that addresses posthumanism and the materiality of “life itself,” another Woolfian power trope. Ryan reads Woolf’s own thinking about atoms and physics, first through the philosophy-physics of her contemporary Niels Bohr and then through Deleuze, and finds that the “immanent, posthuman ontology” of The Waves reveals the dense entanglement of the human with the nonhuman (21). Deleuze’s concept of the haecceity, an event “formed of aggregates of bodies, objects, and spaces” and “‘consist[ing] entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect or be affected’” (189–90), nicely pulls the strands of the chapter together and provides a seductive framework for thinking of certain “moments of being” in Woolf as moments of “becoming-cosmic” (190). In his introduction, Ryan points out the limitations of a routinized way of doing theory that reduces texts to “examples of theoretical concepts” (6). This puts the reader on alert: will Ryan be able to pull off anything different? But for a few moments, which are few and far between (a discussion of becoming-minoritarian in Flush does get a bit wrapped up in its own vocabulary), Ryan provides a fresh, vigorous reading-together of Woolf and theory that is deeply rewarding for the Woolf scholar, and to the wider community of scholars in literary studies and beyond.

Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method, 2012

1. Philosophy, Method and the Arts 2. The Moralized Economy in Hard Times 3. The Blues Subject: C... more 1. Philosophy, Method and the Arts 2. The Moralized Economy in Hard Times 3. The Blues Subject: Counter-Memory, Genre, and Space 4. Zones of Justice: A Philo-Poetic Engagement 5. For an anti-Fascist Aesthetics 6. The Micropolitics of Justice: Language, Sense and Space 7. A Continuing Violent Cartography: From Guadalupe Hidalgo to Contemporary Border Crossings 8. The Presence of War: "Here and Elsewhere"

Preliminary outline of new book, to be published by Palgrave.

This is a paper, in Italian, on my recent thinking about queer unhistoricism.It is an introductio... more This is a paper, in Italian, on my recent thinking about queer unhistoricism.It is an introduction to my current book project, on queer unhistoricism and gay ventennio artists/writers Giovanni Comisso, Guglielmo Janni, Filippo de Pisis, Henry Furst, and Corrado Cagli