And from Cain there sprang misbegotten spirits, among them Grendel. — Seamus Heaney, transl. Beowulf (2000) This is an excerpt from a longer essay, framed from just before the 2016…
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Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
On Less Convenient Histories
Every day, I look at the sepia-tinted photograph that hangs on my refrigerator, but I don’t often see it. The woman at the center of the image has long, coarse…
Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
A Lacuna Follows
“The Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History,” wrote Daniel Defoe at the beginning of The Fortunate…
Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
Math of the Non-visible
Siddhartha Lokanandi, who owns a bookstore and arts event space here in Kufürstenstrasse called Hopscotch, told me two things in our first meeting that he believes to be true about…
Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
The After Archive: Introduction
After the end, or after the beginning, or after we started to write these essays everything changed. I wait for my ability to imagine a relationship with the past or…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Afterword Form Now: As Limit and Beyond
The title of this double special issue of Post45 invites us to consider whether each individual essay endorses, condemns, practices or in some way “unbinds” formalism. It also raises the question about…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Notes on Shade
Many things in this world haven’t yet been named; many things, even if they have been named, have barely been described. One of these is the practice of “reading” —…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Queer Formula
In literary studies, queer theory came on the scene around 1990 wielding its formalism as the sign of its politics. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s cheeky description of queer theory…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Zadie Smith’s Style of Thinking
Form, writes Ali Smith, can be “a matter of need and expectation,” offering “clear rules and unspoken understandings.” But in practice, she adds, form is “also a matter of breaking…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Form contra Aesthetics
Enjoying a second act that seemed all but inconceivable a couple decades ago, form has recently reclaimed center stage in academic literary studies. This time around it claims greater power…