Paragraph Special Issues – serie

Founded in 1983, Paragraph is a leading journal in modern critical theory. It publishes essays and review articles in English which explore critical theory in general and its application to literature, other arts and society. Regular special issues by guest editors highlight important themes and key figures in modern critical theory.

This special edition of Paragraph, 'New British Hispanisms', explores a new direction in the discipline of 'Hispanism'. With six key contributors, this text reviews a variety of subjects, including cultural studies, comedy, male homosexuality and fantasy/science fiction.Paragraph is a leading journal in modern critical theory.

This issue of Paragraph, 'Revisiting the Scene ofWriting: New Readings of Cixous', aims both to reflect and to foster the extraordinary ongoing impact of Helene Cixous's writing across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines and literary forms

This volume of Paragraph represents the first collection of critical responses to be made to the work of Slavoj Žižek. It draws from a variety of engaged readers of his prolific output, judging it from philosophical, political, cultural and psychoanalytical viewpoints.

This is a special issue of the journal Paragraph.The last decade has seen a considerable growth of interest in Genet, now widely recognized as one of the most important French writers of the twentieth-century. From the very beginning, Genet attracted the attention of the major thinkers of his time, as witnessed by the volumes both Sartre and Derrida devoted to him. But recently his writing has proven a mine for readings informed by a whole variety of theories. Including Derrida’s first text on Genet since Glas and spanning the spectrum from a Deleuzian study of the event to speech-act analysis and queer theorizations of Genetian power relationships, this collection of articles reflects the diversity of the theoretical approaches currently being applied to his work.

In response to Bergson’s claim that modern science has not found its metaphysics, Deleuze remarked that it was this metaphysics that particularly interested him. In recent years, as the complexities of Deleuze’s work have been critically evaluated, interest has grown in the important part that science and a corresponding metaphysics plays in this work, including the publications that were co-authored with Félix Guattari. Necessarily, much of this critical work has explored the precise nature of Deleuze’s expressive materialism. It has been suggested, by Manuel DeLanda for example, that Deleuze’s realist ontology has much in common with an intensive science that concentrates on the divergent processes that underpin the extensive world of finished products that we see around us. John Protevi and Mark Bonta have suggested that, in the same way that Kant’s Critiques corresponded to a world of Euclidean space, Aristotelian time, and Newtonian physics, so Deleuze’s philosophy helps to make sense of the world of fragmented space, twisted time and far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics that science is now exploring. This collection brings together a series of papers that deal with Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of science in A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?, as well as looking in detail at scientific issues such as emergence, complexity theory, non-linear dynamics, modern mathematics and physics and nanotechnology. As well showing how science functions in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, these papers also explore the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari were keenly aware of the related revolutions in physics, biology and information technology that gathered pace in the post-war period. Much exegetical work on Deleuze in recent times has emphasised the importance of the articulation between the virtual and the actual as the key co-ordinates of Deleuze’s ‘image of thought’. The papers in this collection show just how important science was for Deleuze in elaborating th

In January 1977 Roland Barthes became professor of literary semiology at the Collège de France, where he taught for three years until his death in March 1980. His lectures from those years, published more than two decades after his death, represent the final intellectual journey of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In his late teaching, Barthes continuously challenged his previous work, seeking out new ways of reading and living. In his idiosyncratic style, he sketched the outlines of a critical and ethical project that is still thought- provoking and relevant today.Taking the Collège de France lectures as a starting point, leading specialists assess Barthes's legacy and the constituent fantasies that haunted his entire oeuvre. This volume reveals the untimely force of Barthes's thinking, whereby looking back often means discovering unexpected possibilities for contemporary literary and cultural studies.This is also published as a Special Issue of the journal Paragraph.

The philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) – in particular the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (pub. 1922) and the Philosophical Investigations (pub. 1953) – was decisive for English-language ‘analytic philosophy’ in the post-war period. At the same time, French-language interest in Wittgenstein (as well as the ‘analytic’ tradition) was restricted and politically charged, in particular among French 1960s philosophers. Wittgenstein’s influence has waned in the last quarter-century amongst philosophers working in English. In French, however, his reputation has grown considerably. This special issue of Paragraph brings together articles by scholars working in France, the UK, and North America around the questions of language and canon-formation in philosophy and ‘theory’. In addition, Wittgenstein’s current pertinence to literary and historical interpretation are explored, as are the connections between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and contemporary trends in interpretation theory, such as cognitive approaches to interpretation.

Founded in 1983, Paragraph is a leading journal in modern critical theory. It publishes essays and review articles in English which explore critical theory in general and its application to literature, other arts and society. Regular special issues by guest editors highlight important themes and key figures in modern critical theory.

This is an exploration of Francophone communities from the 19th century to the present. It is a special Issue of Paragraph edited in 2001 by Celia Britton and Michael Syrotinski on Francophone Texts and Postcolonial Theory played a determining role in shaping the research field it helped to map. Ten years later, this collection of ten articles provides an opportunity to explore Francophone communities from a range of perspectives which similarly engage with today's most pressing questions in Francophone-Caribbean studies and postcolonial studies more generally. The contributions draw on material from different historical moments, ranging from the 19th century to the contemporary period, and explore questions of literature, culture, society and thought from across the Francophone Caribbean and beyond. They will bring together original work by some of the leading scholars in those fields, including Charles Forsdick, Kate Hodgson, Martin Munro, Lorna Milne, Eli Park Sorenson, Mary Gallagher, Maeve McCusker and Michael Syrotinski.

The articles in this volume take as their object the concept of freedom broadly – and of freedom of expression in particular – and view them through the lens of insights from modern critical theory and the continental philosophical tradition. Some articles revisit works of key theorists to shine fresh light on their conceptual understanding of "freedom", examining how they articulate it and how they arrived at it in genealogical terms. Others link concepts and ideas from critical theory to live contemporary debates, such as those concerning online freedom, campus no-platforming, and so-called "cancel culture", and use the tools of critical theory to nuance discourse surrounding these often sensationalized and polarizing topics. A critical awareness of how power operates in the deployment of the language of freedom – who is allowed to align themselves with that virtue along sexed, gendered, racialized, and class lines – permeates the articles.

The ground-breaking and monumental encyclopedia of philosophical terms read through the history of their translation, Vocabulaire Européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Robert/Le Seuil, 2004), finally appeared in English translation in 2014 with Princeton University Press as the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, eds. Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood. Translations of the Vocabulaire are now under way in several other major languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Romanian, Italian, Ukrainian and Russian. This special issue of Paragraph will be the first sustained critical reflection following the publication of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, and includes contributions by those who were most closely involved in the editing of this volume, by two of the translators (Mehlman, Syrotinski), as well as others whose work has been significantly inflected or influenced by the questions raised by the Dictionary.

One of Derrida’s most complex, intriguing and challenging texts, Glas is a work of resounding importance for literature, for philosophy, for literature, and for the relationship between the two. This collection of essays, featuring leading scholars in the field, seeks to trace its resonance four decades after its publication. A number of interconnected problems and themes will be examined, including Derrida’s deconstruction of the Hegelian interpretation of Antigone, the philosophy and politics of familial and civil life, questions of sexual difference and dissidence, the question of the signature, the complex role played by figuration and language, and the continuing relevance of Glas today. While some of the essays undertake rigorous close readings of the text, at the same time as tracing the limits of such reading as they are indeed anticipated by Glas itself, others take this work as the occasion to explore its reverberations in other writings and in a host of topics and problems germane not only to literary and philosophical studies, but to cultural and political worlds far beyond the confines of academia.

In 1977, Shoshana Felman opened up the question of how literature and psychoanalysis speak to each other's most intimate concerns with her landmark volume of Yale French Studies entitled Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading ("Otherwise"). That relationship, she proposed, needed to be reinvented and transformed into a real dialogue between two different bodies of language and two different modes of knowledge. Over the forty years that have elapsed since the publication of Felman's 1977 volume, the encounter between literature and psychoanalysis has participated in the emergence of several new fields of critical inquiry, such as trauma, testimony, affect theory, neuro-psychoanalysis, and performance studies, and has been a privileged space for reflections on mourning, singularity, translation, transference, and translatability, the death drive, repetition, violence, cruelty, virtual reality, the clinic, and sexuality. In a world that has become enamored with modes of knowledge production that respond to ever increasing demands for quantifiable verification (the science of the brain) or for programmatic applicability, literature and psychoanalysis continue to offer an intractable resistance. Inspired (both directly and indirectly) by Felman's 1977 volume and working from the premise that this intractability is itself a source of potential transformation, the essays in this issue of Paragraph look to literature and psychoanalysis to invent new forms for the future.

'Queering the Second Wave' considers the works and ideas of feminists including Monique Wittig, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Marilyn Frye, Donna Haraway, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherríe Moraga as precursors of queer theoretical writings by names such as Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, Lee Edelman, Paola Bacchetta, and Judith Jack Halberstam. While acknowledging some of the problems and blindspots of second-wave politics and writing, we nevertheless seek to challenge the assumption that second-wave feminism is politically outdated or invalid. Instead, we imagine cross-generational and cross-discursive dialogues, and trace a genealogy of influence between the second-wave past and the queer present, while also speculating, in some cases, on previously unimagined queer-feminist futures.

The special issue responds to two concurrent phenomena: the re-emergence in the 21st century of religion as a political and cultural force, and its resurgence in a range of theoretical discourses, from postsecularism to New Atheism. Mirroring this theoretical and cultural turn, cinema across the world is renewing its acquaintance with religion as private practice, public display and political force and exploring overlapping material, spiritual and doctrinal concerns in the new millennium. This issue probes intersections between contemporary cinema and diverse theoretical, philosophical and theological engagements with religion. It compares cinema’s capacity to present visual expressions of faith, evoke embodied experience and varied modalities of love, correlate earthly and divine realities and inspire belief and doubt with writings on religion and postsecularism. Contributors explore ideas about transcendence, vocation, affliction, love, doubt and forms of religious practice and expression that connect specific films with theoretical accounts that look beyond the secular.

In contemporary film theory, cognitivist specialists have demonstrated the most sustained interest in imagination, pioneering an earlier wave of scholarship on this topic, principally with reference to spectatorship. In the 1990s, investigations into identification and mental simulation on the part of spectators (Gregory Currie) and the theorization of viewers as imaginative agents (Murray Smith) spearheaded just some of the studies of imagining as a cognitive process, which took as their principal object of analysis mainstream cinema. This volume acknowledges the inspiration of earlier cognitivist accounts and is not conceived as a break with the old. It does seek, though, to explore questions that were not covered in that earlier research and thereby further cognitive enquiry, as well as open consideration of film and imagination to other theories and philosophies, in addition to a broader selection of films.