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THE NEWSLETTER OF THE SCHOOL OF CRITICISM & THEORYIn TheoryCornell UniversityFall 2013A Word from the DirectorAmanda AndersonAndrew W. MellonProfessor of Humanitiesand English,Brown UniversityGiven that we nowself-consciouslyinhabit theepoch of theanthropoceneand the threatof ecologicalcatastrophe, howdo we reframeour approaches toforms of criticismand theory thathave relied onwhat now seemsa blinkeredunderstandingof the place ofhumans in historyand the world?How do “the new materialisms”—asthey have emerged across severaldisciplines and areas of inquiry—helpus to reconceptualize the relation of thehuman to the nonhuman world? Howcan the literary history of intellectualdisability help us to rethink the relationAnnual SCT Reception at MLAThe annual SCT reception at the MLA will be held on Saturday, January 11th, from7:00-8:15pm in Chicago D, Chicago Marriott. SCT is joined by the American ComparativeLiterature Association in sponsoring this well-attended event. Past or potential SCTparticipants have the chance to meet and mingle, and the SCT and ACLA groups sharemany interests. Former and future SCT faculty tend to stop by and the food andconversation make the event something to which former attendees look forward. We hopeto see you!SCT Alumni Networkbetween narrative self-consciousness andneuroatypicality? What are the particularcontributions and perspectives offeredby contemporary design theory, and howmight design-literacy more broadly feedinto the methods and frameworks ofhumanistic scholarship?These questions and more were takenup in the six-week seminars of the 2013session of the SCT, serving as the basisfor extended discussion both withinseminars and beyond—in the lecturehall, in the colloquium auditorium, andat the many social events that contributeto the richness of the SCT experience.The six-week faculty, Ian Baucom (DukeUniversity), Jane Bennett (Johns HopkinsUniversity), Michael Bérubé (PennState University), and Julia ReinhardLupton (University of California, Irvine),participated with great energy in theintellectual and social life of the session,and I am very grateful to them all formaking the 2013 program so vibrant andsuccessful. Their core seminars werePlease help us keep in touch with SCT alumni. If you did not receive this newsletter atyour current mailing address or if you would like to receive future mailings electronically,please send your updated contact information to Alice Cho, Program Administrator,sctcornell-mailbox@cornell.edu.Please visit our website at http://sct.cornell.edu or find us on Facebook. We look forwardto hearing from you.amplified by a thought-provoking setof mini-seminars and public lecturesaddressing “secular re-enchantment”(Akeel Bilgrami), mood and methodin contemporary critique (Rita Felski),affect theory and neuroscience (CatherineMalabou), “democratic animism” (AchilleMbembe), species evolution and culturalfreedom (William Connolly), and theoriesof autism (Joseph Valente).I invite you to read the participantessays that follow, which individuallyand collectively provide a vivid senseof last summer’s experience. Theycapture the range and intensity of theintellectual life at SCT and convey thedistinctive characters of individualseminars as well as the spontaneousrelationships and dialogues thatdeveloped outside of formal settings.As in previous years, we had a largeand interesting mix of participants:we welcomed participants from 63institutions of higher learning, including20 institutions outside of the U.S. Weare also continuing to draw participantsfrom a diverse range of intellectualdisciplines. While SCT has historicallyhad a strong number of participantsin literature, we attract participantseach year from a range of humanitiesand social sciences disciplines. In 2013we had representation from the fieldsof history, political science, Africanastudies, American studies, film andmedia, women’s studies, religion,performance studies, and art. Wepublicize the program through a numberof channels, but more than anything elsewe rely on word of mouth and hope thatalumni will recommend the programto potentially interested colleagues. Asin the past, we also continue to benefitfrom well-established relationships withmany leading institutions that sponsorparticipants annually.Please take note of the line-up for 2014,listed on the following page. Fullinformation about the upcoming sessionand the SCT can be found on our website(http://sct.cornell.edu/).

IN THeory 2 Fall 20132014 Summer SessionJune 15 - July 25Reflections on SCT 20132014 Faculty6-Week SeminarsSimon CritchleyHans Jonas Professor in Philosophy,New School for Social Research“Tragedy As Philosophy”Mark B. N. HansenProfessor, Program in Literature, Program inMedia Arts and Sciences, Department of Art,Art History and Visual Studies,Duke University“Media Between Data and Experience”Sianne NgaiProfessor of English, Stanford University“The Contemporary”Annelise RilesJack G. Clarke ’52 Professor of Law in Far EastLegal Studies, Professor of Anthropology, andDirector, Clarke Program in East Asian Law andCulture, Cornell University“Theorizing the Gift: Law, Markets, Love”Mini-SeminarsLeela GandhiProfessor of English, University of Chicago“Moral Imperfection: An Ethics for Democracy”Ursula K. HeiseProfessor, Department of English/Institute ofthe Environment and Sustainability,University of California, Los Angeles“BioCities: Urban Ecology and the CulturalImagination”Christopher NewfieldProfessor of Literature and American Studies,English Department, University of California,Santa Barbara“Critical Theory and the Post-CapitalistUniversity”Tricia RoseDirector, Center for the Study of Race andEthnicity in America, and Professor ofAfricana Studies, Brown University“Black Popular Culture in the Age ofColor-Blindness and Mass CulturalCommodification”Applications from faculty membersand advanced graduate students atuniversities worldwide will bereviewed beginning February 1, 2014.For online application and programinformation:http://sct.cornell.edu/Perhaps the two most famousvisual representations ofscholarly inquiry—the eerilysimilar paintings titled TheGeographer and The Astronomer(both. c. 1668) by Johannes Vermeer—portray a solitary male figure immersedin intellectual activity. Confined in aclosed room with a singular source oflight, the scholar turns his eyes not onthe phenomena he is analyzing, but ontheir visual representations—a nauticalmap and a celestial globe. In this model—which Jonathan Crary identifies as theepistemological model of the cameraobscura—academic work results fromthe separation of bodily sensations andexperiences from the ever-changingphenomena of the studied field. In orderto understand the world, the geographerand astronomer have to withdrawfrom it.Although Ithaca (as well as the elevatedlocation of Cornell University’s campus)may seem like a site of withdrawal, aftera few days it became obvious that thestyle of conducting academic work atSCT had nothing to do with a solitarypursuit of knowledge. It was refreshingto see the different ways you couldperform academic work and its variousmanifestations. I was fascinated by thevariety of styles of asking questions—ranging from the short, innocent, andyet incisive, through the slightly messybut all the more brilliant, to the long,fully developed and ending with sharpwittedpunch lines. Different manners ofnote taking revealed the variety of waysin which one could absorb and registerknowledge—while some of us speedtypedthrough lectures, others wrotedown the main arguments in capitalizedletters, yet others used complicated notetakingprograms that allowed them toillustrate their notes with doodles. Sometook no notes at all, placing perhaps toomuch trust in the plasticity of their brains,to invoke the concept of one of the guestfaculty members at this year’s SCT—Catherine Malabou. It quickly becameobvious that every faculty member andparticipant brought with her a deeplydistinctive way of thinking, a uniquearchive of academic texts and culturalreferences as well as a particular way ofpresenting it. I took pleasure sharing myarchive with others, adding new indexcards to my own, was fascinated by themultiplicity of the forms of academicperformance, and enjoyed reflecting onnew rhetorical styles.Faculty and participants at the SCT registration picnic, A.D. White House garden

IN THeory 3 Fall 2013Of course, SCT wasn’t only aboutthe observations of academic styles,postures, and manners (although, afterJane Bennett’s lecture on the “mannersof democracy” in Walt Whitman’spoetry, we can now examine theirpolitical potential) and not only aboutimpassioned debates on the precariouscondition of young scholars and thefuture of the humanities, but mostimportantly about in-depth academicinquiry and exchange. Its main venuewas the six-week-long seminar—in mycase Ian Baucom’s “Postcolonial Studiesin the Era of the Anthropocene.” Theseminar began with a reading of DipeshChakrabarty’s now classic ProvinicializingEurope along with the author’s neweressays, in which he significantly revisesnot only his earlier theses, but also hisvision of the field of postcolonial studies.According to Chakrabarty, in the era ofthe anthropocene—“the new geologicalepoch when humans exist as a geologicalforce”—humanities scholars shouldintegrate the investigation of particularhistories and emancipatory struggles intoa wider consideration of a new politicsof the human species. In the light ofpending ecological doom, it is necessaryfor the human collective, the new “we”interpellated by our own destructiveactions, to design “a global approach topolitics.”Our conversations, which werethoughtfully moderated by Ian Baucom,struggled with this call for universality—seemingly recognizing its necessity(aren’t “we” all affected by ecologicaldisasters?), but simultaneously doubtingthe common foundation of the universalhuman species (are “we” all reallyequally responsible for the anthropoceneand are “we” all affected by it on equalterms?). Our heated discussions aboutworks by such thinkers as DonnaHaraway, Bruno Latour, and JaneBennett, along with the multiple andincredibly inspiring theoretical referencesbrought into the seminar by Ian Baucom,helped us explore the difficult relationbetween the incommensurable scales ofhuman and natural history, the possibilityof building a collective of human andnon-human actors, the limitations andchallenges of political ecology, and therole that aesthetic works have to playwithin this new, redefined realm ofpolitics. Going back to these discussions,I remain inspired by many of the pointswe arrived at and the spirit of scholarlycongeniality we fostered. We and not“we,” as we truly did draw and build onone another’s thoughts day after day—the I’d like to go back to what Paul said’sor drawing on what Michaela reminded usof ’s quickly became the refrains of ourdiscussions.One of the many things I took backwith me from SCT was a long readinglist: scribbled at the back of my seminarnotebook it contained the multiple textualreferences—“read Meillasoux,” “finishlectures by Latour,” “go back to that essayby Derrida”—pointed towards by facultymembers and participants. Adding newpoints to the list, I would usually writedown who the text was referenced by andin what context (we started grasping thedifferences between lectures, seminars,mini-seminars and colloquia after thesecond, well maybe third, week...),creating a messy mind map of discursiveaffiliations, connections, and affairs. Aseparate theory chart could have beendrawn up from the many exuberantparties, bar outings, and trips, whereacademic talk was really taken to thenext level (at some point you just haveto stop taking notes though). Looking atthe reading list now, I am both slightlyparalyzed by the impossibility ofcompleting it and thrilled at the memoryof the vibrant intellectual life that I wasso lucky to participate in. Yet, whatremains with me most are the memoriesof long conversations with new friends,conversations founded on a feeling ofsolidarity, and a sense of hopefulnessabout the possibility of building newcollectives through academic work.Magda SzcześniakUniversity of WarsawSCT faculty with participants at social events. Clockwise from top left: Jane Bennett (right); Michael Bérubé (left); Julia Reinhard Lupton (right); Ian Baucom (right).

IN THeory 4 Fall 2013One morning in seminar, ourfearless leader Michael Bérubédistributed around the tablea short excerpt from Mrs.Dalloway, in which VirginiaWoolf describes a character “overcomewith his own grief, which rose like amoon looked at from a terrace, ghastlybeautiful with light from the sunken day.”In the novel’s next sentence, the griefstrickenfigure, Peter Walsh, puts his handout toward Clarissa Dalloway, pullingher into the metaphor alongside him:“There above them it hung,that moon. She too seemedto be sitting with him on theterrace, in the moonlight.”With remarkable economy,Woolf’s sentences set beforeus one of the central problemswe’d been grappling within our seminar all summer:how is it that literatureoffers such a unique, andseemingly unmatched, mode ofnavigating the traffic that takesplace between the minds ofseparate people? What specific resourcesdoes literature bring to the venerablyirresolvable problem—tackled over thecenturies by philosophers, artists, mystics,and now neurobiologists and cognitivescientists—of accessing, knowing, andeven “entering” mental states that are notone’s own? Or, as Bérubé excitedly putthe question to us: What is it about thatmoon?But if Peter and Clarissa’s shared griefoffered us one point of entry to thethemes of our course, it didn’t get us allthe way there. Our more specific concernthis summer lay in exploring how themechanisms of literary narrative canthemselves be warped and transformedby the presence of characters withatypical or disabled mental capacities.Why is the literary such a powerfulregister for exploring the minds ofcharacters who are seemingly unableto distinguish their own thoughtsand experiences from those of others?The scope of this question, it turnsout, is remarkably far-reaching. If, asTobin Siebers has argued, disabilityfunctions as a “master trope of humandisqualification,” the disabled or atypicalmind and/or brain challenges us tothink differently about who is and whois not accorded the status of personhood.Guided by Bérubé’s unflaggingenthusiasm (and seemingly effortlesscommand of at least the last century’sworth of literature, theory, and culturalhistory), our seminar traversed an oftenhead-spinning succession of furtherissues, as impressively diverse as theinterests of the seminar’s participants.We considered, for instance, recentattempts to use cognitive psychology toexplain why readers care about fictionalcharacters; current controversies overlegal surrogacy for the intellectuallydisabled; the “glitchy” avatars created inonline disability communities; and theseductively deranging representations ofalternative cognitive styles found in J.M.Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K.and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip.“My time at SCT made me hopeful that ourscholarly practices might be transformed bymore fully acknowledging the various waysthat different minds and bodies have ofattuning to one another.”In pursuing the question of “other minds”through the specific lens of intellectualdisability, our seminar brought togethertwo separate scholarly conversationsthat have, thus far, overlapped very little:disability studies, which has long beencritical of the normalizing tendencies ofscientific and medical knowledge, andthe current vogue for so-called Darwinianliterary studies and “evolutionarycriticism,” itself part of a broader “turnto science” that disciplines across thehumanities seem to have taken in recentyears. Many of us felt a pressing needto develop more skeptical attitudestoward the authority of “science” thanwas to be found in some of the work thatwe read from the latter category. Therewere contentious moments: what else toexpect from a roomful of theory-headsconfronting scholarship that was, insome cases, openly hostile to the qualitiesthat drew so many of us to pursuegraduate work in the humanities in thefirst place? And yet there was somethingundeniably useful, and even invigorating,in encountering ideas that seemed to goagainst many of our deeply held criticalimpulses. It allowed us to discuss howlongstanding debates about (for instance)the instability of language, the functionof ideology, and the role of history inthe development of scientific reason stillprovide an indispensible counterweightto the overly gleeful embrace, in someprecincts, of what science can now tellus about the human brain, mind, andself. Indeed, the darker chapters in thehistory of disability—including variousforms of institutionalization, eugenics,even genocide—teach us all too well thehazards of uncritically acquiescing tothe authority of those claiming access toscientific truth.Though disability studies is still asmall and often marginalized academicfield, I would like to think ourcollective encounter with its methods,commitments, and modes of thoughtat the SCT this summer might provesalutary, even for those of us whoseresearch interests seem tolie quite far afield fromdisability studies per se.Academics in general,and particularly thoseof us in the hothouseof graduate school, areeasily enthralled byvirtuosic, solo feats ofintellectual mastery,which often seem torequire superhumanabilities of mindand body. Engagingwith disability as both a trope and aprovocation for theoretical reflectionmight encourage us to cultivate stylesof thinking, and being, that are lessalienated from the everyday messiness ofexperience than the largely disembodied,“critical” voice many of us have beentrained to adopt. What new modes ofscholarship might become availableby slowing down and lingering witha problem while setting aside theoverweening ambition to conquer it, orconceptualizing intellectual labor in termsthat are less relentlessly individual?My time at SCT made me hopeful that ourscholarly practices might be transformedby more fully acknowledging thevarious ways that different minds andbodies have of attuning to one another.In informal late-night reading groups,heady discussions underneath waterfalls,or simply sitting together on Cornell’sArts Quad after a heated seminardiscussion, the ethos of conviviality tobe found at SCT provided an almostideal (and certainly idyllic) environmentin which to experiment with some ofthese possibilities. A bit like Peter Walshand Clarissa Dalloway’s moonlit terrace(though without, thankfully, the pangof grief!), our summer together in Ithacaoffered a glimpse of other modes ofaffiliation and collective contemplationthat may yet become possible.Leon HiltonNew York University

IN THeory 5 Fall 2013In her public lecture, one of themany given by scholars visiting theSchool of Criticism and Theory thispast summer, Catherine Malaboudelivered a grim diagnosis. Sheargued that our contemporary conditionis characterized by “indifference,” that is,the destruction of affect. Battered by theeveryday violence of twenty-first centuryliving, we are increasingly incapable ofbeing concerned or moved by anythingat all. Indifference, warned Malabou,is a far more serious impairment thanthe temporary state of boredom ordespondency. More horrifically, weare actually beginning to resemblepatients with severe cerebral disease ortrauma. Drawing on neurobiologicalresearch, Malabou was not speakingmetaphorically. The social world damagesthe psyche more slowly but no lesspowerfully than a bullet to the brain’sfrontal lobes.Malabou’s remarks didn’t feel quite right.In the midst of an intensely affectivesummer, cerebral degeneration felt likeno more than a distant and hypotheticalthreat. Affect has been theorized asan ambient force outside of consciousknowing—circulating across the blurryboundaries of people and things—thatmay impel thought and practice. I foundaffect to work this way at the SCT: ourcollective experiments in thought wereset in motion by a wide range of affectiveforces and intensities. Looking back, Ifind it difficult to disentangle the ideasI encountered from the affective strandswith and through which they werewoven.The six-week seminar with Jane Bennett,“A Political Ecology of Things,” in whichI was enrolled, was a case in point. Itsnew materialist invitation to explore thepower of things—huckleberries, balloons,plastic bags, gleaned potatoes, broadaxes,border walls, and planets, amongstother unorthodox objects of philosophicalinquiry—required not only intellectualopenness but also affective flexibility. Faraway from our disciplinary havens andemboldened by Bennett’s example anddirection, we cultivated a space in which,like Thoreau at Walden, a “slight insanityof mood”—not a cool indifference—ruledthe day. In the seminar (and aroundits edges) we slowed down the typicaldrive towards mastery to saunter a bitmore leisurely, in our common slightinsanity, among many lush new materials:Whitehead’s ingressing cosmos; thespontaneous morphogenesis of Bergson;the noisy, clamoring multiplicity of Serres;Darwin’s climbing plants; Perec’s playfullists; Whitman’s aching eros for vegetalmatter; the affirmations and goings-underof Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; the refrainsof Deleuze and Guattari; Bennett’s ontosympathy;the vitality of Ithaca’s gorgesand slime molds.Affective intensities extended beyondthe seminar room as well. There wasplenty of warmth and even joy, especiallyas I grew accustomed to the pleasantfeeling of decompression after a longand stimulating day, feeding into thehumming energies of a garden partywith friends, food, and drink. Therewere also the familiar satisfactions of ahermeneutics of suspicion, deftly appliedby visiting scholars like Achille Mbembewho unmasked the capitalist subjectivitydriving new materialisms, and Rita Felskiin her colorful critique of critique.We also moved on the far side of theaffective spectrum. With new ideassometimes came anxiety, accompanyingAmanda Anderson’s analysis of the stateof the humanities as well as Ian Baucom’sfrank discussion of the anthropocene andits portents of environmental devastation.There was also disorientation as I leftthe comforts of my own departmentand encountered different methods,commitments, and vernaculars. Finally,there was some anger and frustration.The last colloquium was tense. As thetemperature rose in the hall, so too didthe voracity of questioning along withour collective blood pressure. Over thecourse of our summer idyll, severalstudents pointed out, a Florida courtacquitted Trayvon Martin’s killer, Detroitfiled for bankruptcy, and my homestate of North Carolina passed the mostregressive voting laws seen since theGilded Age. What have we done here, itwas demanded, to remit these wrongs?Where was the practice in our criticismand theory? Satisfying answers werenot easily won, but not for a pathosof indifference or a want of affect. Onthe contrary, the upsurge of thoughtfuldebate commingled with the upsurge ofaffect that day. Rigorous thinking andpassionate feeling went hand in hand.Slight insanity, warmth, satisfaction,anxiety, disorientation, and anger—thesummer of 2013 was a boisterous hubbubof all these affective forces. If Malabouis right, and I hope she is not, I thinkshe may at least need to account for thedeeply affective dimensions of criticaland theoretical endeavors themselves, ofwhich the School of Criticism and Theoryis an exceptional example.Sonia HazardDuke UniversitySCT Director Amanda Anderson speaks at the Garden Party.

IN THeory 7 Fall 2013SCT faculty give public lectures (Top from left to right: Achille Mbembe, Amanda Anderson, Akeel Bilgrami;Bottom left: Catherine Malabou; Bottom right: SCT participants)to the contemporary “maker” movement.Such a spectrum proved immenselycapable of not merely speaking to but—more importantly—connecting ourdisparate, individual interests.Divided into three two-week sections, theseminar began with “Dwelling,” focusingon questions related to architecture andplace, especially in relation to Heideggerand Arendt. What does it mean to dwell,as Heidegger suggests? Is there a kind ofdwelling that we can identify as valuableand useful for us today, some sixtyyears on from his famous speech to anaudience of architects in that ideologicaland cultural hub of post-war Europeanreconstruction, Darmstadt? How does thenotion of dwelling, understood as “theroutines and needs of life,” connect withArendt’s conception of the vita activa andthe classical distinction between publicand private space, a distinction whichitself increasingly comes under erasurein a networked, post-Fordist era in whichcontinual, 24/7 connections are rapidlybecoming the default modes of being?From there, we moved on to “Telling,”emphasizing the increasing importanceof design in constructing contemporary,postmodern narratives based aroundinteractions between people and objects.For example, how might James Gibson’sinfluential theorizations of affordances,or the usages that an object facilitates,contribute to New Materialism and otherrecent considerations of the agency ofobjects? In a particularly serendipitousturn, Gibson’s own work in this settingprovided us with a prime demonstrationof his theory; having been a professor atCornell, Gibson’s papers are entrustedto an archive on campus, thus affordingour seminar a deeper engagement withhis work. Finally, we concluded witha section on “Selling,” considering theincreasingly indistinguishable overlapbetween contemporary design andlate capitalism, with an emphasis onAutonomist analyses of branding,especially as reflected in recent attemptsto market “immaterial” qualities suchas experiences and environments. As anadded bonus we were able to mix ourtheory with practice, both throughout theseminar, thanks to Lupton’s incrediblywell-designed and effective visualpresentations, and at the end, when sheran a supplementary session on basicdesign principles.As a scholar of digital media turning acritical eye on the practices and ideologiesof informational capitalism, I found thelatter sections of the seminar most usefulfor my own, current project, a studyof digital multimedia convergence inconjunction with the fall of the BerlinWall, the end of state communism,and the beginning of a newly globalsocioeconomic order. Yet not only theother parts of the seminar but SCT as awhole, including presentations from SCTfaculty members and thought-provokingvisits from scholars such as AchilleMbembe and Catherine Malabou, not tomention Ithaca’s unparalleled naturalbeauty and the infectious enthusiasm ofmy colleagues in the program, served toremind me of the benefits of a lifelongdedication to learning. Perhaps this,then—for an academic, at least—is whatit means, however briefly, to dwell.Andrew LisonBrown University

IN THeory 8 Fall 2013The School of Criticism andTheory is sometimes describedas an academic conferencestretched out over six weeks,and there is some truth in this.The intensity of discussion, the senseof urgency and freshness in establishedscholars presenting new work and workin progress, and the remarkable feelingof participating in a larger conversation,with palpable stakes, are features that theSCT has in common with a greatconference. Many conferences, as well,share with the SCT the sense of adventurethat comes from being thrown into a newplace with new people, and that gives riseto exuberant post-seminar socializing, aradical openness to new perspectives, anda willingness to take risks (intellectualand otherwise).Yet in a few key ways, the School ofCriticism and Theory is nothing like anacademic conference. For one thing, a realcommunity develops over the six weeksof SCT, whereas conferences tend toreinforce or draw on previously existingcommunities. For another, conferencestend to be either tightly focused orinclusively hodgepodge, where SCToffers something in the middle—a fewsalient lines of thought that speak to andilluminate each other. Most important, forthe few weeks you’re at SCT, you’re noton the market. You’re not competing insome subtle game of departmental ordisciplinary ranking. You’re notpositioning yourself in a field. When youwalk into a seminar at SCT, you are thereas a thinker engaging with other thinkers.The appeal this idea held for me wasalmost physical. The promise of pureintellectual exploration seemed idyllic,even utopian. Still, as I consideredapplying to SCT, I was concerned thatnone of the seminars spoke directly to mydissertation topic, and I worried aboutwhat six weeks would cost me in termsof my own research. I was anxious thatI might be choosing a kind of dilettantismover the more rigorous demands ofexpertise.My dissertation, The Lost War: World WarII in American Literature, 1945-1975,investigates the dominance of traumaticnarratives in canonical literaryrepresentations of World War II, andworks to recuperate an “other tradition”that abjures trauma in favor of moreambiguous, resistant, and complexunderstandings of power, violence, andsocial identity. I wasn’t entirely sure howIan Baucom’s seminar, “PostcolonialStudies in the Era of the Anthropocene,”would illuminate my topic, but I thoughtit would be helpful for me to learn moreabout postcolonial theory and to thinkthrough theoretical problems aroundhistoricity, the concept of an epoch or era,and the idea of the Event. As it turnedout, the questions we asked in seminarabout the anthropocene were oftendirectly related to contextual questionsI was asking about World War II: Howdo we understand the relation between aglobal event and local politics? How doesthe historical apprehension of humanityas a mass or a species affect humanistthought and aesthetics? As technologicaldevelopment exceeds comprehensibility,rationality, and even agency, how do weuse art and literature to represent ourunstable imaginings of the future—and ofthe present? And does the threat ofhuman extinction require a wholesalerethinking of history, culture, andpolitics?“When you walk intoa seminar at SCT,you are there asa thinker engagingwith other thinkers.”As we read the work of DipeshChakrabarty, Bruno Latour, TimothyMorton, Donna Haraway, and JaneBennett, wrestling with questions ofethics, ontology, and politics on a worldwidescale, Ian Baucom encouraged us tobring our own work and interests to bear.Our already rich discussion grew richeras my fellow participants folded in queertemporalities, Inuit knowledge, the art ofSpencer Tunick and Edward Burtynsky,Kropotkin, film studies, Sri Lankanliterature, and Christian Bök’s geneticpoetry. The seminar joined critical rigorand cosmopolitan heterogeneity in a waythat manifested the very best of whatinterdisciplinarity can mean.Ian Baucom’s seminar, for those of usin it, inflected and colored everythingelse we did, from “Anthropocene MovieNight” to the kinds of questions we raisedin the weekly lectures and mini-seminars.As the weeks went on, conversationsgrew deeper and more nuanced as we allattended the same talks and consideredthe same problems. Amanda Andersonand the rest of the faculty fostered asense of cooperative seriousness, pushingparticipants and each other on difficultpoints, attending to each other’s workwith generosity and rigor, and sharingwith us their doubts and concerns. Itseemed not just that we were creating acommunity, but that we were engaging ina rare and potent kind of critical collectivethought—a real “school.”At the same time, some of my mostvaluable experiences in Ithaca took placeoutside the formal rubric of seminarsand lectures: running along Fall Creekand around Beebe Lake, talking aboutphilosophy with Ian Baucom and postwarliberalism with Amanda Anderson,meeting with an informal reading groupon “War, Conflict, and the Event,” andgetting to know some of my fellowstudents one-on-one. I found plenty oftime, as well, to do my own research. Infact, I came to my own work refreshedand energized by the enthusiasm, acuity,and diversity of thought all around me.It was, I believe, the very strength of thesense of collective endeavor that createdsuch a productive space for my ownresearch. My thinking about my projectwas challenged, expanded, refined, andenlivened by the lush intellectual cultureformed at SCT.The School of Criticism and Theory issometimes described as an academicconference stretched out over six weeks,but that’s not quite right. Even the bestconference remains a concatenation ofindividuals with their own agendas: youput on your nametag, you deliver yourpaper, and you return home safely thesame person you were when you arrived.For six weeks every summer at Cornell,though, the SCT offers something else: thepotential and opportunity for change.Roy ScrantonPrinceton University

IN THeory 9 Fall 2013White House receptions, the gourmetpicnic at Taughannock Falls State Park,the outings to the lush farmer’s market,or simply stretched out in the “cocktaillounge” on rainy days, engrossed inour Whitehead. I have never felt suchcamaraderie with a group of colleaguesand new friends whose kindness,generosity, and authenticity warmed myheart. Among the waterfall dips, drinks,steep climbs, and scenic walks, futurecollaborations took flight, Deleuzian style!SCT participants enjoy a picnic at Taughannock Falls State Park.Critical vitalisms, disability narratives, wonder and indifference, the secondcoming of animism, enchanted critiques, the anthropocene, onto-sympathy,dwelling, Shakespeare and dessert...these were the sensual themes mulledover, always in the spirit of suspicion, at this year’s School of Criticism andTheory session. As the odd student out coming from an information studiesdepartment, I initially felt disoriented among the articulate Victorianists, medievalists,and literary scholars. However, by the end of this six-week program of deep cerebralcontemplation, dynamic intellectual exchange, and joyous camaraderie amidst thelushness of Ithaca and the elegance of the Cornell University campus, I was flushed withintellectual energy.SCT must be lived and experienced. I would suggest some prerequisites: an infinite loveof theory and its myriad nooks and crannies and a ravenous appetite for intellectualkinship that spills over into coffee, beer, dancing, and waterfalls. Be warned orpleasantly surprised: the inevitability of theory and the week’s intellectual dilemmasflooding your daytime and nocturnal activities is to be highly anticipated. As youperuse the organic cereal aisle, your mind is swept away by Chakrabarty’s climatehistory project on the anthropocene (the focus of Ian Baucom’s memorable SCTlecture). Contemplating cereals must wait.I am a game studies scholar exploring the nexus of digital identity, creative playpractices, and disability in gaming cultures. I had the privilege to partake in MichaelBérubé’s outstanding seminar: “Narrative, Intellectual Disability, and the Boundariesof the Human.” I jumped at the chance to explore the nuances, slippages, and tensionsof disability as a category of analysis. A remarkable scholar of literature and disabilitystudies, Bérubé graciously led this enriching seminar. We eagerly debated the theoreticalframeworks of the seminar: Darwinist approaches to literary analysis, theory ofmind, disability aesthetics, and disability metaphors. We interrogated Ato Quayson’s“aesthetic nervousness.” We passionately disputed “evocriticism.” We exploredevery facet of disability as lived experience, philosophical concept, and master trope ofdisqualification. It was deep-tissue intellectual massage.My wildly talented colleagues and friends, some of whom recited Walt Whitman byheart, enchanted me beyond measure. They expanded and guided the discussionswith their reflections, evocations, resonances, and dissonances. Our conversationsebbed and flowed, at times turning into rapids, pulling us into assorted currents andvortexes of speculation. This was after all Ithaca, NY, a place of wild waters. I missthose wild waters of intellectual and creative intensity. Not only did we engage with thegermane tangents of the day’s readings, idea sprouts, and conceptual inclinations in theintellectual spaces of the SCT, but we also engaged with them...over coffee, drinks, orwhile visiting a waterfall (or two). Not to mention the fun we had at the sumptuous A.D.We also witnessed world-class scholarsgraciously defend their projects at theweekly lectures, mini-seminars, andcolloquia. The lectures of the four sixweekseminar leaders included JaneBennett’s playful connections betweenhuman postures, Whitman, anddemocracy, Julia Reinhard Lupton’scompelling insight on dessert as anarchitectural affordance for belonging,Ian Baucom’s radiant angle on theanthropocene, temporal accumulation,and multi-species politics, and MichaelBérubé’s inventive exploration of thefiction-reality frontier in disabilitynarratives.Also, there was Rita Felski’s invitationto soften the sharpness of the “r” in“crrritique” and acknowledge ourenchantment with texts. CatherineMalabou encouraged us to wonderat wonder and the lack thereof incontemporary sociopolitical spheres.In his mini-seminar, Achille Mbembe’sriveting Deleuzian reading of FrantzFanon’s selected works captivated us.Amanda Anderson’s nuanced analysisof contemporary forces reshaping thehumanities emphasized the power ofimagination, inspiration, and criticalreflection. Anderson’s lecture remindedme that humanist work is an art andcommunion of ideas: an openness andgrace, a creative-intellectual largesse tothe immediate community, the world, andbeyond – exactly the spirit of SCT.The intellectual jet fuel that was SCTwill power and empower me for yearsto come. I turn to my archived treasuryof SCT memorabilia – my photographs,saved readings, papers and notes,YouTube reading group sessions, scribblesand doodles; I turn to the social mediaposts and emails of my dear SCT friendsand future collaborators, and here I amat School of Criticism and Theory atCornell…Sandra DanilovicUniversity of Toronto

IN THeory 10 Fall 2013When I told professors at my home institution that I was attending theSchool of Criticism and Theory, each had a unique, supportive response:“Ithaca is my favorite place”; “This experience will change and betteryour dissertation”; and from one member of my advisory committee, “Iwish I could go with you. This year’s slated speakers are the best I’ve everseen.” With such a chorus of affirmation—and perhaps a little envy—I left for “gorges”Ithaca, discovering that each comment resonated yet in no way captured the dazzlingdimensions of the SCT.At the SCT, I found the combination of seminars, public lectures, and social gatheringsa stimulating platform for what director Amanda Anderson dubbed in her introductoryaddress “live intellectual work.” I discovered that the SCT, as a program, enacts therole of the philosopher that Michel Serres describes in Genesis. Instead of dwelling in therealm of the “thinkable,” Serres argues that the philosopher should probe the depths andboundaries of the “unthinkable.” “This is philosophizing,” he affirms, and the SCT tooaffirms through its attentive selection of thinkers on the vanguard of new contributionsto the “multiple” (adopting Serres’s term) worlds of critical theory. It is within theseanimated worlds that the SCT invites its participants to collectively contribute to newand unthought critical imaginings.I took part in Jane Bennett’s seminar, “A Political Ecology of Things,” which worked asa forum for understanding and elaborating the evolving field of new materialism. Forme, the seminar became an epicenter of the mesmerizing and unexpected. With readingsranging from Walt Whitman and George Perec to films such as Agnes Varda’s Gleanersand I and Fiamma Montezemolo’s Traces/Rastros, the class sought to evaluate traditionaland untraditional sources in the search for a meaningful philosophy of materialism.“SCT offers ... a vibrant means to intellectual insightand emerging possibilities.”Perhaps most surprising to me was our seminar’s unexpected readings of worksuncommonly adopted in materialist explorations. For example, we turned to textsfrom the canon of continental philosophy, like Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra andAlfred Whitehead’s Process and Reality, to question whether they too may offer newlanguage and methods of evaluation to materialist philosophies. With Zarathustra,we asked if the text could be read, not as an allegory or the “gospel of Zarathustra,”but instead as a tale of a wanderer walking the earth, similar to yet divergent fromThoreau’s form of “sauntering.” We also inquired if we could evaluate Zarathustra asa figure demonstrating a strange brand of eco-materialism through his repeated refrainto “remain faithful to the earth.” With Whitehead’s immense work, we performed asimilar excavation. While Process and Reality has been poorly co-opted for theories indisability studies, as Joseph Valente argued during his public lecture, and retooledfor religious schools of thought like process theology, we asked if Whitehead’s workmight effectively influence ideas and practices in new materialism. Can we imagineWhitehead’s ambiguous world of “eternal objects” and “actual entities”—the processesof “prehensions,” “ingressions,” and charges of negative and positive “feelings”—as adescription of our systems of engagement with the material world? These untraditional,renewed readings of popularly studied texts opened my mind to their capacities forappropriation and contribution to theories in new materialism.By the end of our six-week seminar, our class reiterated some of our central concernsas questions: How is novelty produced and do we need it for political action? Whenshould scholars enact or withhold acts of judgment and critique in order to examinematerial interconnectedness and ontological possibilities? Can scholars be humanistswithout being anthropocentric? And perhaps one of our more polarizing questions:Does new materialism have a feminist or feminine sensibility? Overall, the range ofrelated topics discussed in our seminar, mini-seminars, and public lectures prompteda key acknowledgement that our time constitutes a strange, paradoxical moment inhistory—a moment where some theories in new materialism call for a move away fromhuman centrality while notions of the anthropocene reinstitute the human as a source ofprimary agential power.These questions and conversations were not limited to SCT scheduled events andvenues. Part of what makes the SCT the SCT are the participant-organized activities,including dissertation-writing workshops, film screenings, reading groups, etc.My favorite of these extracurricularactivities was an impromptu roundtablecomparing historical materialism withnew materialism. During this wellattendedevent, participants from variousseminars articulated strengths andweaknesses to both approaches, anddiscussed ways scholars might use onemethod or the other to treat a concreteissue like, as our group attempted,Guantanamo Bay.These numerous intellectualopportunities resulted in a personalepiphany. During Bennett’s seminar andthroughout the SCT as a whole thereemerged a striking emphasis on the ethicsof process and methods of becoming. Wesituated these themes alongside inquirieson the stakes of stasis, indifference, ordamaging repetition—referencing suchdestructive patterns as human habitsof treating waste and the environmentor, as Catherine Malabou’s lecturedescribed, the paralyzing effects of a lossof “wonder” and utter “disaffection”in neurobiological, ideological, andembodied senses. These concernsechoed more deeply within me whenour class confronted the ethics of processin Serres’s strange lament that we moreoften use weapons to “stop battle” than“for fighting” itself. In my mind, Serresgrieves not the loss of violence butinstead the adoption of objects as endsinstead of means. For Serres, the problemlies in fetishizing an object rather thanseeing it as potentiality itself. His antidoteto the devastating effects of repetition andends lies in his theory of “multiplicity,”which, to me, works as an answer toWhitehead’s call for “a principle ofrefreshment.” This refreshment principleaims to renew processes, shape originalpatterns, and arrange new ingressions,such that process never becomes roterepetition, but rather, a site of multiplicityand an emblem of the possible. Thisemphasis on ends and means resonatesnot just with my evolving approach tomaterial forces in the world but also withhow I view the SCT. For me, the SCT willnever function as an end, even thoughit has ended. It will always be in process,as I am a work in progress, contributingin fresh ways to my thinking, myscholarship, and my network of alliesin the field of critical theory. In this way,the SCT offers participants like myself avibrant means to intellectual insight andemerging possibilities.Julie McCormick WengUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

IN THeory 11 Fall 2013Without a doubt, participatingin the SCT this summerhas been one of the bestintellectual experiencesof my life. When Ifirst decided to apply for a seminarentitled “Dwelling | Telling | Selling:Contemporary Design Topographies,”I was not sure what to expect. Aftercompleting my first year as an AssistantProfessor of Spanish, I longed to be on theother side and feel like a student again.But at the same time the mixed feelingswere overwhelming: I felt nervous,curious, scared, but above all, excited andeager to experience new academic spacesand meet new people. I had no theoreticalor practical experience with Design,as I told the class when we introducedourselves in our first meeting. I had justfinished a PhD dissertation on spatialand urban issues a year previously, soI should have felt comfortable with theDwelling section of the seminar, butwhen Julia Reinhard Lupton handed usthe syllabus, I was more concerned thanpleased to note my lack of familiaritywith most of the readings. They weretexts not traditionally studied in literatureprograms, such as the one I completed.However, this proved to be the best thingthat could happen to me as a scholar,since not only did my research interestswiden to include subjects I never knewI was interested in, but I also started tolook at my own research in a differentlight.Faithful to the title of the seminar,Julia Lupton opened the first classwith Heidegger’s “Building, Dwelling,Thinking” which, no matter how manytimes you have read it, always surprises.This was the first week and there wasnothing introductory about it; it was asintense as it gets. Our conclusions on theHeideggerian concept of dwelling wouldhaunt each and every other discussionthroughout the seminar, in which weput Heidegger in dialogue with Arendt,Gibson, Jacobs, Le Corbusier, and DeBord, among others. We dwelled at lengthupon concepts such as labor, design,landscape, affordances, action, branding,or post-Fordism in ways that transcendedthe walls of the classroom and that, forsome of us, will surely evolve beyond thissummer.The seminar provided a different andhealthy space for the exchanging ofideas. I never thought I could learn somuch from—and so productively arguewith—a group of twenty individualsfrom different backgrounds and academicdisciplines united by the same topicsand themes. The seminar’s success wasunquestionably a result of Julia Lupton’steaching methodology, her ability tolisten and find interest in what everyonehad to say. A Shakespeare scholar, shebrought to class her friendliness, herperceptive thoughts on the materials, andher acute questions. And of course hersolid experience in design, well displayedin the creative slides she projected forus every Monday and Wednesday. Asan eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryscholar myself, it was refreshing to seehow she drew on contemporary spatialdiscourses for reciprocal illumination ofpast and present.But what makes the SCT a unique placeis not just the provocative discussionsheld in the privacy of our seminar. Thesewere just the spark to ignite the fire thatwould continue to burn in the manypublic events that the SCT organizes.There is a parallel SCT happening outsidethe classrooms, just as intensive, just asunforgettable. The public lectures, miniseminars,and colloquia complementedwell the six-week seminar, and left ourheads teeming with ideas and questionsthat would stay with us for hours. Allthese activities are woven together by theextraordinary work of Alice Cho and SCTDirector Amanda Anderson. Anderson’sincisive and sharp questions in everypublic lecture and colloquium madeall of us in the audience—not just thespeaker—reflect, think outside the box,look for answers and critically explore thetheoretical implications of our own work.And beyond these public events are themany forms of social networking at SCT,which occur in the Tuesday receptions,the local bars, the halls of Cascadilla, andthe many lunch spots on campus.As a result of my SCT experience, I cameback to Dartmouth with several newresearch topics and works in progressthat I excitedly plan to develop in theshort-term future. I am going to writean essay on affordances in nineteenthcenturySpain, drawing from thediscussions in the seminar; another oneon the poetics of indifference and wonderin Spanish literature, inspired by theilluminating talk of Catherine Malabou;and I have just proposed a panel at amajor conference about dwelling withdisabilities, combining the outcome ofJulia Lupton’s seminar and MichaelBérubé’s public lecture. I was fortunateenough to meet another participant in myseminar in the Spanish field, and togetherwe came out with a book project—acompilation of critical and theoreticalessays in Spanish for undergraduates,a work that simply does not exist at themoment. Needless to say, we were in theperfect setting to develop this kind ofproject. This is the best example showingthat it is possible to unite the personaland the academic in an alliance that willhave an impact in years to come.The SCT is not just about buildingacademic bridges, but personal ones: thepeople I met and the friendships I madeat Cornell strongly marked my summerexperience and made dwelling in Ithacamuch easier and more enjoyable. Becauselet’s face it: being away from home, livingin a place rented online, and facing a verydemanding schedule in the context of thethree Hs, as I liked to call them—Heat,Humidity, Hills—made the dwellingexperience in Ithaca challenging.But a challenge easily overcome, sinceat the end of the day, the only way tothink about the SCT is as an exhilaratingintellectual atmosphere, enjoyable hikingand swimming, great restaurants, goodfriends, and stimulating conversation.That’s what I call a summer well spent.Sara Muñoz-MurianaDartmouth CollegeSCT faculty and participants attend weekly colloquia.

The School of Criticism & TheoryA.D. White House27 East AvenueCornell UniversityIthaca, NY 14853SCT faculty and participants at Taughannock Falls State Park