Abstract:Scholars of early modern toleration are divided about Hobbes’s role in the development of modern secularism. Much of this debate focuses on whether we should see Hobbes as a modest defender or enemy of toleration, while often neglecting an engagement with critical secularism studies inaugurated by Talal Asad’s work. Bringing the insights provided by these new perspectives on secular power to bear upon the analysis of Hobbes’s position, this article argues that Hobbes’s work in fact includes a poignant early theorization of secular power that anticipates the operations and tensions of political secularism more accurately than more normatively-inclined early modern theories of toleration. Hobbes’s arguments on this topic are developed in the course of the evolution of his thinking on military duties from Leviathan to Behemoth, culminating in a distinct model of religious reconstruction. Situating this model at the center of Hobbes’s contributions to the development of political secularism, the article thus makes a case for the value of cultivating more robust disciplinary interactions between histories of political thought and critical analysis of secular power.
{"title":"Thomas Hobbes and Political Secularism: A Critical Engagement","authors":"Pınar Kemerli","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Scholars of early modern toleration are divided about Hobbes’s role in the development of modern secularism. Much of this debate focuses on whether we should see Hobbes as a modest defender or enemy of toleration, while often neglecting an engagement with critical secularism studies inaugurated by Talal Asad’s work. Bringing the insights provided by these new perspectives on secular power to bear upon the analysis of Hobbes’s position, this article argues that Hobbes’s work in fact includes a poignant early theorization of secular power that anticipates the operations and tensions of political secularism more accurately than more normatively-inclined early modern theories of toleration. Hobbes’s arguments on this topic are developed in the course of the evolution of his thinking on military duties from Leviathan to Behemoth, culminating in a distinct model of religious reconstruction. Situating this model at the center of Hobbes’s contributions to the development of political secularism, the article thus makes a case for the value of cultivating more robust disciplinary interactions between histories of political thought and critical analysis of secular power.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"1002 - 977"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66287128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In this article we place the discussions of automation in post-work imaginaries within and alongside feminist critiques and understandings of domestic technology. Structured in three parts, the first surveys debates on the future of work, showing how feminist materialist critiques of technology would lend themselves to an anti-work rather than post-work politics. The second focuses on both historical and contemporary feminist critiques of domestic automation to situate the post-work condition in this longer lineage. In the final section, we sketch the contours of a distinctly feminist anti-work imaginary drawing on Dolores Hayden’s work on collective domestic settlements and Rachel Maine’s work on amateur uses and repurposing of obsolete technologies in the name of a politics of pleasure.
{"title":"On Domestic Fantasies and Anti-work Politics: A Feminist History of Complicating Automation","authors":"Valeria Graziano, Kim Trogal","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0034","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article we place the discussions of automation in post-work imaginaries within and alongside feminist critiques and understandings of domestic technology. Structured in three parts, the first surveys debates on the future of work, showing how feminist materialist critiques of technology would lend themselves to an anti-work rather than post-work politics. The second focuses on both historical and contemporary feminist critiques of domestic automation to situate the post-work condition in this longer lineage. In the final section, we sketch the contours of a distinctly feminist anti-work imaginary drawing on Dolores Hayden’s work on collective domestic settlements and Rachel Maine’s work on amateur uses and repurposing of obsolete technologies in the name of a politics of pleasure.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"1130 - 1149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46087228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This paper explores the intricate relationship between precarity and coloniality. It argues that discussions and experiences of precarity—defined as the increased vulnerability to exploitative working and living conditions—are historically steeped in colonial and racial violence. It stages a critique of the recently-emerged scholarship on the future of work that tends to both trivialize the experience of precarity as the deprivation of futurity, and ignore the racialized dynamics through which these experiences are distributed. Through a meditation on the anti-work politics of Autonomia and the armed struggles of the Zapatistas, the argument concludes that it is only by reconnecting the resistances to precarity to the project of decolonization as one against dehumanization that discussions of precarity will find their resonance, strength, and efficacy.
{"title":"Precarity/Coloniality","authors":"Lucas Van Milders","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper explores the intricate relationship between precarity and coloniality. It argues that discussions and experiences of precarity—defined as the increased vulnerability to exploitative working and living conditions—are historically steeped in colonial and racial violence. It stages a critique of the recently-emerged scholarship on the future of work that tends to both trivialize the experience of precarity as the deprivation of futurity, and ignore the racialized dynamics through which these experiences are distributed. Through a meditation on the anti-work politics of Autonomia and the armed struggles of the Zapatistas, the argument concludes that it is only by reconnecting the resistances to precarity to the project of decolonization as one against dehumanization that discussions of precarity will find their resonance, strength, and efficacy.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"1068 - 1089"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66287134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay suggests a reading of Dave Eggers's 2013 novel The Circle as a critique of modernity. It argues that Eggers's dystopian novel can be read as an artistic take on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's philosophical critique of Enlightenment ideology, as put forward most prominently in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47). The puzzling tendency of "enlightened," rationally-minded individuals to subject themselves to totalitarian and dehumanizing systems is identified as a common concern of the Frankfurt School theorists and of Eggers's dystopia. The Circle, in this perspective, is read as a critical study of the twenty-first-century's version of Enlightenment ideology, and of the social mechanisms that lead to a state of "voluntary servitude." By means of a theory-informed analysis of the novel's principal thematic concerns, it is demonstrated that the world constructed by Eggers exhibits central traits associated with an enlightened society by Horkheimer and Adorno, and it is shown how the novel embeds its depiction of the self-destructive tendencies of this society in a discussion of social media and digital technology. This leads, eventually, to a reconsideration of the intellectual significance of The Circle.
{"title":"\"A World of Perpetual Light\": Dave Eggers's The Circle and Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment","authors":"Sebastian Tants-Boestad","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay suggests a reading of Dave Eggers's 2013 novel The Circle as a critique of modernity. It argues that Eggers's dystopian novel can be read as an artistic take on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's philosophical critique of Enlightenment ideology, as put forward most prominently in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47). The puzzling tendency of \"enlightened,\" rationally-minded individuals to subject themselves to totalitarian and dehumanizing systems is identified as a common concern of the Frankfurt School theorists and of Eggers's dystopia. The Circle, in this perspective, is read as a critical study of the twenty-first-century's version of Enlightenment ideology, and of the social mechanisms that lead to a state of \"voluntary servitude.\" By means of a theory-informed analysis of the novel's principal thematic concerns, it is demonstrated that the world constructed by Eggers exhibits central traits associated with an enlightened society by Horkheimer and Adorno, and it is shown how the novel embeds its depiction of the self-destructive tendencies of this society in a discussion of social media and digital technology. This leads, eventually, to a reconsideration of the intellectual significance of The Circle.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"406 - 434"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49604651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article claims that recent dystopian fiction for teenagers presents critical literacy as futurity's primary form of activist resistance. Both M.T. Anderson's Feed (2002) and Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008) grapple with the far-reaching consequences of a society that has demonized literacy in various ways. Feed is a bleak examination of future America's uncritical, corporatized dependence on technology, theorizes narrative—both the ability to tell a story and the ability to interpret it—as a mode of resistance within a dark, corporate-dictated future. In the first of Ness's futuristic Chaos Walking books, young protagonist Todd struggles to reconcile what he has been taught and what is empirically true; his baggage is that of uncritical indoctrination. Both texts rely on young female characters to teach critical literacy: Violet encourages Titus to escape from his exaggerated albeit typical narcissistic teenage bubble while Viola is Todd's only point of entry into the only surviving written words in Prentisstown, his ma's journal. This article argues that the imagined futures in such literature conceptualizes our current need for analytical literacy, and the empathy constructed through it, in the face of "alternative" facts—theorizing resistance through critical reading as its own form of New Futurism.
{"title":"Futurist Resistance: Gendered Critical Literacy in the Dystopian Age","authors":"Jennifer Mitchell","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article claims that recent dystopian fiction for teenagers presents critical literacy as futurity's primary form of activist resistance. Both M.T. Anderson's Feed (2002) and Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008) grapple with the far-reaching consequences of a society that has demonized literacy in various ways. Feed is a bleak examination of future America's uncritical, corporatized dependence on technology, theorizes narrative—both the ability to tell a story and the ability to interpret it—as a mode of resistance within a dark, corporate-dictated future. In the first of Ness's futuristic Chaos Walking books, young protagonist Todd struggles to reconcile what he has been taught and what is empirically true; his baggage is that of uncritical indoctrination. Both texts rely on young female characters to teach critical literacy: Violet encourages Titus to escape from his exaggerated albeit typical narcissistic teenage bubble while Viola is Todd's only point of entry into the only surviving written words in Prentisstown, his ma's journal. This article argues that the imagined futures in such literature conceptualizes our current need for analytical literacy, and the empathy constructed through it, in the face of \"alternative\" facts—theorizing resistance through critical reading as its own form of New Futurism.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"466 - 495"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/lit.2021.0017","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44702306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
They even think that they have spent such days well, in a truly useful and worthy manner, these days spent in contemplation of the possible forms of the future. . . . They are calm and unworried enough to set out with the author on a long road whose endpoint only a much later generation will see. When the greatly agitated reader, in contrast, springs into action . . . we must fear he has failed to understand the author. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions
{"title":"Against Afuturistic Reading","authors":"Will Bridges","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0016","url":null,"abstract":"They even think that they have spent such days well, in a truly useful and worthy manner, these days spent in contemplation of the possible forms of the future. . . . They are calm and unworried enough to set out with the author on a long road whose endpoint only a much later generation will see. When the greatly agitated reader, in contrast, springs into action . . . we must fear he has failed to understand the author. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"435 - 465"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/lit.2021.0016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48715231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The creative aspect of the humanities has not yet found its recognition in the established classification of academic disciplines. The crucial question may be formulated as follows: are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should there be some active, constructive supplement to them? There are three major branches of knowledge established in academia: natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Technology serves as the practical extension (“application”) of the natural sciences, and politics as the extension of the social sciences. Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study: nature and society. Is there, then, any activity in the humanities that would correspond to this transformative status of technology and politics? In the following schema, the third line demonstrates a blank space, indicating the open status of the practical applications of the humanities:
{"title":"A Futurist Turn in the Humanities","authors":"M. Epstein","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0022","url":null,"abstract":"The creative aspect of the humanities has not yet found its recognition in the established classification of academic disciplines. The crucial question may be formulated as follows: are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should there be some active, constructive supplement to them? There are three major branches of knowledge established in academia: natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Technology serves as the practical extension (“application”) of the natural sciences, and politics as the extension of the social sciences. Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study: nature and society. Is there, then, any activity in the humanities that would correspond to this transformative status of technology and politics? In the following schema, the third line demonstrates a blank space, indicating the open status of the practical applications of the humanities:","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"593 - 622"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/lit.2021.0022","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49556534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:It should no longer be controversial to begin with the premise that the formation of the genre of science fiction (SF) is intimately intertwined with the history of colonialism. Narratives of imperial expansion, encounters with alterity, and war continue to permeate much of the genre's megatext, which, in turn, sets the ideological limits to its imagination of different futures. In effect, the historical underpinnings of the genre in colonial rhetoric engenders a colonization of the future as such, rendering it subordinate to the terms of the past and present. This essay explores this dimension of the genre's continuing colonial legacy by way of a re-examination of Abe Kōbō's 1958 novel Inter Ice Age 4. With a story centered on the struggles surrounding the development of a forecasting machine that can predict the future by extrapolating algorithmic data from the present, Abe's novel proves to be ironically prescient in its anticipation of postcolonial and neoliberal regimes of futurity organized around the extraction of value from the speculation and securitization of future ecological crises, despite the author's expressed resistance to the reduction of the future to a mere continuity with the present. I consider the novel's engagement with the ethics of futurity as a metafictive commentary on what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay has discussed as the SF genre's desire to imaginatively transform older forms of imperialism into technoscientific empires, which will serve as a point of departure for articulating the desire for different horizons of possibility, different horizons of futurity whose potentiality may not be already exhausted or rendered inert in the actualization of history.
{"title":"\"Confront the Cruelty of the Future\": Coloniality, Ecology, and Futurity in Abe Kōbō's Inter Ice Age 4","authors":"Baryon Tensor Posadas","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:It should no longer be controversial to begin with the premise that the formation of the genre of science fiction (SF) is intimately intertwined with the history of colonialism. Narratives of imperial expansion, encounters with alterity, and war continue to permeate much of the genre's megatext, which, in turn, sets the ideological limits to its imagination of different futures. In effect, the historical underpinnings of the genre in colonial rhetoric engenders a colonization of the future as such, rendering it subordinate to the terms of the past and present. This essay explores this dimension of the genre's continuing colonial legacy by way of a re-examination of Abe Kōbō's 1958 novel Inter Ice Age 4. With a story centered on the struggles surrounding the development of a forecasting machine that can predict the future by extrapolating algorithmic data from the present, Abe's novel proves to be ironically prescient in its anticipation of postcolonial and neoliberal regimes of futurity organized around the extraction of value from the speculation and securitization of future ecological crises, despite the author's expressed resistance to the reduction of the future to a mere continuity with the present. I consider the novel's engagement with the ethics of futurity as a metafictive commentary on what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay has discussed as the SF genre's desire to imaginatively transform older forms of imperialism into technoscientific empires, which will serve as a point of departure for articulating the desire for different horizons of possibility, different horizons of futurity whose potentiality may not be already exhausted or rendered inert in the actualization of history.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"496 - 516"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/lit.2021.0018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44312166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We see that both deliberation and action are causative with regard to the future, and that, to speak more generally . . . there is a potentiality in either direction. Such things may either be or not be; events also therefore may either take place or not take place. . . . It is therefore plain that it is not of necessity that everything is or takes place; but in some instances there are real alternatives. —Aristotle, “On Interpretation”
{"title":"The Certaintists","authors":"G. S. Morson","doi":"10.1353/lit.2021.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2021.0021","url":null,"abstract":"We see that both deliberation and action are causative with regard to the future, and that, to speak more generally . . . there is a potentiality in either direction. Such things may either be or not be; events also therefore may either take place or not take place. . . . It is therefore plain that it is not of necessity that everything is or takes place; but in some instances there are real alternatives. —Aristotle, “On Interpretation”","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"575 - 592"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45582090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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