Jean Baudrillard’s highly controversial book America (published in French 1986, English translation 1988) constitutes the point of departure for an undergraduate class writing project which began in 2020. Students were encouraged to respond to the following prompt: what would an America 2.0 look like today in the midst of the Trump presidency? Here we have assembled and arranged the numerous fragments contributed by the students and the editors as a collaborative enterprise in thinking and writing differently.
This article focuses on two examples of sociological writing that have attracted wide public interest: Didier Eribon’s best-selling memoir about his working-class origins, Returning to Reims, and Hartmut Rosa’s door-stopper work of social theory, Resonance, featured on the cover of the German news magazine Stern. These two very different works – one indebted to Bourdieu and Foucault, the other located in the tradition of the Frankfurt School – share certain qualities. First, a formal feature I’ll call scale-shifting: a leavening of theoretical claims with vivid examples and resonant details. And second, a commitment to doing justice to the phenomenological depth of ordinary persons’ self-understanding. Both writers, in other words, approach the world as deserving of a poet’s attentive and appreciative eye as well as a theorist’s critical gaze.
In this article, I describe the experience of a chronic pain diagnosis. Combining memoir, medical history, and literary precedents, I begin with a reflection on my own history with walking. Walking leads to foot pain which eventually leads to diagnosis of a full-body chronic condition: fibromyalgia. Through an exploration of the history of hysteria, one of fibromyalgia’s ancestors, I consider some of the resonances between these conditions.
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