Read Representations’ new special virtual issue, “Weird Scholarship: From Curious to Rare,” free for a limited time.
Of the many cross-disciplinary and topical strands that have emerged from nearly forty years of Representations in print, one stands out: a kind of research that perhaps originated in the journal’s pages and remains difficult to find elsewhere–what might fondly be called “weird scholarship.” We invite you to dip into a virtual issue featuring some of the most representative examples in this vein, available free of charge for a limited time.
The essays selected for this virtual issue highlight examples from the early years of Representations, by which the contours of New Historicism became known, and many examples from more recent issues, which show how the conversation among disparate discourses has born strange and wonderful fruit.
Weird Scholarship: From Curious to Rare
Table of Contents
Terry Castle. The Female Thermometer, no. 17, 1987
István Rév. In Mendacio Veritas (In Lies There Lies the Truth), no. 35, 1991
Nathaniel Mackey. Other: From Noun to Verb, no. 39, 1992
Elaine Scarry. On Vivacity: The Difference Between Daydreaming and Imagining Under-Authorial-Instruction, no. 52, 1995
Michel Zink. Nerval in the Library, or The Archives of the Soul, no. 56, 1996
Jessica Riskin. Eighteenth-Century Wetware, no. 83, 2003
Sue Waterman. Collecting the Nineteenth Century, no. 90, 2005
Phil Ford. Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica, no. 103, 2008
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby. Negative-Positive Truths, no. 113, 2011
Carolyn Steedman. Cries Unheard, Sights Unseen: Writing the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis, no. 118, 2012
D. Vance Smith. Fallacy: Close Reading and the Beginning of Philosophy, no. 140, 2017
“The essays collected here counter [the] fantasy of pain as a knowable sensation that lies within that is then represented, or misrepresented, in language. Instead, they consider pain as always already enmeshed in social life, and representation as the means through which we can engage this imbrication. In so doing, they demonstrate the importance of bringing together two approaches to the problem of pain that have often been kept distinct. The first is the anthropological insight that pain behavior constitutes a mode of social engagement and, hence, that suffering is necessarily bound up with shifting, often unpredictable, cultural, familial, and interpersonal dynamics. The second involves a historical and literary-critical account of representation’s complex and productive relations to both experience and culture.” –from the editor’s introduction