Decomposing Matter: From literary critique to language creation

Authors

  • Helen Palmer Kingston University London, United Kingdom
  • Beatriz Revelles-Benavente Junior Lecturer at the English Department at the University of Granada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1344/jnmr.v1i1.29299

Abstract

This article provides a context for the section “Creating Language and Theorizing Literature”. The editors of the section discuss both contemporary and historicalarticulations of the materiality of language from a new materialist perspective. The new materialist project comprises looking for the immanence of language via three realms: its relation, its theorization, and its creation. Therefore, moving away from representationalist practices demands a definition of language as animate, sensory material requiring creative labour for its realisation. The article provides an example of this materialization of language, via the concept of bodywording.

 

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Acker, Kathy (1993). Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body.Bodies of Work (1997), London: SerpentsTail, 143-151.

Alaimo, Stacey (2016). Exposed: Environmental Politics&Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1990). [1924] Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. M. Holquist and V. Liapunov, trans. V. Liapunov and K. Brostrom, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Barad, Karen (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (3), 801 – 831.

Bennett, Jane (2009). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Bianchi, Emanuela (2019). ‘Matter’. In (ed.) Robin Goodman, The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21stCentury Feminist Theory, London: Bloomsbury, 383 – 398

Braidotti, Rosi & Hlavajova, Maria (eds.) (2018). Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury.

Bühlmann, Vera, Felicity Colman & Iris van der Tuin (2017). Introduction to New Materialist Genealogies. TheMinnesota Review (88), Critical Special Focus: New Materialist Genealogies, pp. 47-58.

Butler, Judith (2004). Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso.

Cecire, Natalia (2015). Ways of not reading Gertrude Stein. ELH: English Literary History, 82 (1), 281-312.

Cixous, Hélène (1976). The Laugh of the Medusa’ trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4:1, 875-893.

Chiew, Florence (2016). Sensory Substitution: The Plasticity of the Eye/I. In Vicki Kirby (ed,), What if Culture was Nature All Along? Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Clement, Tanya E. (2008). A thing not beginning and not ending: using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude Stein’s. The Making of Americans, Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23 (3), 361-381.

Colebrook, Claire (2008). On not becoming man: The materialist politics of unactualized potential. In Stacy Alaimo & Susan Hekman (eds.) Material Feminisms, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 24-53.

Colebrook, Claire (2011). Matter Without Bodies. Derrida Today 4:1 (2011), 1-20.

Colman, Felicity, VeraBühlmann, AislinnO’Donnell & Iris van der Tuin (2018). Ethics of Coding: A Report on the Algorithmic Condition [EoC]. H2020-EU2.11.- INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP – Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies – Information and Communication Technologies. Brussels: EuropeanCommission. http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/207025_en.html.

Donne, John (1994).The Collected Poems ed. Roy Booth. Ware: Wordsworth.

Felski, Rita (2015). The Limits of Critique. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

De Freitas, Elizabeth (2019). Love of Learning.In R. Braidotti and S. Bignall (eds) Posthuman Ecologies: Compexity and Process after Deleuze. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 87-104.

Gatens, Moira (2013). Cloud-Borne Angels, Prophets and the Old Woman’s Flower-Pot: ‘Reading George Eliot’s Realisms alongside Spinoza’s ‘beings of the imagination.’ Australian Literary Studies, 28 (3), 1 – 14.

Glissant, Édouard (1997). Poetics of Relation trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Haraway, Donna (2016). Staying with trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna (2008). When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Haraway, Donna (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14 (3), 575 – 599.

Huang, Michelle N. (2017). Rematerializations of Race.Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 6:1. DOI: 10.25158/L6.1.11. Last accessed 08/04/19

Iovino, Serenella (2018) ‘Literature of Liberation’. In (eds). Rosi Braidotti& Maria Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary,London: Bloomsbury, 232 - 235

Joyce, James (1992) [1916. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ware: Wordsworth.

Kaiser, Birgit (2014). Worlding CompLit: Diffractive reading with Barad, Glissant and Nancy. Parallax28 (3), 247 – 287.

Kirby, Vicki (2017). What If Culture Was Nature All Along? (ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Kirby, Vicki (1997). Telling Flesh: Substance of the Corporeal. London: Routledge.

Kristeva, Julia (1989). Language: The Unknown, trans. A. M. Menke. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Lau, Carolyn (2018). Posthuman Literature and Criticism.In Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (eds) Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 347-348.

Leyshon, Neil (2012). The Colour of Milk. Cape Town: Penguim Random House South Africa.

Luciano, Dana & Cécile Roudeau, (2015). How the Earth Feels: A Conversation with Dana Luciano,Transatlantica1.

O’Sullivan, Simon and David Burrows (2019). Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Palmer, Helen (2020 forthcoming). Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Palmer, Helen (2019) ‘A field of heteronyms and homonyms: new materialist, speculative fabulation and wor(l)ding’, in Ridvan Askin, Frida Beckman and David Rudrum (eds.) New Directions in Literature and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 215-233.

Palmer, Helen (2014). Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense. London: Bloomsbury.

Rivera, Mayra (2015). Poetics of the Flesh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rogowska-Stangret, Monika (2017). Corporeal Cartographies of New Materialism: Meeting the ElsewhereHalfway. Minnesota Review 88 Special Focus: New Materialist Genealogies, pp. 59-68.

Saldanha, Arun (2017).Space after Deleuze. Bloomsbury: New York.

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1959) [1916]. Course in General Linguistics trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library.

Shomura, Chad (2017) Exploring the Promise of New Materialisms. Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 6:1.

Skiveren, Tobias (2019; forthcoming). Feminist New Materialism and Literary Studies: Methodological Meditations on the Tradition of Feminist Literary Criticism and (Post) Critique. In How Literature Comes to Matter. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Skiveren, Tobias (2019a; forthcoming). Fictionality in New Materialism: (Re)Inventing Matter.

Skiveren, Tobias (2018). Literature. New Materialism Almanac https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/l/literature.html. Last accessed 08/04/19

Snaza, Nathan (2019). Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Posthumanism. Durham: Duke.

Stein, Gertrude (2013) [1939]. The World is Round. New York: Harper.

Stein, Gertrude (2004). Look at me now and here I am: Selected Worked 1911 – 1945. London & Chester Springs: Peter Owem.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond (2019). Making Out. New York: NYU Press.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond (2015). Reading as Kissing, Sex with Ideas: “Lesbian Barebacking”?, LA Review of Books https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/article/reading-kissing-sex-ideas-lesbian-barebacking/

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana (2016). On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy. Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5:1.

Downloads

Published

2020-02-17

Issue

Section

Creating Language and Theorizing Literature