Browse Items · Legacies of the Enlightenment

Linnaeus, Natural History, and the Circulation of Knowledge

Contributors examine the various techniques, materials and methods that originated within the ‘Linnaean workshop’: paper technologies, publication strategies, and markets for specimens. Fresh analyses of the reception of Linnaeus’s work in Paris,…

Tags: colonialism, disciplines, evolutionary biology, materialism, Matter, science

Nature's Queer Performativity

Through a range of vivid examples drawn from scientific research (from social amoebas to lightening), Barad lays out how nature itself is queer, how it models queer communication through a performative rather than represnetative mode. Barad expands…

Tags: gender and sexuality studies, In-between, materialism, nature, new materialism, queer studies, science

Cinema and Experience: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno

Hansen explores the promise of cinema as it defined and changed the notion of experience in modernity and modernist thinkers. Here Hansen proposes a materialst theory of the cinema to help work understand the radical potential that the cinema and…

Tags: critical theory, experience, film, In-between, materialism, media history

Critical Theory: Essays

Collection of Horkhiemer's early essays that define the program of critical theory. Includes seminal essays such as "Traditional and Critical Theory" and "The Latests Attacks on Metaphysics," providing background and context for many of the wartime…

Tags: critical theory, disciplines, history, In-between, Marxist criticism, materialism, sociology

The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

A collection of essays published during the Weimar Republic that reflect on the contemporary state of reason and society as expressed in the material products of modern mass capitalism, most notebly in dance revues, photography, and the literary…

Tags: critical theory, materialism, media, modernity

FRN 825:The Marquis de Sade: From materialist philosophy to popular culture and feminist theory

Dr. Grey gives a lecture on the philosophical debates between materialists and theologians in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on Descartes, La Mettrie, and Sade.

Tags: John Grey, La Mettrie, lecture, materialism, moral theory, naturalism, philosophy, Sade

Objectivity

Daston and Galison write the history of the emergence of scientific objectivity, beginning in the eighteenth century and proceeding into the present day. This magisterial study reveals practices of scientific image-making as constitutive of both…

Tags: experiment, history of science, image-making, materialism, objectivity, philosophy of nature, science, subjectivity

Catching Nature in the Act: Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century

Terrall's investigation of the eighteenth-century French scientist Réaumur and his circle represents both a fascinating account of the techniques and practices of eighteenth-century naturalists and a stimulating analysis of the production of…

Tags: discourse, experiment, history of science, materialism, philosophy of nature, science

Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics

Allewaert uncovers the enmeshment of persons in places-- and the imbrication of the nonhuman and the human-- in eighteenth-century American plantations (and the literature, culture, and thought circulating around and through them). Her book imagines…

Tags: 18th century, colonialism, destruction, ecology, literature and thought, materialism, resilience

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning

Barad builds on the insights of Niels Bohr's quantum physics to develop a new queer and feminist ontology and epistemology that radically reframes questions of being, individualism, relationality, representation,agency, and identity. Her notion of…

Tags: materialism, new materialism, non-representational, object-oriented ontology, vitalism

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Less a single coherent argument than a series of meditations, this book introduces many of the concepts that would become foundational to Marxist thought and critical theory, more generally, including alienation, exploitation, and dialectical…

Tags: Anthropocene, capitalism, critical theory, Marxism, materialism, new materialism, philosophy

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

Perhaps the most canonical work of Marxist critical theory in the twentieth century, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment investigates how the project of the Enlightenment transforms into a logic of domination and instrumentalization in…

Tags: capitalism, critical theory, Marxism, materialism, myth, philosophy, psychoanalysis

FRN 825:The Marquis de Sade: From materialist philosophy to popular culture and feminist theory

A graduate seminar that examines Sade's work (La Philosophie dans le boudoir) and his adaptation of 18th-century materialist philosophy, as well as Sade's impact on later feminist pro-sex authors like Virginie Despentes and Morgane Merteuil and…

Tags: gender and sexuality studies, graduate course, materialism, popular culture, syllabus, upheavals

FR597: The Abnormal Early Modern

A graduate seminar in French that examines texts from the 16th-18th centuries organized around the theme of abnormality. Students also read critical theory in gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and queer studies, among others.

Tags: disability studies, disciplines, gender and sexuality studies, graduate course, In-between, materialism, queer studies, syllabus

FR543: Studies in the Enlightenment: Kinship, Community, and State

A graduate seminar in French that examines 18th-century novels and poems from France and Haiti exploring the relation of kinship and community to the State. Students also read critical theory in psychoanalytic theory, gender and sexuality studies,…

Tags: disciplines, gender and sexuality studies, graduate course, In-between, kinship, materialism, political theory, syllabus

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

Quickly becoming a classic, Bennett's book asks (among other things) how the term "materialism" came to be synonymous with Marx's notion of materiality, "as economic structures and exchanges that provoke many other events." She asks, "Why did…

Tags: materialism, new materialism, object-oriented ontology, vitalism

Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France

Vila's study is now a classic, not only for its revealing interdisciplinary treatment of sensibility but also for its precise methodology and the clarity of its prose.

Tags: 18th century, biology, disciplines, France, In-between, materialism, medecine, philosophy, physiology, science, sexuality

The Great Cat Massacre

Translated into 18 languages to date, this work is delightful read and also gets one thinking about the many ways in which we impose our own cultural assumptions, inaccurately, on previous eras; very useful as a pedagogical tool to get students out…

Tags: 18th century, disciplines, Europe, history of ideas, materialism, philosophy

The Republic of Letters

A ground-breaking consideration of the social history of gender in the Enlightenment. As well as an invaluable source on the social history of the Enlightenment overll, this study gave rise to a meaningful and revaling debate about the lack of…

Tags: 18th century, collective identities, Europe, female authors, feminism, France, gender, In-between, materialism, philosophy, sexuality

“Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: The Regime of the Sister in Graffigny's Lettres
d'une Péruvienne.”

Discusses 18th-century author Françoise de Graffigny's important novel (Lettres d'une Péruvienne), focusing on the form of the letters in the novel, which are constructed first in quipos (a peruvian form of communication involving knotted cords), and…

Tags: 18th century, colonialism, disciplines, female authors, feminism, France, Graffigny, In-between, literature, materialism, sexuality

Browse Items (29 total)

Linnaeus, Natural History, and the Circulation of Knowledge

Nature's Queer Performativity

Cinema and Experience: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno

Critical Theory: Essays

The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

FRN 825:The Marquis de Sade: From materialist philosophy to popular culture and feminist theory

Objectivity

Catching Nature in the Act: Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century

Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

FRN 825:The Marquis de Sade: From materialist philosophy to popular culture and feminist theory

FR597: The Abnormal Early Modern

FR543: Studies in the Enlightenment: Kinship, Community, and State

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France

The Great Cat Massacre

The Republic of Letters

“Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: The Regime of the Sister in Graffigny's Lettres
d'une Péruvienne.”

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