Janet Halley

Imagine being in the best imaginable works-in-progress group. Some of the faculty (Edelman) just go on about the same (brilliant?) things they've been saying for years (cf Edelman here to Edelman in the 2006 MLA on the antisocial thesis if you're not convinced...but look at his recent work on Barbara Johnson for related but different), some advance their work incrementally and lovingly (Kate Thomas on Michael Fields: such great stuff), and--at least for this medievalist--many, many happy surprises from friends of friends showing up unexpectedly. Less a works in progress group, then, than a party.

Highlights include Michael Cobb against the primacy of the couple in ethical analysis and political recognition; Carla Fraccero, for her endnotes (which are a miniature guide to queer theory); Jonathan Goldberg on Lucretius and a kind of affective, polychronic redoing of atomism; Joseph Litvak, on sycophants, Jews, and HUAC; Michael Moon on the profound sadism of some accounts of Darger; Jeff Nunokawa, because you can hardly believe how he writes ("how tinny, how thin, how programmatic queer theory’s business-as-usual opposition to fixed identity can sound when it is set next to the voice of the take-no-prisoners prophet we hear in “Is the Rectum a Grave?”; how pale, how paint-by-number the sight of its unfixing can look next to the flames of the funeral pyre where Bersani stages its immolation"); and Bethany Schneider's great line: "Muñoz’s hopeful metaphor of space-clearing, deterritorializing, and reoccupying is no metaphor when it comes to Oklahoma."
… (més)