Announcement

In the past two decades, a perhaps paradoxical development has arisen in literary studies: renewed attention to the human body, in all its perceptual and affective complexities, and the broad rejection of the human body as the basis of epistemological and metaphysical inquiry. Keyed to signification and citation, the “linguistic turn” had the perhaps unintended effect of occluding the body at the core of its analysis of power and knowledge. Today, a range of exciting new scholarship bears out a sustained effort to undo the “sensory deadening” of poststructuralism (cf. Dana Luciano, “How the Earth Feels” [2015] in Transatlantica), taking the sensory body as something of the locus classicus of culture, belief, kinship, and power. All the while, posthumanism and its adjacent schools of thought—which describe agency as distributive, ontology as relational, and human and nonhuman matter as entangled or intra-active—have challenged long-held assumptions in literary criticism about the...