Bryan Norton

This new collection of essays on German romanticism takes its cue from the opening page of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant proposes that human experience consists of a surprising assemblage, a Zusammengesetztes, of sense impressions and a priori components of intellectual cognition. This "conceptual monad of 'assembly,'" as Mottram and Clason explain in their well-crafted introduction, "gathers the myriad ways that a concordance between perception and meaning is constructed" for human beings (1). This logic of assembly foreshadows the deployment of Kant's synthetic judgments a priori later on in the first Critique, a process which folds intellectual and sensual modes of cognition together into a single unified operation. This conceptual nexus provides Mottram and Clason with the opportunity for investigating the unique ways meaning-making systems like a poem or a piece of music are conceptualized, created, and even disassembled by romantic writers working in the wake of Kant's project. Tracing the post-Kantian composition and decomposition of meaning by Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and others, Assembly and its Other in German Romantic Literature and Thought highlights the centrality of the senses and Kant's investigation of the relationship between aesthetics and knowledge for romantic poetry and scientific experimentation. The emphasis on the role played by sensing, aesthesis, in poetic production could place romanticism front and center for current discussions occurring elsewhere in German Studies and in the humanities at large on the role of the senses and embodiment in knowledge production. This important connection, however, is not touched on directly in the volume. The link remains merely implicit, a lacuna which presents a real missed opportunity for scholars who might be otherwise interested in better

This compact volume aims to take stock of the myriad critical responses elicited in recent years by transformations in computational media and digital capital. Attending to the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence in the construction of digital media environments, these essays collectively highlight the contingency embedded within algorithmic functionality while addressing the oppressive organizational structures and governmental capabilities such operations make available to big data. Containing entries from Mark Hansen, Luciana Parisi, Claus Pius, and others, Critique and the Digital provides an impressive overview of both the theoretical and practical stakes of coming to terms with the digital in its increasingly ubiquitous forms.

Exhibiting a unique combination of historical acumen and theoretical bravado, Sweet Science draws from an array of scholarly and disciplinary traditions including science and literature, gender studies, new materialism, and radical pedagogy in an attempt to shed light on a Lucretius-inspired countertrend to the increasingly sharp disciplinary boundaries that were drawn between art and the sciences over the course of the nineteenth century. Blake joins a chorus of figures including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin in casting "animal formation as a work of acute circumstantial dependence, rather than of autotelic power." Lying hidden in this essay, Goldstein shows, are a number of astounding affinities between De rerum natura's imaginative display of Brownian motion via dancing dust mites and Goethe's own gradual understanding of figuration as central to the project of thinking nature and poetry concomitantly.