Books by Keith Leslie Johnson
An exploration of Czech Surrealist Jan Svankmajer's cinema, a cinema that spawns new and weird li... more An exploration of Czech Surrealist Jan Svankmajer's cinema, a cinema that spawns new and weird life forms--hybrids of machine, animal, and non-organic materials like stone and dust--existing in a space governed by a single uncanny order of being, a space wherein all things are at once animated and alert. This "animist cinema"--and by extension Surrealism itself--is considered as, at heart, an ethical, biopolitical, and ecological project militating against anthropocentrism.
Essays by Keith Leslie Johnson
PMLA, 2023
A discussion of "exophony" (i.e. literary composition in a non-native language) as a paradigmatic... more A discussion of "exophony" (i.e. literary composition in a non-native language) as a paradigmatic case not only for translation but literary production as such. The work of Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada is used as a touchstone for thinking through the implications of that assertion.
Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism, 2021
This essay examines Vampyroteuthis infernalis (1987) as a central, rather than anomalous, text in... more This essay examines Vampyroteuthis infernalis (1987) as a central, rather than anomalous, text in Vilem Flusser's oeuvre. The "vampyroteuthic logic" presented by Flusser becomes a way to think about modernist media and cybernetics in general, drawing out their inhuman or even "Weird" dimension.
Acéphale and Autobiographical Philosophy in the 21st Century, 2021
A consideration of evil as a political (rather than theological) problem, as laid out in the work... more A consideration of evil as a political (rather than theological) problem, as laid out in the work of Georges Bataille and other members of Acéphale (the "secret society" he co-founded).
Brave New World: Contexts and Legacies, eds. Jonathan Greenberg and Nathan Waddell (Palgrave), 2016
A reexamination of Aldous Huxley's _Brave New World_ in light of recent theorizations of the Anth... more A reexamination of Aldous Huxley's _Brave New World_ in light of recent theorizations of the Anthropocene.
Modernism/modernity, 2016
An examination of Weird fiction's preoccupation with extinction events with an eye to how we migh... more An examination of Weird fiction's preoccupation with extinction events with an eye to how we might use these fictions to differently bracket modernist theories of trauma. Wm Hope Hodgson's novel _The Night Land_ is read against Lauren Berlant's _Cruel Optimism_ in order to extract the possibility of what I call "kind pessimism": a gentle detachment of human bonds to life itself.
Twentieth-Century Literature , 2009
A reading of Aldous Huxley's underappreciated novel _Ape and Essence_ as an ambivalent redaction ... more A reading of Aldous Huxley's underappreciated novel _Ape and Essence_ as an ambivalent redaction of ethical dilemmas inherent to Darwinian biology.
MLA Approaches to Teaching Coetzee’s Disgrace and Other Works, eds. Laura Wright, Jane Poyner, and Elleke Boehmer , 2014
Journal of the Kafka Society of America , 2014
Journal of the Kafka Society of America , 2012
Journal of the Kafka Society of America , 2006
Southeast Review of Asian Studies, 2015
This essay examines the biopolitical implications of a manga series by Nihei Tsutomu (b. 1971), p... more This essay examines the biopolitical implications of a manga series by Nihei Tsutomu (b. 1971), particularly in terms of three overlapping conceptualizations of the body: abjection, or the monstrous body; projection, or the phantasmal body; and introjection, or the replicable body.
Southeast Review of Asian Studies , 2014
Southeast Review of Asian Studies , 2013
The work of manga artist Nihei Tsutomu 弐瓶勉 (b. 1971) is here examined in terms of its extraordina... more The work of manga artist Nihei Tsutomu 弐瓶勉 (b. 1971) is here examined in terms of its extraordinary use of space. Not only does Nihei's work present us with sophisticated renderings of architectural space, it also makes novel use of the manga format itself: the space within and between panels. The uncanny spatiality of Nihei's manga resonates with an equally uncanny sci-fi ecology, one that no longer distinguishes between living and non-living matter, between creature and datum.
Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, 2004
The ethical paradoxes of silence and self-translation in the works of Samuel Beckett are addresse... more The ethical paradoxes of silence and self-translation in the works of Samuel Beckett are addressed from within the theoretical vocabularies of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Walter Benjamin, and Emmanuel Levinas. Among Beckett's works, particular attention is paid to "Three Dialogues," "Imagination Dead Imagine," and Company; in other words, the ethico - formal questions discussed in this essay preoccupied Beckett over his entire career. The Gadamerian concepts of "aesthetic differentiation" [ästhetische Unterscheidung] and "highlighting" [Überhellung], together with the Benjaminian concepts of "ripening" [nachreife] and "afterlife" [fortleben], and the Levinasian concept of "retroversion (chez Jill Robbins) increasingly clarify the ethical stakes of Beckett's project.
Reviews by Keith Leslie Johnson
American Book Review, 2009
American Book Review, 2011
symplokē
Review of Martin Hägglund, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov
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Books by Keith Leslie Johnson
Essays by Keith Leslie Johnson
Reviews by Keith Leslie Johnson