Reviewed by: The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form by Audrey Wasser Matthew Scully Wasser, Audrey. The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form. Fordham University Press, 2016. 208 pp. "The problem of art in the modern era," according to the opening of Audrey Wasser's The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form, "is the problem of the new" (1). Citing the familiar maxim of Ezra Pound, "make it new," Wasser locates in the problem of novelty the problem of modern art as such. Modernity inherits its fixation on the new from a longer tradition, which for Wasser begins with the German romantics in the wake of Kantian aesthetics. Crucial for Wasser is the way in which the romantic philosophers, particularly Friedrich Schlegel and other contributors to the Athenaeum, attempted to resolve the problems with the Kantian system by "invest[ing] the literary with the power to overcome the fundamental division of the sensible and the intelligible, the particular and the universal" (4). This power attributed to the literary hinges on a romantic concept of reflection, by which an artwork might overcome itself through a process of self-reflection that leads to self-knowledge. Yet as Wasser notes, "To assume that a work is capable of reflecting on itself, commenting on itself, and representing itself by means of its own figures is already to take the work to be coherent and self-sufficient" (9). Wasser's main intervention, then, is to rethink the status of literature and our romantic inheritance in order to "articulate a non-romantic theory of literature" (3), while at the same time recognizing our inability to avoid a direct engagement with romanticism's concepts. The Work of Difference can be conceptually divided into two sections: first, a genealogical and theoretical engagement with the concept of literature, romanticism, and the inheritance of romantic thought that concludes with an articulation of a non-romantic theory of literature grounded in Deleuze's philosophical work; second, a series of readings that stage this articulation. As the first chapter argues, one problem with the concept of literature as we have inherited it is the fact that "embedded in the very development of the concept is an indistinction between literature's aesthetic and epistemological dimensions, between its value as beauty and its value as knowledge" (15). In the history that Wasser sketches, conceptions [End Page 113] of literature always attempt "to preserve a number of conflicting values," which "reach a certain apex" in romanticism (16). Romanticism privileges a thinking of the fragment in its logic of reflection. Following a discussion of Schlegel's characterization of the fragment as seed and mirror, and an engagement with Immanuel Kant's third Critique, Wasser rehearses the central problem romanticism produces: "Between Bild and Bildung, or form and formation, or product and process lies the entire problematic of the romantic fragment, as well as the conflict of freedom and necessity that constitutes the romantic conception of art" (31). As Wasser continues, "rather than a dialectic of part and whole, we witness the specular reflection of the whole in the form of the fragment, and the formation of these fragments into a whole whose genesis lies in the fragment's excessive and universalizing tendencies – fragments are seeds of systems" (32-33). Like the fragment, criticism for romantic philosophy, "act[s] both as the 'part' that incompletes the whole and as the monument to the always-already-lost of this whole" (36). As Wasser astutely remarks, this romantic characterization of criticism "cannot help but mark the failure of its own project. It would also seem to call for an endless repetition of this failure" (37). For German romanticism, "reflection gives the artwork access to an idea of the infinite. Yet by turning the work into a fragment of the speculative project of thinking the absolute, romanticism burdens literature with a philosophical task it cannot – and should not be asked to – shoulder" (37). The excessive task assigned to literature by romanticism announces, by its very excess, literature's inevitable failure. Following the first chapter, Wasser engages with Cleanth Brooks (chapter two) and Maurice Blanchot (chapter...

Reviewed by: Microdramas: Crucibles for Theatre and Time by John H. Muse Erica O'Neill Muse, John H. Microdramas: Crucibles for Theatre and Time. University of Michigan Press, 2017. 246 pp. John H. Muse's Microdramas: Crucibles for Theatre and Time examines the production of short plays across the history of Western theatre practice, from the late-nineteenth century to contemporary performance. Categorizing plays shorter than twenty minutes as microdramas, Muse does not insist on a new term for a theatrical subgenre, but provides an ideal working title for the study of brief theatre: a study which, until now, has been largely overlooked in literary theoretical analyses on theatre. Muse shows us how the study of plays by playwrights who consciously choose brevity as a form, provides a platform for examining the evolution of theatre's structural practices. Identifying how short plays expose traditional structures evident in longer-form plays on a microcosmic level, Microdramas provides test samples from slices of theatre's history within which to analyze dramatic form and the experience of theatre viewing. Rather than being relegated as: useful tools for acting students; amusing anecdotes in the history of modernist and avant-garde theatre practice; or as entr'actes interspersed within long-form theatre plays–because character development, plot and dialogue are abridged–microdramas limit the requirements of dramatic convention to its most basic elements, returning the stage to its position as a laboratory, a place of experimentation and observation. Muse challenges assumptions about abrupt or minimal theatrical and artistic experiences by observing how short plays challenge viewers to interact with the theatrical experience in a different manner. Muse's book enquires into what the experience of witnessing microdramas reveals about theatre and time, providing a comprehensive insight into the intricacies of temporal experience in both theatre and in general. Muse observes how certain playwrights manipulate the experience of time by putting pressure on an audience's cognitive processes. Muse argues that specific microdramas isolate the distinctive workings of theatre time and lived time, revealing the complexities of both, and exposing the temporal customs to which all theatrical performance is subject. [End Page 126] Muse's book is divided into four distinct historical periods that correspond to related concepts of temporality, and the changing reception of theatrical events, contextualized within their cultural milieu. Muse notes that while diminutive plays have been performed since theatre's beginnings, the late-nineteenth century witnessed a rise in the number of playwrights who undermined the boundaries of dramatic form by insisting that short plays achieve equal or greater efficacy than long plays. Beginning with the emergence of the microdrama in late-nineteenth-century France, Muse then analyzes avant-garde theatre's beginnings in Italian futurist shorts, to the height of modernist theatre practice with Samuel Beckett's late, and often misunderstood brief plays, and concludes with two examples of contemporary playwrights who have inherited the framework of the short play and have taken it to its nth degree. The playwrights in this final chapter produce long anthologies of short plays that Muse calls microthons. Muse focuses on the play texts–on the page and on the stage. Each case study corresponds with the following related concepts: theatre's spatialization of time; the heterogeneity of brief time; the riddle of eventfulness; and the pace of absorption. Muse structures his book around how these concepts and their related historical case studies designate microdramas as working laboratories for theatre and time. Exploring compressed theatre across more than a century–examining each case uniquely–Muse highlights brevity as a subjective and historically contingent concept. Muse specifically concentrates on a historical period in which our experience of time was dramatically affected due to numerous temporal alterations in industrial modernity: technological advancement; the introduction of standardized Greenwich Mean Time; the working day and factory time; organized public transport and train schedules; electronic communication advancements from telegraph to telephone, and later, email; television broadcast and the Internet. Muse demonstrates how theatre practice–which at its most basic is communication between performer and audience–responded to the growing rapidity of communication and information reception. These situations, coupled with advancements in theatre technology, and audience fatigue over traditional theatrical forms...

Closing Thoughts:Benjamin to Brecht Christopher Norris (bio) Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual . . . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice–politics. Only a thoughtless observer could deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. —Walter Benjamin Let aura fade and replication thrive!Let aura fade now promeneurs can findNear-perfect copies in the next arcade. Works out of sight go quickly out of mind;Works out of sight now turn up ready-madeIn long production-runs at speed of light. Sounds come alive with phonographic aid;Sounds come alive as copies overwriteThe ghostly paradigms for which they strive. Not aura-blind, the passions they excite.Not aura-blind, but set up to deriveLarge benefits as aura lags behind. [End Page 59] The copy-trade works best in overdrive.The copy-trade means nothing's sealed and signed'Authentic' but all downloads make the grade. What they invite is artwork new in kind.What they invite is what the rear-brigadeOf aura-fanciers mobilize to fight. 'Let our archive have masterworks displayed.'Let our archive, they say, not spread this blightOf replicas where only fakes survive. For they've divined the depth of their new plight.For they've divined how it may soon depriveThem of their arts and livelihoods combined. So they're afraid when multiples arrive.So they're afraid to see works once enshrinedIn Tate or Louvre now digitally purveyed. The yawning height is where they'll be confined,The yawning height that hosts the dim paradeOf works known solely to the erudite. Why then contrive this cultural crusade?Why then contrive false pedigrees that mightGive authenticity its old high five? Why not rewind each archived megabyte?Why not rewind the clip so art's nose-divePulls out to yield a flight-path more streamlined? No plan well-laid would have them so connive.No plan well-laid [End Page 60] has aura so entwinedWith bourgeois politics of every shade. A sacred rite, its leopard-days assigned.A sacred rite whose forms and customs jadeThe replica-consumer's appetite. They twist and rive as slouching beasts invade.They twist and rive as media trends inciteThe wrath of those who crave their culture live. Keep that in mind if they put up a fight.Keep that in mind when they'd seek to reviveA culture-copyright long unassigned. ___________ Yet still I brood on aura's long decay.Yet still I brood on cherished texts and tellMyself a tale of Kabbalah renewed. Bert Brecht's my guide; I've learned his lessons well.Bert Brecht's my guide when crises call for crudeApproaches or solutions cut-and-dried. That's what he'd say: adjust your attitude.That's what he'd say: the times are tough–untriedOr quick-fix tactics have a role to play. No time to dwell on it; take things in stride.No time to dwell on whether it's okayTo strike if stationed at the gates of hell. When that's my mood I'm with him all the way.When that's my mood [End Page 61] there's no text could compelMy mind to let those Hamlet-thoughts intrude. It's time and tide conspire such thoughts to quell.It's time and tide demand that we excludeAll thoughts whose action-plan's not bonafide. Yet think how they cry out to be construed!Yet think how they, my palimpsests, provideNo end of ways to lead the mind astray! That's when their spell sends thinking high and wide.That's when their spell is surest to betray...

Introduction David F. Bell, Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Paul A. Harris, and Eric Méchoulan Periodically, we take stock of SubStance and provide a brief statement regarding initiatives and priorities in the journal's interests. Three years ago, we announced that "Exploring hybrid writing with theoretical impact is at the center of our current preoccupations."1 Since that time, the journal has made significant changes. This issue marks our fourth issue of publishing with Johns Hopkins University Press in a transition that recognizes our new publisher as a leader among university presses. Our plan also expressed our intent to move toward publishing digital work that exemplifies theoretical thinking in nonlinear, experimental forms. In 2018, we launched Digital SubStance, a platform for "hybrid work that generates challenging conceptual frameworks, work that represents something more than a style, or, rather, truly a style: a creative way to address and express ideas or concepts, to push literary thought and thought about literature into new territories."2 We are committed to supporting innovative scholars and artists by providing a peer-reviewed publication venue for digital scholarship. While the profession has been moving in this direction, institutional structures have been slow to recognize digital scholarship consistently, substantially, or equally toward promotion, tenure, or career development. We hope to contribute usefully to that discussion. Our investment in this venture is also informed by a longer-term view of ensuring the robust presence, influence, and evolution of humanistic scholarship and creative work. New media, including digital platforms, open up opportunities to present work in different forms, in turn stimulating different pathways of thinking and working and different ways of reaching out to a broader readership. Digital SubStance encompasses two kinds of open-access publications. Its Journal Supplements features intermedial content related to specific issues of SubStance. The special issue Rock Records (SubStance 146, 2018) includes theoretical writings from leading eco-theorists alongside artistic works that carve out a contemporary geo-aesthetics, as well as an excerpt from Roger Caillois's writings on stones presented for the first time in English. The Journal Supplements for Rock Records includes an exhibition of Viewing Stones, artist Richard Turner's multimedia renderings of his stone artworks, and an exhibit of Caillois's mineral collection and stone writings, which provide context for the excerpt published in the issue. [End Page 3] The special issue Dismantling the Man-Machine (SubStance 147, 2018) investigates contemporary representations of the human as a machine. The issue's Journal Supplements include a digital version of Sydney Levy's "Elove: What does Fiction Know?" that exposes and pursues the complex relationships among the concepts, and representations of robots discussed in Pierre Cassou-Noguès's essay for the issue. Our second foray into digital publishing is SubStance@Work, a series comprised of born-digital works that integrate non-linear structure and multimedia content in innovative theoretical explorations. In assembling an Advisory Board for the series, we invited artists and academics committed to digital scholarship and art, whose work demonstrates sophisticated theoretical thinking across a number of disciplines, including film, philosophy, theory, media studies, and art. In the first project in the series, Phobic Postcards, Pierre Cassou-Noguès considers the irrationality of phobia. A phobia is a fear that has an object (contrary to Heidegger's Angst) but its object is absurd: there is no danger. Phobias seem to mark an uncanny limit to reason, to argumentation, to philosophy, a limit that this project explores through twelve videos and many notes. The second project, The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin by Paul A. Harris, is a work of Anthropocene theory and art that cements a breccia with traditions by cobbling together conglomerate materials, composing an uplifting landscape grounded in rock-gardening, geo-humanities, and earth art. We wish to thank Melanie Hubbard, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Loyola Marymount University, for her work in designing Digital SubStance and assisting authors with their contributions to Journal Supplements and SubStance@Work. We conclude by renewing our invitation to approach us with inquiries along the lines opened up by Digital SubStance, including individual submissions of work designed for digital publication, proposals for special issues that would include both conventional scholarship and digital content...

Geology, Myth, Media A.J. Nocek (bio) This article argues for the relevance of mythical signification in our geological epoch. More than this, it contends that we need to revise our assumptions about media and communication systems in order to grasp the importance of myth in an era where the future of human and nonhuman life on the Earth is entirely uncertain. To make this case, I focus on the growing consensus in the sciences and theoretical humanities that mythical stories about geological and planetary processes cannot simply be disqualified or disregarded because they do not conform to the norms of modern scientific epistemology (e.g., Vitaliano; Piccardi and Masse). Whether these stories come to us from pre-modern civilizations and attempt to give sense and meaning to geological events such as natural disasters, or they have more contemporary roots in neo-pagan activism and feminist healing practices (e.g., Stengers; Salomonsen; Keller), there is a mounting need to account for the important ways in which myth has facilitated, and could still facilitate, meaningful engagements with the Earth's complex material transformations. There is little doubt that this urgency stems in large part from our shared anxiety over what is to come of the human species in our geological epoch (e.g., Lee; Scranton; Thacker), and the attendant need to piece together knowledge about the Earth before the advent of sophisticated modeling, as well as a more general desire to develop alternative (i.e., non-modern) material and epistemic practices in collaboration with the Earth's surface environments.1 This article addresses the varied and complex challenges that confront theories of planetary history and transformation that incorporate mythical storytelling into their epistemologies. The difficulties facing such efforts could not be more pronounced than they are in today's rancorous political climate, which has, and not unproblematically, been dubbed, "post-truth," and which has also mobilized various kinds of "fiction" to the detriment of the planet (e.g., Klein). In this context, I discuss how Roland Barthes was all too familiar with the myriad ways in which mythical signification in particular could be wedded to exploitative systems of power. In what follows, I address these and other challenges in what [End Page 84] I consider to be mutually informing "layers of complication" that give shape to the problem of incorporating mythic signification into our epistemologies of planetary and geological phenomena. For instance, I trace the limitations of modern science's attempt to integrate geological myths into its epistemic practices in the quickly emerging field of geomythology. I also consider the importance of expunging dangerous myths from our theories of planetary evolution. Along the way, I expose how media and communication theory is an invaluable resource for unpacking these layers of complication, mainly because it brings into sharp relief the communicative essentialisms underwriting our various theories of geomythology. In the end, I insist that it is actually our limited understanding of media and communication in the context of planetary and geological processes that stands in the way developing a robust theoretical framework for mythical signification in our current geological epoch. The work of Isabelle Stengers, Alfred North Whitehead, and contemporary media theory will prove especially useful for framing this argument. Layer 1: Geomythology as Geocommunication Unusual topography has often inspired myths about the formation and purpose of the Earth's surface. The island of Mangaia in the Cook Islands is a good example of this. At the center of the island is an eroded volcano surrounded by a "moat-like depression." According to one myth, the once "smooth and regular" island was formed as a result of a competition between the rain god and the sea god that caused tremendous erosion and mudslides (see Vitaliano, "Geomythology"). Another good example of the intersection of topography and myth is the Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Two Native American tribes living nearby tell a slightly different story about the tower's formation, but both accounts reference how they were able to flee the deadly grip of a very large bear because their deity answered their desperate plea and raised the Earth under their feet. To this day, the bear's claws are still visible in...

Reviewed by: Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe by William Guynn, and: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth-Century by Timothy Snyder Rosemarie Scullion Guynn, William. Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe. Columbia University Press, 2016. 251 pp. Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth-Century. Tim Duggins Books, 2017. 128 pp. On the Lessons and Experience of History On November 15th, one week after the results of the 2016 US presidential election were known to all, Timothy Snyder, a distinguished historian of Modern Europe, took to his Facebook page where he formulated a series of steps he urged readers to take in response to what he clearly deemed an emerging threat to the future of American democracy. Snyder's message, which captured the sense of urgency and foreboding that was palpable across large swaths of the land, instantly went viral. In a preface to comments informed by deep knowledge of the totalitarian regimes that held Europe in their grip in the decades following World War I, Snyder wrote: Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or Communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.1 The commentary that followed was surely jarring to the countless online readers who came upon it in subsequent weeks. Although no doubt aware of the stark polarization that has riven the American electorate in recent decades, pitting not just Left and Right, but also entire regions of the country against one another, Snyder's readers were not likely to have given much prior thought to how one goes about surviving and resisting political tyranny of the sort his post indicted may well be upon us. Some readers may have found Snyder's call to action unnecessarily alarmist, reasoning that it was best just to wait and see what the future held. For many, though, there was every indication that we were headed into uncharted and portentous political terrain. The brisk and broad dissemination of Snyder's post suggests it was a resounding wake-up call that shook one of our polity's core beliefs: that a centuries-long experience of flawed, but nonetheless continuous democracy would never fall prey to [End Page 175] the kinds of despotism that have asserted themselves at various moments in time in other parts of the world. But as Snyder has shown in a body of scholarship that has altered our understanding of twentieth-century Europe, rule by consent is far from a given in Western modernity, much less in the whole of human history; under the right circumstances, Snyder warns, the tyranny that plagued the European continent in the interwar and war years can flourish anywhere, at any time. In his paradigm-altering study Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Snyder examined the policies of state-sanctioned mass murder that efficiently delivered 14 million human beings to certain death in that narrow window of opportunity which two dictatorships, one of the Left and one of the Right, opened in Central and Eastern Europe between 1930 and 1945. Snyder's study charts the demise of fragile interwar democracies and the commandeering of a would-be egalitarian society-in-the-making, showing how each succumbed to the campaigns of domestic political terror and turbocharged imperial aggression that Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler waged in this period, across a zone of mass destruction stretching from Berlin to Moscow. Both used similarly ruthless means to simply annihilate populations they saw as either obstructing the historical imperatives that the one was intent on fulfilling, or standing in the way of the racist utopia that the other was bent on creating. Despite stark differences in the ideologies that propelled their projects, there is a sorry commonality in the staggering amount of carnage these two despots unleashed, the documentary record of which was closely held by the powers that ruled this region for decades following World War II. The recent resurgence of far-right white nationalist and authoritarian movements, not just in the US...

Extracts from Pierres réfléchies Roger Caillois (bio) Translated by Charles A. La Via SubStance is pleased to present, for the first time in English, the Prologue and Epilogue from Roger Caillois's Pierres réfléchies. Pierres réfléchies is the last, and least cited, of Caillois's singular writings on stones, which are being rediscovered and reread in the contemporary geologic-philosophical-aesthetic context. Here, Caillois provides a final articulation of his mystical materialism and diagonal science, his hermetic reading of a cosmos composed of hieroglyphic signs, in which "stone… speaks… the most convincing language in the universe." These ruminations from Pierres réfléchies display a deeper methodological discernment, and more somber humor (in both senses), than the earlier works. Perhaps this is why Caillois deems it "useful to reproduce" in a footnote his first (and most often quoted) account of mystic materialist musings in Pierres (Éditions Gallimard, 1966). The shift from the "mental effervescence" of the first work to the search for "clarity" and "austerity" in these passages from Pierres réfléchies mark them as an essential selection from Caillois's reflections on stones. Caillois bequeathed his mineral collection to the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. The collection, featured at the 2013 Venice Biennale, can be seen at the Galerie de Minéralogie et de Géologie. Information about Caillois's collection, including specimen images, may be accessed at http://substancejournal.sites.lmu.edu/home/supplements/rock-records. — Paul A. Harris Prologue: The Apostate Stones, here, are sometimes objects of contemplation, like things used for spiritual exercise. I do not look at them in terms of their dimensions or qualities. I only focus on their appearance, which is practically all I know or perceive of them. Like the ancient Chinese, I am inclined to consider each stone to be a world. Like Pascal, I presume that, from the atom to the nebula, the models for the two infinities coincide, and, like Paracelsus, I readily imagine that there are kinds of signatures for things—patterns that vary but are constant. While their appearances first surprise us because of their variety, if the universe is countable, they must necessarily recur. I unintentionally leave aside the question of scale, in the certainty that, at every level, the problems, proportions, and architectures remain analogous. My starting point is the object. I pay sustained—nearly tedious—attention to it. I do not claim to become totally engrossed in it. At the very moment I am demanding myself to be more exact, and to adopt a more precise approach, I detest even more the metaphors I am forced to use, the slippages that invite me to exaggerate the image, and which, while it is emerging, make it slide into insignificance, like paper money with no gold to back it. I only strive to reveal the hint of a trace, of an [End Page 149] ordered network, the laws that lay out the grids in which originate the fraternal permanent partitions of meditative space. The extended world suddenly ceases to be, as philosophy would argue, the incompatible opposite of thought—that other mode of existence. It becomes instead its natural environment. At this juncture, it seems to me the mind can hardly attempt anything other than joyful and accurate classification—the distribution of things and principles in an ideal wind rose. I no longer consider geometry or the wily system of numbers to be a construction of the mind, nor a reflection of human intelligence that is finally intelligible to itself. Thought, on the contrary, seems to be the questionable and vague approximation of the subjacent order, which at times it recklessly, almost misguidedly, extends and also attempts to reach. As far as it strays, it can sense or recompose the dismantled and indecipherable order in which it recognizes itself. It identifies it instinctively, every time it succeeds in extracting itself from the obscurity of psychology, from the necessary and costly detour it must make to gain access to consciousness. As soon as it escapes from this fermentation, it is sucked up and returned to the grammar or rigors of unalterable space, which remain its own, are...