Descriptions and Downloads

Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Henry S. Turner, “Between Worlds in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors,” Exemplaria 33.2 (2021): 158-83. An essay on how conceptions of experience, enworlding, and the Mediterranean region inform Shakespeare’s response to early modern globalization and its racializing tendencies.

“Pragmatism, Race, and the Collective Subject in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors,” The Rambling 3. January, 2019. A special issue devoted to work from the Folger Shakespeare Library seminar on “Race and Gender in Early Modern Studies.” Ed. Carol Mejia-LaPerle.

“Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 58.2 (2018): 473-537. An annual omnibus survey of the field.

“Love Your Corporation,” an essay for a special joint issue of the American Book Review and the electronic book review on “Corporate Fictions,” ed. Jeffrey DiLeo and Joseph Tabbi (Jan-Feb. 2017: 4, 13) that offers a series of theoretical hypotheses toward a new dissident political theory of corporations.

“Corporate Persons, Between Law and Literature.” The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700. Ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 467-84. An essay on poetic, legal, and theatrical personhood, from Spenser to Shakespeare to Hobbes to Nike. The Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 received the 2017 Roland H. Bainton Reference Book Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

“Corporation.” Dictionary of the Possible. A special issue of Shifter Magazine, ed. Avi Alpert and Sreshta Rit Premnath. Issue 22 (2016): 47-50.

“The Society for the Arts of Corporation: An Invitation.”  A brief essay that introduces a new project for public collaboration and public action, by way of a discussion of the nature of “art” as a procedure of creative generalization. For a special issue of Postmedieval 6.4 (2015): 485-90 on “Critical/Liberal/Arts,” ed.  J. Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski and Myra Seaman.

“Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.” Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater, ed. Ronda Arab, Michelle Dowd, and Adam Zucker (New York: Routledge, 2015). 182-97. An essay on corporations, theatrical personation, and theater as a space of assembly by way of a reading of Dekker’s play.

“Corporations: Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy.” An essay on the humanist background to the emergence of the notion of political economy, with particular reference to the conceptual role that the corporation played in 16th century attempts to rethink political categories under the pressures of the international commerce and colonial activity usually associated with mercantilism. With some concluding reflections on the status of the “State” in definitions of political entities and political actions.  For the collection Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 153-76.

“Generalization.” Early Modern Theatricality. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 1-23. An overview of the state of the field, with reflections on text and performance, form and materialism, phenomenology and fiction, and “the art of creative generalization.”

“Book, List, Word: Forms of Translation in the Work of Richard Hakluyt.” An essay on Hakluyt’s work as a translator and on translation as a mode of materialism in early modern travel writing.  For the collection Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature, ed. Allison K. Deutermann and András Kiséry (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2013), 124-46.

“Francis Bacon’s Common Notion.” An essay on Bacon’s “political biology” in the Novum Organum: on his approach to ideas about the “common” and the “collective,” on the definition of notions, axioms, and forms, and on induction as an experimental philosophy for concepts. For a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS) on “Commons and Collectivities: Renaissance Political Ecologies,” ed. Emily Shortslef and Bryan Lowrance, 13.3 (Summer 2013): 7-32.  With essays by Crystal Bartolovich, Drew Daniel, Steve Menz, and Emily Shortslef.

“Books, not MOOCs.” Public Books, April 2013. A review of OpenUtopia, ed. Steven Duncombe, with thoughts on MOOCs and their threat to the university.

“Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on ‘Form.’” An essay on recent discussions of the problem of form in literary studies, drawing on the work of Bruno Latour to suggest several ways in which the notion of form might be expanded and suggesting how an expanded category of form might be useful to historians of science and literary critics alike. Written for the Focus section of Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society, on “History of Science and Literature and Science: Convergences and Divergences,” ed. James J. Bono, with pieces by Bono, Colin Milburn, Laura Otis, and Laura Dassow Walls. Isis 101 no. 3 (September 2010): 578-589.

“Mathematics and the Imagination: A Brief Introduction.”  An introductory essay written with Arielle Saiber for a special issue of Configurations 17.1-2 (2010), the journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, for which we were guest co-editors.  The issue is available now and includes essays by Reviel Netz, Robert Goulding, Tom Conley, Arkady Plotnitsky, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, and Lori Emerson.

“Of Dramatology: Action in the Form of Tools and Machines,” an essay on cybernetics, tools and machines in the work of Norbert Wiener, Plato, and Aristotle, with reflections on Shakespeare and Bacon. Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1.1-2 (Spring-Summer 2010): 199-207, a special issue on “When did we become post/human?”, ed. Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne.

“Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego: The Case of Richard Hakluyt.” On problems of legal personhood, value, narration, networks, and the political imagination.  Written in the voice of Freud, as a “lost lecture,” for a special issue of differences 20 nos. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 2009): 103-147 on “The Future of the Human,” ed. Nancy Armstrong and Warren Montag.

“Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare,” an article about dramatic character as a form of artificial life and theater as the new media of the sixteenth century, via Canguilhem, Agamben, and Kant.  South Central Review 26.1&2 (Winter & Spring, 2009): 197-217.

“The Problem of the More than One: Friendship, Calculation, and Political Association in The Merchant of Venice“, an article on philosophies of value, friendship, decision, and justice in classical ethics and in Shakespeare’s play, as viewed through Derrida’s late work. Shakespeare Quarterly 57.4 (Winter, 2006): 413-442.

“Literature and Mapping in England, 1520-1688.” In The History of Cartography, Vol. III: Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part I, ed. David Woodward (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 412-426. Traces the literary use of maps and the map-image during the early modern period and proposes several avenues for future research into the problem of topographesis, or the relationship between cartographic and literary modes of representation.

“From Homo Academicus to Poeta Publicus: Celebrity and Transversal Knowledge in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589)“, on the place of Renaissance homo academicus in relation to early modern epistemologies of poetics, technology and magic. Written collaboratively with Bryan Reynolds (Theater and Drama, UC-Irvine) for Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer, ed. Edward Gieskes and Kirk Melnikoff (Ashgate Press, 2008), 73-93.

“Performative Transversations: Collaboration Through and Beyond Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay“, on homology, academic discourse, and State power in Greene’s play and the 21st century academy. Written collaboratively with Bryan Reynolds in Bryan Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (London: Palgrave, 2006).

“Plotting Early Modernity,” in The Culture of Capital, 85-127. An omnibus statement of the argument and primary evidence ofThe English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics and the Practical Spatial Arts.

“Nashe’s Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599).” Undertakes an intellectual history of the commodity form from Aristotle to Nashe to Marx and examines different competing modes of understanding material objects in Renaissance antiquarianism and natural philosophy. ELH 68 (2001): 529-561.

“King Lear Without: The Heath.” Examines problems of spatial representation on stage and in print. Renaissance Drama, n.s. 28 (1997): 161-193.

“‘Empires of Objects’: Accumulation and Entropy in E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910).”  Examines Forster’s formal techniques for representing the processes of capital accumulation, imperialism, and the radical loss upon which both are predicated. Twentieth Century Literature 46 (2000): 328-345.