[open-humanities] New Open Access book publisher

Mon Apr 4 16:28:17 UTC 2011

<mailto:acssi2011 at UGent.be>
Looks interesting and it is 'para-humanities'.
More info: http://punctumbooks.wordpress.com/

punctum books
spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion
[http://punctumbooks.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/ship-of-fools-woodcut2.jpg?w=300&h=170]<http://punctumbooks.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/ship-of-fools-woodcut2.jpg>
email: punctumbooks at gmail.com
*.pdf of Press Release HERE<https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B17owIt5y_GvODhmYjc2NTQtNzQzYS00Y2U0LTkwNmUtYzE2NThlOGJlMWEx&hl=en>

This word is set down so that you may understand that this whole time [totum saeculum], which to us seems so long while it is rolling along, is really a moment [punctum].

—Augustine, Ennarations on the Psalms

This time it is not I who seek it out . . . it is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument . . . This element which will disturb the studium I . . . call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice.

—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

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CO-DIRECTORS>

Eileen A. Joy<http://siue.academia.edu/EileenJoy>. Old and Middle English Literature, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Post/humanisms, Embodiment/Affect, Ethics. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville + postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies<http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/index.html> + BABEL Working Group<http://www.babelworkinggroup.org/>, USA

Nicola Masciandaro<http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/pub/Faculty_Details5.jsp?faculty=552>. Medieval Literature, Philosophy, Mysticism, Metal Theory, Speculative Medievalism, Commentary. Brooklyn College, CUNY + Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary<http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/glossator/>, USA

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VISION STATEMENT>

punctum books is an open-access and print-on-demand independent publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. We specialize in neo-traditional and non-conventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms, with an emphasis on books that fall length-wise between the article and the monograph—id est, novellas, in one sense or another. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds.

punctum books encourages projects that profit from formal risks and possibly engage with supposedly outmoded or ‘quaint’ genres—the abcedarium, (auto)commentary, summa, bestiary, dialogue, case study, compendium, speculum/mirror, conduct manual, letter/address, apologia pro vita sua, hagiography, elegy, postcard, telegraph/telegram, inter-office memo, encyclopedia, forgery, hidden writing, source-fiction, natural history, leechbook, atlas, colloquium, colophon, commonplace book, telephone book, rolodex, field report, romance, dialogue, dream vision, catalogue, sonnet cycle, poetics, treatise, manifesto, prosody, calendar, morality play, marginalia, interlinear translation, digest, microfiche, concordance, book of hours, pastoral/eclogue, polemic, epigram, broadsheet, flyer, note-book, breviarium, collationes/collectio, book of nature, testament, proof, manual, pamphlet, miscellany, chapbook, captivity narrative, penny dreadful, testament, manual, discography, catena, liner notes, autopsy, exegesis, rule, antiphonary, legend, fax, travelogue, etymologiae, lai, excerpt, curiosity cabinet, disputation, computus, comedy of errors, soliloquy, essay, bulletin, evangeliary, gloss, meditation, fable, florilegium, myth, fairy tale, purchase order, carbon copy, transcript/transcryptum, blueprint, psalter, micrologue, lyric, daytimer, inventory, annal/chronicle, pipe roll, receipt/invoice, watch-list, charter, canon, and so on ad infinitum. Surprise yourself.

The word ‘punctum’ is intended to summon and ignite several registers of discourse and address. First, in the sense of the punctures made by the pointed awls or spikes used to rule or ‘prick’ the vellum pages of premodern manuscripts and thereby unfurl the blank lines of writing (and thinking), punctum medievally invokes the founding of textual work upon perverse and paradoxical openings. punctum books seeks to curate the open spaces of writing or writing-as-opening, the crucial tiny portals on whose capacious thresholds all writing properly and improperly takes place. Pricking, puncturing, perforating = publishing in the mode of a unconditional hospitality and friendship, making space for what Eve Sedgwick called “queer little gods” – the “ontologically intermediate [and teratological] figures” of y/our thought.

Second, through Augustine’s point about time, punctum stabs home the fact that, whatever the temporalities we inhabit at any given time, whatever we think regarding the perhaps unthinkable totum saeculum [whole time], whatever our commitments or indifferences to future and past, the ‘word’ immediately knows time as always and beautifully momentary. punctum books seizes without freezing the momentary, promoting punctual writing that emerges in the moment, that is all of a sudden presently free to carry and to be carried away by other times, its own time, and both at once. punctum books seeks writing that does not let go of its own time, its adjacency to what is immediate and intimate, as well as writing that abandons time and lights out for other territories.

Finally, by way of Barthes’s affective photographic concept, punctum indicates thought that pierces and disturbs the wednesdayish, business-as-usual protocols of both the generic university studium and its individual cells or holding tanks. Further, punctum signifies text that wounds and pricks and cuts and pierces. This is to encourage writing as risk, adventure, a going-forth without ‘papers’ or guarantees: falling through the hole/punctum, a falling down, freefall. punctum books solicits and pimps quixotic, sagely mad engagements that generate and satisfy noetic-erotic need, textual thought-bodies that give pleasures only to be possessed in their presence.

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EDITORIAL BOARD>

Jane Bennett<http://politicalscience.jhu.edu/bios/jane-bennett/>. Political Theory, Political Ecology, Object-Oriented Materialisms, Ethics. Johns Hopkins University, USA

Kathleen Biddick<http://www.temple.edu/history/biddick/index.html>. Medieval European History, Critical Historiography/Theory, Studies in Medievalism. Temple University, USA

Nandita Biswas Mellamphy<http://politicalscience.uwo.ca/faculty/Biswasmellamphy/>. Political Science, Political Philosophy, Post/humanisms, Zoontotechnics, War/Globalization. University of Western Ontario, Canada

Jen Boyle<http://jenboyle.squarespace.com/>. Early Modern Literature, New Media Studies, Technoculture/Technoscience Studies, Sexuality Studies. Coastal Carolina University, USA

Jeffrey J. Cohen<http://www.jeffreyjeromecohen.com/>. Medieval Comparative Literature, Queer Studies, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Post/humanisms. George Washington University, USA

Ruth Evans<http://www.slu.edu/x31612.xml>. Middle English Literature, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Feminist Theory, Memory/Mindware Studies. Saint Louis University, USA

Aranye Fradenburg<http://www.aranyefradenburg.com/>. Medieval Comparative Literature, Clinical Psychoanalysis, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Cognitive Literary Studies. University of California-Santa Barbara + New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, USA

Jonathan Gill Harris<http://departments.columbian.gwu.edu/english/people/127>. Early Modern Culture, Drama, Shakespeare, Globalizations, Temporality/Motion. George Washington University + Shakespeare Quarterly, USA

Ed Keller<http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/faculty_program.aspx?id=48191>. Architecture, Design Criticism/Research, Social Media, Transdisciplinary Design. Parsons the New School of Design, USA

Anna Kłosowska<http://www.units.muohio.edu/frenchitalian/node/76>. Medieval and Early Modern French Literature, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Queer Theory, Critical Theory. Miami University of Ohio, USA

Katerina Kolozova<http://eurobalkan.academia.edu/KaterinaKolozova>. Feminist Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Gender Studies, Non-philosophy, Speculative Realism. Euro-Balkan Institute, Macedonia

Dan Mellamphy<http://uwo.academia.edu/mellamphy>. Comparative Literature, Continental Philosophy, Media Technology, Post-Humanism, Speculative Fiction. University of Western Ontario, Canada

Timothy Morton<http://english.ucdavis.edu/people/directory/tbmorton>. 18th-Century British Literature, Romanticism, Poetics, Literature and the Environment, Eco-Theory, Food Studies, Sound and Music, Materialisms, Science Studies. University of California-Davis, USA

Reza Negarestani<http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/>. Independent Philosopher and Writer. Malaysia

Michael O’Rourke<http://independentcolleges.academia.edu/MichaelORourke>. Early Modern Studies, Queer Studies, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Theory. Independent Colleges, Dublin, Ireland

Simon O’Sullivan<http://www.simonosullivan.net/>. Art History, Visual Culture, Art Theory, Psycho/schizoanalysis, Subjectivity, Goldsmiths College. University of London, UK + Plastique Fantastique<http://www.plastiquefantastique.org/>

Eugene Thacker<http://www.newschool.edu/mediastudies/faculty.aspx?id=55483>. New Media/Technology Studies, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Horror. The New School for Social Research, USA

Scott Wilson<http://www.thelondongraduateschool.co.uk/faculty/scott-wilson/>. Cultural Studies, Critical Theory/Psychoanalysis, Audiology, Metal Studies. Kingston University + London Graduate School, UK

Julian Yates<http://www.udel.edu/materialculture/faculty/yates.html>. Early Modern Studies, Material Culture, Object-Oriented Studies, Science Studies. University of Delaware, USA

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FORTHCOMING TITLES>

Wlite: i englisc boc be missenlicum þingum wrætlicum. Vol. 1: Translations from the MS. QV i with Introduction and Paleographical Essay.

Daniel Remein, Translator

Wlite is a translation of an impossible book of early medieval poetry and the invention of relations between a poetic avant-garde in the present and its astonishing medieval future.

This book provides an initial glimpse at the historically impossible discovery and content of the manuscript shelf-marked (in an undisclosed private collection) Quidi Vidi i, which contains: evidence of an alternate ‘school’ of experimental or conceptual Anglo-Saxon poets operating near or in the Danelaw in the ninth and tenth centuries, a tenth-century book discovered in a tiny fishing village in Newfoundland in 2009, evidence of a tenth-century telephonic technology, a recovered micro-chronicle of an alternate history of Norse/Anglo-Saxon relations in pre-Conquest England, a whole alternate dawn of recorded English literary history. It forms an anthology of poems by multiple poets reliant on enigmatic and disruptive syntax and dependent on coterie diction saddled with references so quotidian as to parallel those of the twentieth-century New York School. The poems range from riddles to verse chronicle entries, from elegies to homilies in verse, and the manuscript also includes what appears to be the fragment of a longer Beowulf-style narrative elegy about a very ornamental but somehow sentient iceberg.

In the interests of giving the non-specialist access to these texts as quickly as possible, Volume 1 presents a complete translation of the manuscript, leaving an edition of the Anglo-Saxon text to Volume 2, yet still including a full account of the MS’s paleography, codicology, and the most important of the philological notes and commentary to-come.  Additionally, Remein includes a theoretical introduction, examining the contribution this MS makes to our actual relations with Anglo-Saxon poetry and outlining a radical program for touching, feeling, speaking-with, and hosting Anglo-Saxon poetry in the present. Wlite is a project that speculates about the medieval-ness of the future of avant-garde poetry in English, but it also speculates about the abolition of necessity and of history conceived as object—seeking not to evade but to enter into authentic historical relations in order to measure poetry’s capacity to flout historical and physical totality and impossibility, not with transcendence but with wonder and the sublime.

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The Pervert’s Guide to Reading.

Éamonn Dunne and Michael O’Rourke

The oxymoronically perverse Guide to Reading proceeds by detours and digressions and doesn’t seek to guide anyone anywhere in particular, let alone try to tell you what a pervert is, if there is such a thing. There is a real danger in trying to do that, since the word pervert generally refers to someone who deliberately or otherwise turns or diverts from a regular course. To pervert something, the OED explains, means to misapply, misconstrue or distort, to change direction from a preordained goal, to lead astray, even to misguide someone, to trick them. A pervert is therefore conventionally thought of as a misguided confidante, someone going in the wrong direction and taking you with them. If this book strikes you as a guide, then you are already well on your way and you will require no help from the authors. As if it could be any other way.

Reading is what perverts. All good reading is an event and reading literature and critical theory is therefore a dangerous enterprise, for in truth you never know where it will take you or where you will find yourself. If reading is taken seriously, patiently, as testimony to an encounter with the unheard of, then it will take you where you cannot possibly have known you were going before you began reading. Reading is therefore a voyage of discovery, an exploration of the unknown, an encounter with otherness, an invention, an infinite surprise. This book is an account of situated acts of reading, an a to z of epiphany that takes moments of close reading and productive bafflement as its sole goal and purpose. As such it is to be approached as a non-sequential series of fragments, glosses, keywords, passwords, a hypertext, a choose-your-own-adventure for adults.

In choosing to wander this way and that, The Pervert’s Guide to Reading seeks to expose those myriad connections between critical thinking and reading that run counter to the soporific balm of theory, exposing the very limits of reflection itself. The book chooses no way and leads only to more and more clearings. Its theme is just reading and signals our belief that the only reading worthy of the name is nomadic and that exemplary critical thinking begins and ends in the wilderness of thought. If we are to read perversely, by which we mean to read responsibly, then we can never know where we are going when we really begin to read.

Nomad-Signposts>

A Anastomosis, A-venir; B Blank; C Catachresis; D Destinerrance, Différance; E Event; F Face; G Gloss; H Hospitality; I Irony, Iterability, Irresponse; J Jouissance, Justice; K Kiss, Khora; L Learning; M Metonymy, Mouth; N Necromancy; O Other; P Performativity, Prosopopeia; Q Queer; R Responsibility, Reading; S Suture, Sexual Difference; T Telepathy; U Unworking, Unheimlich; V Vision, Veils, Visor Effect  ; W Worldwideization; X X; Y Yes, Yes; Z Zero.

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thN Lng folk 2go.

The Confraternity of Neoflagellants (Norman Hogg, Sargeant-at-Law and Neil Mullholland, Keeper of the Wardrobe)

The Confraternity of Neoflagellants are lay peoples dedicated to the ascetic application, dissemination and treatment of neomedievalism in contemporary culture. Borne of the new irrationalism of zombie capitalism, they are attuned to the scent of medieval in the creative commons, in the folkmote, the plateau of middle, in the unbundled territoriality of post-post-industrialism. Working with our ensemble of fellow neomedieval travellers, the Confraternity are currently researching the collaborative manufacture of a portable reliquary device, which will meet the hand luggage specifications of major airlines and can also transform into a full-scale gallery exhibition-to-go. This technological reliquary of contemporary relics will tour the earth’s continents, revealing and renewing its treasures in each of its sites of pilgrimage.

thN Lng folk 2go is a fantasy travelogue. This swarm-authored illuminated user’s manual will simultaneously validate and ritualise the reliquary device within a mythical canon, providing a non-linear object biography of the artefacts it contains. Multiple manuscript sources detailing the real and imagined journeys of famous medieval travelers—such as Prester John, Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville and John Capgrave—will be mashed-up with accounts of contemporary international travel reproduced in memetic commercial and fan websites, in film and television, and in popular fiction and travel writing. These traveler’s tales will be reanimated in the adventure block format of the ‘Fighting Fantasy’ role-play novel. True to FF game play, the reader will be prompted by multiple numbered choices giving the impression of progress through time and space. As they follow their quest, however, it will become apparent that only the central pages of the book have been transcribed—all paths now lead back to the perpetual present of the geographic middle ground. It is the epicentre of the book that provides its beginning and end. Here, within this spatiotemporal flux, virtual pilgrims will find an operating manual containing the deployment of its delights.

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On An Ungrounded Earth.

Ben Woodard

Geophilosophy is an odd form of philosophy torn between an overly narrow categorization of thinking and an overly vast project, a strange limitation of the noetic vistas of thought that simultaneously focuses on an entity as complex as the planet on which we live. Geophilosophy also questions the ground of thinking itself, the relation of the inorganic to the capacities and limits of thought. On An Ungrounded Earth constructs an eclectic variant of geophilosophy through an engagement with digging machines, nuclear containment, giant worms, decay, hell, and xenoarcheaology via continental theory (Nietzsche, Deleuze, Schelling, et al.) and various cultural objects such as horror films, videogames, and weird fiction, with special attention to Speculative Realism and the work of Reza Negarestani. In a time where the earth as a whole is threatened by ecological collapse, On An Ungrounded Earth generates a perversely realist account of the earth as a dynamic engine materially and ideally invading and upsetting its human reduction to merely the ground beneath our feet.

Table of Contents>

0: Introduction or Abyss Lessons (Verne-Deleuze-Guattari-Hadot)

1: Wormed Earths or Abyssal Ungroundings and Torsional Porosities

1.1: The Earth is a Living Island (Deleuze-Grant-Nick Land-Lost-Antisomatization)

1.2: Schelling’s Unground (Transcendental Geology-Interiority-Spatiality-Temporality)

1.3: Exaggerated Decay (Negarestani-Hagglund-Twisted Time-Twisted Space)

1.4: Worms or Internal Ungrounding (Conqueror Worm-Dune-Lovecraft-Ligotti)

2: External Ungroundings

2.1: Externality as Spatial Torsion (Star Trek-Whirlpools-Schelling)

2.2: Digging Machines (The Core-DeLanda-The Matrix)

2.3: Planet Demolishing (Doomsday Machine-Corpse Bride-Unicron as War Machine)

2.4: A Brief Note on Directionality (Buckminster Fuller-Vertical and Horizontal Ungrounding-Darkening and Blackening)

3: Regroundings

3.1: Xenoarchaeology (Harmanian Archaeology-Big Dumb Objects-Misread Instructions)

3.2: Strange Temporalities (Meillassoux-Latour-Negarestani)

3.3: Internal and External Potentialities (Monoliths-Hell Raiser-Jane Bennett-Timothy Morton)

3.4: The Organic/Inorganic Blur (Jane Bennett-Ligotti-Deadspace-Superman Returns)

3.5: Geocontainment or The Panic of Burial (Graveyards-Yucca Mountain-Earth After Us-Bldg Blog Geology)

4: Hell Dimensions

4.1: Hell In (>) or Infernology as Geophilosophy (Hell History-Dante)

4.2: Volcanic Orifices (Zielinksi-Nietzsche-Kircher)

4.3: Against Over-Demonization (Iain Grant-The Descent)

4.4: Hell Out (<) (Meillassoux on Event Horizon-Doom 3-Fucking Hell)

5: To Conclude or A Dark Earth, a Black Sun

5.1: Dark Earth (Schelling-Oken-Negarestani)

5.2: Black Sun (Kant-Sunshine-Solar Catastrophe)

Excursus: Nihilismus Autodidactus (Lovecraft-Houllebecq)

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Forthcoming Sub-Channels>

proceedings: books comprising the proceedings of symposia and other event-spaces, such as Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory Atelier I & II

Oliphaunt: a series of books developed by George Washington University’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute

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Here then, is what we would call, in order to call upon it, the unconditional university or the university without condition: the principal right to say everything . . . to publish it.

—Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition”

Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj at uni.coventry.ac.uk<mailto:ademaj at uni.coventry.ac.uk> | Mobile: ++447808738388 | www.openreflections.wordpress.com<http://openreflections.wordpress.com/> | http://twitter.com/Openreflections
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