The King of Tars is story about proof. So is Guy de Cambrai’s Barlaam and Josephat. And likewise an account of a divining ape at the early 17th-century…
Today, my “Problems in Posthumanism” graduate seminar worked on Alexander and Dindimus, Montaigne on Cannibals, Petrarch on the Canary Islands (well, we at least read it),…
Every literature academic has an origin story, the book or poem that captured them & ruined them for other study. Mine’s ‘The Hollow Men.’ I…
Nearly two years ago, I announced: For several years I’ve wanted to write an essay on the way that ‘mute beasts’ communicate through gesture in…
Thinking about animals and violence and the middle ages tends to follow one of two routes. The first holds that medieval people were more “brutal”…
It is not uncommonly said that habitats generated by internal combustion engines and electronics lack the crowds of animals common to what are often called…
The first biography of Thomas Aquinas had the job of turning this Christian Aristotelian and theological systematizer into a saint. As ideas themselves, sadly, cannot be…
“The more strange it was to read in a previously-mentioned article by Huxley the following paraphrase of a well-known sentence of Rousseau: ‘The first man…
Part I: Babel The myth of the existence of a single originary language dates at least to the Biblical story of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). From…
by KARL STEEL As part of the process of assembling, expanding, and (re)writing the material for Book 2, I’ve returned to the problem of “feral…
