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Abel Ferrara – A New Perspective on a Cult Auteur
Read more: Abel Ferrara – A New Perspective on a Cult Auteurby Florian Zappe Abel Ferrara is one of the most uncompromising and provocative filmmakers of his generation. From his early […]

Venus Voluptas: The Desire of Gods and Men
Thomas Nail writes about Venus as the desire of gods and men in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. She is not only the external object of desire of the other gods and of men; she is the desire itself.

You Don’t Know Jacques: Speculative Realism, New Materialism, and the Denial of Deconstruction
Fifty years have passed since the publication of Of Grammatology, and the Oxford Literary Review has dedicated its July 2018 issue to marking “The Age of Grammatology”. In my contribution to this issue, Misreading Generalised Writing: from Foucault to Speculative…

Studying sixteenth-century France from inside and outside France
My guest edited special issue of Nottingham French Studies (NFS), explores ‘Text, Knowledge and Wonder in Early Modern France‘, fleshing out new aspects of the sense of wonder that permeates much literature, philosophy, culture, and ritual in the period. As Genevieve…

Rediscovering the Wonder of Philosophy
Wonder is largely absent as a topic of concern to contemporary philosophers. Yet ancient philosophers saw it as the source of what was distinctive in their way of thinking. Plato and Aristotle thought that it was the stirrings of wonder…

James Benning: A Cinema of Our Times
In James Benning’s film Concord Woods (2014), we watch a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin is first shown during the summer solstice, graced by the golden sunlight. The shot lingers for sixty minutes…

OLR 40th Anniversary – Roland Barthes & Robert Young
Welcome to November where, very sadly, we’ve reached the last in our blog series for OLR’s 40th anniversary. To go out with a bang, we have made two articles free to enjoy for a month. Enjoy! First up, we have…
Literature and Psychoanalysis: Open Questions
A special issue of journal, Paragraph, guest edited by Elissa Marder, creatively re-imagines Shoshana Felman’s groundbreaking 1977 volume of Yale French Studies (Nos 55/56), Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, in which Felman opened up the question of…

OLR 40th Anniversary – Jean-Luc Nancy
In 1963, Jean-Luc Nancy tackled the subject of generational silence in his article ‘A Certain Silence’ (republished in OLR in 2005). Nancy, a well-known French philosophy and writer, wrote ‘A Certain Silence’ only a year after he graduated in Philosophy…

For F’s Sake: Theresa May, Falling Letters and the Philosophy of Signs
At the recent Conservative Party conference in Manchester, Theresa May’s speech turned into the stuff of every presenter’s nightmares, something both ironic and apposite, given that her main theme was the return to the ‘British dream’. I don’t want to…