ABOUT THIS BOOK

Collaboratively reassesses Barbara Johnson’s legacy as a reader and thinker with an eye to contemporary conditions

Across an archive of essays on abortion and race, Mallarmé and Melville, feminist philosophy, rhetorical device, and pedagogical method, Barbara Johnson built a legacy of thought whose energies reverberate into the present. This collected volume gathers writers and critics from a range of North American higher educational settings to engage with this essential but still often underappreciated critic in a time of renewed and deepening crisis.

In Zoom meetings and shared essays, across a virtualized map of today’s academic and para-academic worlds, the group assessed how the rolling catastrophes of late neoliberalism continue to stage the sort of analogy Johnson herself would highlight between patriarchy, capitalism, ecocide, and other forms of structural violence. Emerging from that assemblage, this experimental collection tracks Johnson’s efforts to link literary reading with concrete matters of personhood and care at a moment when the very system of higher education that enabled Johnson’s work in the 1980s and 1990s faces existential threat. The frozen record of a live experience, the book is an impure procedure, tangled in the idiom of its own unfolding: a temporary culmination of an ongoing collaborative undertaking that will always remain unfinished.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

DEVIN M. GAROFALO is an assistant professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Cosmologies of the Human: Worlds Unmanned and the editor of Victorian Poetry.

NATHAN K. HENSLEY is professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author, most recently, of Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse.

REVIEWS

“As the brilliant contributors to this shimmering compendium make clear: Barbara Johnson speaks to and for us—still. To read this team’s essays is to see Johnson-inspired and -driven deconstructive literary reading deftly, defiantly, and decisively connect with our most pressing political and social issues. This collection is simply vital. A must-read.” —Gregory Jones-Katz, Institute for General and Comparative Literature at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

“Barbara Johnson’s lapidary essays on rhetoric and poetry might not seem the most obvious weapons in an attack on the degradation of democracy, education, and transgender rights. But the authors of The Barbara Johnson Collective, drawing on the energy of collaboration, have made a passionate and persuasive case. This book makes clear why language, thought, and writing matter, now more than ever.” —Heather K. Love, University of Pennsylvania

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures

Introduction: Barbara Johnson Still

Devin M. Garofalo and Nathan K. Hensley

Part I: Personhood And Its Others

Chapter 1: Speaking, Non-Binarily

Sarah Dowling

Chapter 2: Monster / Self / Dobbs

Margaret Ronda

Chapter 3: On Critical Hauntings: Three Movements

Rachel Feder

Rereading 1: Put Another Way

Ria Banerjee, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Nathan K. Hensley

Part II: Figure In the Domain of Praxis

Chapter 4: Barbara Johnson, Sylvia Wynter, And Anthropomorphosis

Devin M. Garofalo

Chapter 5: Reading With

Brian Glavey

Chapter 6: Metaphor, Metonymy, And Style; or, Barbara Johnson’s Queer Relations

Cara L. Lewis

Chapter 7: Decidability

Johanna Winant

Rereading 2: Never Now

Sarah Dowling, Rachel Feder, Margaret Ronda

Part III: Pedagogies Of Surprise

Chapter 8: Totality In/And Deconstruction

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Chapter 9: The Obverse of Knowledge

Nathan K. Hensley

Chapter 10: Barbara Johnson And Virginia Woolf, Or Reading Within Institutions

Ria Banerjee

Rereading 3: On Turning and Being Turned

Devin M. Garofalo, Brian Glavey, Cara Lewis, Johanna Winant

Postscript: Is Thinking Still for Me?

Erin Spampinato

List of Contributors