The Mourning Cloak
transformation & rebirth
recent posts
- Birthquake: The Literary After-Shocks of the Great Kantō Earthquake in Arthur M. Mitchell’s “Disruptions of Daily Life.”
- Looking Good: A Review of Yasuda’s Beauty Matters.
- Unanchored Reason: Gaston Bachelard and Surrealist Philosophy.
- (Positive) Vibrations
- Loving in the Wreckage: Salvaging Liberal Theology.
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Works Reviewed: Arthur M. Mitchell Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. 266 pages. The power of modernist fiction, contends Arthur M. Mitchell, lies in its ability to “make us aware of the discursive structures that undergird the imaginative relationship we have to our social world.” The…
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Anri Yasuda’s Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics 1890-1930. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024 Of the three transcendentals of classical philosophy, which one has suffered, at the hands of modernity, as beauty has suffered? Immanuel Kant famously clipped the wings of the imagination, afraid that her fecundity should compromise the…
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Republication of Review from The Chaleur Bay Review. This is one of my previous reviews, from an older iteration of the site, under the name The Chaleur Bay Review of Books. It was one of my favourites, and I thought it might be nice to reintroduce it to the new site. Works Reviewed. Kotowicz, Zbigniew. Gaston Bachelard:…
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On Music as Material Practice of Vibration. Works Reviewed. Marcus Boon The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice. Durham, Duke University Press, 2022. 279 pages. In the song “Johnny Was,” the great Bob Marley paints us a picture, in sound, of a grieving mother whose son has been caught in the crossfire of…
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Works Reviewed. Garry Dorrien In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2020. Theology, particularly in its contemporary iterations, is always involved in the process of salvage work, in the sense that it must both recuperate and reinvent a way forward out of the fraught legacy of its history.…
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Antiopia’s Kitchen Party ~Joshua Paetkau. One of my favourite quotes, from Charles Peguy, goes something as follows: “Nothing is as old as today’s news. If you want to read something new go to the Odyssey and the Iliad of Homer.” Our age of fast food and fast news is unsatisfying to the storied souls of…
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What makes a human human? Descartes famously offered cogitation as a solution to the question of existence, but as we began to develop thinking machines, new questions began to emerge. “Can machines think?” Alan Turing asked, in the 1950s and proposed that, thought being such a difficult concept, we could try to answer the question…
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The book begins with a body, alive, but registering a deep visceral shock. A blow that is a cultural, political blow, but is experienced at the corporeal level. It is the story, and the body, of the former Tunisian dignitary Husayn Ibn ‘Abdallah who, like so many others experienced ‘the physical and mental traumas of…
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History of the book and history of religion are two of my areas of interest, and Spreading Buddha’s Word in East Asia: The Formation and Transformation of the Chinese Buddhist Canon is an impressive work of scholarship which bridges those fields to bring to life the story of the compilation of one of the world’s…
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El fascismo se cura leyendo, y el racismo se cura viajando Miguel de Unamuno. Unsourced quote. During the fascist years of Franco, in Spain, the Basque novelist Miguel de Unamuno was once presiding over a meeting at the University of Salamanca. The meeting was attended by people of diverse political backgrounds, including General Millan-Astray. The…
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