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The Production of Medieval Life Forms in the Work of Gumbrecht

One of the main challenges of understanding medieval literature is that it is not "literature" in the modern sense: in fact the challenge is precisely to get to its existence or actuality. Medieval "literature" is strange and distant in terms of its forms and transmission. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's work on medieval literature serves as a model of what he would call "riskful thinking."

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These People Live Here: Conceptualism and the New Documentary Poetics
A maximalist take on a now commonplace idea that demands the equally commonplace response, “what relationship exists between the texts and the writer?”  And the more immediate question, “who, then, do the texts serve?”  The answer to these questions is at the core of the struggle to develop a documentary poetics adequate to our new and increasingly textual world. 
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Hermeneutic Construction

Why do we do what we do? Why do we labor to read, and teach students to read, slowly, attentively, philologically, and speculatively? What are literary studies’ practical epistemologies? Julie Orlemanski's hypothesis is that answers to questions like these are sedimented in disciplinary activity.

Is There a Text in This Book?
I started using Google Books heavily in 2008 in the last sprint of dissertation writing. How useful it was to be able to chase up a peskily errant quotation or to type “University town: University press” with conviction!