Earth: A Wandering

Earth is the name of our planet and of an element from which we emerge. Pre-modern and non-modern traditions show us how to live at this conjunction better than many modern simulacra. This reflection examines in particular early medieval Christian tradition, set in dialogue with the emerging twenty-first-century field of ecosemiotics, while wandering from the Susquehanna Valley to Middle-earth.

The Lily and the Lotus: Notes on Translation

This critical/creative project considers Stéphane Mallarmé’s critical poems in his 1897 Divagations as an invitation to explore the notion of criticism and the relationship between the conceptual and the nonconceptual aspects of writing and thinking. Informed by Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face, Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of theTranslator” and the myth of Orpheus, I consider ways to approach that which may not be said or thought by following Mallarmé’s method of combining poetry and criticism to create a wandering, unclassifiable text where we may imagine the nonconceptual as a remoteness, as the presence of an absence.