We are thrilled to join Oscar Jansson and David LaRocca in celebrating their new book with Bloomsbury Academic, The Geschlecht Complex: New and Selected Essays on Gender, Genre, and Ontology, which grew out of an SCT seminar in 2017. Thank you to Oscar and David for sharing a few words with us below:
"As one indication among many of the generativity of SCT sessions, a new book—inspired by a summer in Emily Apter’s seminar 'Thinking in Untranslatables' (2017)—will appear from Bloomsbury Academic. The volume, edited by SCT alumni Oscar Jansson and David LaRocca, is entitled The Geschlecht Complex: New and Selected Essays on Gender, Genre, and Ontology. Among the contributors are SCT alumni Lauren DiGiulio, Richard Hajarizadeh, and Caro Pirri.
The contributors center their attention, individually and collectively, on the effects of untranslatability—along the way using the multifarious meanings “Geschlecht” (genre, gender, kinship, sex, species, etc.) as a heuristic—and in the process address some of the most pertinent questions for contemporary studies in the humanities: What happens when texts, concepts, and materials are transferred, displaced, or forcibly moved from one language, tradition, or form to another? What is readily transposed, what is resistant to such shifts, and what emerges as new in the process of attempted translation? Gathering essays that give detailed analyses of specific 'category problems' in literature, theatre, cinema, performing arts, and philosophy, the contributors collectively argue for a mode of thought that is critical in both political and philological senses, and that does not shy away from the contradictory, opaque, or seemingly unsolvable effects of such research. In undertaking this work—negotiating modes, movements, and the meanings of residuals, deficits, and lacunae—the authors of The Geschlecht Complex continue to foster SCT’s 'relentless and undogmatic inquiry' that defined our stimulating summer weeks around a conference table at Cornell University."
Congratulations to Oscar Jansson, David LaRocca, Emily Apter, Lauren DiGiulio, Richard Hajarizadeh, and Caro Pirri.
Read more about the book and pre-order here.
