Peter Schwenger
Biographic Data
| ID | 279893 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Schwenger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Schwenger |
| SIGNATURE | SCHWENGER P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Mount Saint Vincent University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Earworms and the Sound of a Self
Earworms may be experienced as a minor irritation or as a vampiric possession. In the latter case, the rhythm of an earworm obliterates the “personal rhythm” that the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik maintained is present in each individual. That personal rhythm begins with the mother’s heartbeat, followed by the cadence of the mother’s voice, the structures of one’s native language, and the social dynamic. Because this personal rhythm has accompanied …
The Draw of the Mark
The mark is the present moment of writing. It follows that if we give some thought to marks, we will also learn something about writing. The mark takes place in a certain space, from which it distinguishes itself. In George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, a right-angle mark becomes the founding gesture for a study of distinction, space, and the relations between them. The Spencer-Brown mark is presented as the elegant minimum needed to convey the i…
Jan Sawka’s Screen Play
In 1982 the Polish American artist Jan Sawka executed an extraordinary painting, 15 Strange Things on the Clean Morning Sky. Contradicting the title, the sky depicted is covered with sketches and cryptic writing. This suggests a common hallucinatory experience had by pilots navigating an empty sky, the ganzfeld effect. When vision encounters any undifferentiated field, such as total darkness, it will create something to see, in the form of halluc…
Reading's Residue
Though we forget most of the fiction that we read, something remains. This essay asks what forms that "something" might take in readers' memories, a question that recurs in the work of the Australian writer Gerald Murnane. When a novel's plot lines and visualized incidents have faded away, there may still linger an atmosphere peculiar to it, which is evoked by its title
Fabienne Verdier and the Force between Words
The fiftieth anniversary edition of the Petit Robert dictionary has an unusual feature: color inserts of paintings that attempt to depict the force fields shared by twenty-two pairs of words. This interposition is the result of a two-year collaboration between the dictionary’s editor, Alain Rey, and the artist Fabienne Verdier. Together, they are perversely resisting the usual project of dictionaries: to separate words from each other through pre…
Enigmatic Epistolarity: Twombly's Letter of Resignation
Looking at first merely like 38 scribbled pages, Cy Twombly's Letter of Resignation shows how writing's essence, as Roland Barthes argues, is most evident when it is illegible. The series illuminates letter-writing as a process; writing's relation to drawing; and the way the hand's traces reveal the emotions that impelled it
Phenomenology of the Scream
The Obbligato Effect
Beginning with a quirky example by Aris Fioretos, this essay considers the peripheral and unintended associations that accompany any act of reading. After some contextualization in genetic criticism and the thought of Maurice Blanchot, it contrasts two versions of what goes on unconsciously while reading a literary work. The first version follows the author's implicit directions; the second gives free rein to personal associations. It may seem th…
The Dream of Writing (review)
Reviewed by: The Dream of Writing Peter Schwenger (bio) Herschel Farbman, The Other Night: Dream, Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. A profoundly "other" concept of writing is unfolded in Herschel Farbman's The Other Night–other than the commonly accepted notions of writing, and other than the subject from which writing is presumed to emerge. Rather, writing comes out of the night: not the night…
Writing Hypnagogia
Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia
The Dream Narratives of Debris
Consider the so-called decorator crab. As it moves across the sea floor, it covers itself with debris, such as bits of algae and sponge, which it attaches to the small hooked hairs that cover its carapace. Most critical essays proceed in a similar manner. Bristling with snipped-off quotations, footnotes and bibliographical references, they adopt a protective coloration that allows them to pass unharmed through intellectual deep waters. Nor is thi…
Words and the Murder of the Thing
Corpsing the Image
Agrippa , or, the Apocalyptic Book
America's Hiroshima, Hiroshima's America
is Hiroshima, the TV host announced, to the accompaniment of a crescendo of ticking. On the screen flashed the image of a clock with its hands at 8:15, then a mushroom cloud accompanied by the thunder of kettledrums. It was the May 11, 1955, episode of This Is Your Life, and the guest was an ordinary-looking Japanese man introduced as the Reverend Kyoshi Tanimoto. He was asked to tell, step by step, what he had been doing on the morning of August…
Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book
Research Article| October 01 1993 Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book Peter Schwenger Peter Schwenger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1993) 92 (4): 617–626. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-92-4-617 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Peter Schwenger; Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 October 1993; 92 (4): 6…
Writing the Unthinkable
Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth Century Literature
Herrick's Fairy State
Its fairy kingdom, as E. M. Forster once observed,1 provides the only real mythology that England can claim. As such, it has an interest-at times a common one-for both the anthropologist and the critic of English literature. To the anthropologist, the folklore of English fairies offers three related lines of investigation. Most predictable and proper to the discipline is the collecting and classifying of fairy lore, in all the variants that may b…
The Masculine Mode
Writing the Unthinkable
Words and the Murder of the Thing
Corpsing the Image
Phenomenology of the Scream
The Dream Narratives of Debris
Consider the so-called decorator crab. As it moves across the sea floor, it covers itself with debris, such as bits of algae and sponge, which it attaches to the small hooked hairs that cover its carapace. Most critical essays proceed in a similar manner. Bristling with snipped-off quotations, footnotes and bibliographical references, they adopt a protective coloration that allows them to pass unharmed through intellectual deep waters. Nor is thi…
The Masculine Mode
Herrick's Fairy State
Its fairy kingdom, as E. M. Forster once observed,1 provides the only real mythology that England can claim. As such, it has an interest-at times a common one-for both the anthropologist and the critic of English literature. To the anthropologist, the folklore of English fairies offers three related lines of investigation. Most predictable and proper to the discipline is the collecting and classifying of fairy lore, in all the variants that may b…
The Masculine Mode
Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth Century Literature
Writing the Unthinkable
Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book
Research Article| October 01 1993 Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book Peter Schwenger Peter Schwenger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1993) 92 (4): 617–626. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-92-4-617 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Peter Schwenger; Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 October 1993; 92 (4): 6…
Agrippa , or, the Apocalyptic Book
America's Hiroshima, Hiroshima's America
is Hiroshima, the TV host announced, to the accompaniment of a crescendo of ticking. On the screen flashed the image of a clock with its hands at 8:15, then a mushroom cloud accompanied by the thunder of kettledrums. It was the May 11, 1955, episode of This Is Your Life, and the guest was an ordinary-looking Japanese man introduced as the Reverend Kyoshi Tanimoto. He was asked to tell, step by step, what he had been doing on the morning of August…
Corpsing the Image
Words and the Murder of the Thing
The Dream Narratives of Debris
Consider the so-called decorator crab. As it moves across the sea floor, it covers itself with debris, such as bits of algae and sponge, which it attaches to the small hooked hairs that cover its carapace. Most critical essays proceed in a similar manner. Bristling with snipped-off quotations, footnotes and bibliographical references, they adopt a protective coloration that allows them to pass unharmed through intellectual deep waters. Nor is thi…
Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia
Writing Hypnagogia
The Dream of Writing (review)
Reviewed by: The Dream of Writing Peter Schwenger (bio) Herschel Farbman, The Other Night: Dream, Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. A profoundly "other" concept of writing is unfolded in Herschel Farbman's The Other Night–other than the commonly accepted notions of writing, and other than the subject from which writing is presumed to emerge. Rather, writing comes out of the night: not the night…
The Obbligato Effect
Beginning with a quirky example by Aris Fioretos, this essay considers the peripheral and unintended associations that accompany any act of reading. After some contextualization in genetic criticism and the thought of Maurice Blanchot, it contrasts two versions of what goes on unconsciously while reading a literary work. The first version follows the author's implicit directions; the second gives free rein to personal associations. It may seem th…
Phenomenology of the Scream
Enigmatic Epistolarity: Twombly's Letter of Resignation
Looking at first merely like 38 scribbled pages, Cy Twombly's Letter of Resignation shows how writing's essence, as Roland Barthes argues, is most evident when it is illegible. The series illuminates letter-writing as a process; writing's relation to drawing; and the way the hand's traces reveal the emotions that impelled it
Jan Sawka’s Screen Play
In 1982 the Polish American artist Jan Sawka executed an extraordinary painting, 15 Strange Things on the Clean Morning Sky. Contradicting the title, the sky depicted is covered with sketches and cryptic writing. This suggests a common hallucinatory experience had by pilots navigating an empty sky, the ganzfeld effect. When vision encounters any undifferentiated field, such as total darkness, it will create something to see, in the form of halluc…
Reading's Residue
Though we forget most of the fiction that we read, something remains. This essay asks what forms that "something" might take in readers' memories, a question that recurs in the work of the Australian writer Gerald Murnane. When a novel's plot lines and visualized incidents have faded away, there may still linger an atmosphere peculiar to it, which is evoked by its title
Fabienne Verdier and the Force between Words
The fiftieth anniversary edition of the Petit Robert dictionary has an unusual feature: color inserts of paintings that attempt to depict the force fields shared by twenty-two pairs of words. This interposition is the result of a two-year collaboration between the dictionary’s editor, Alain Rey, and the artist Fabienne Verdier. Together, they are perversely resisting the usual project of dictionaries: to separate words from each other through pre…
The Draw of the Mark
The mark is the present moment of writing. It follows that if we give some thought to marks, we will also learn something about writing. The mark takes place in a certain space, from which it distinguishes itself. In George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, a right-angle mark becomes the founding gesture for a study of distinction, space, and the relations between them. The Spencer-Brown mark is presented as the elegant minimum needed to convey the i…
Earworms and the Sound of a Self
Earworms may be experienced as a minor irritation or as a vampiric possession. In the latter case, the rhythm of an earworm obliterates the “personal rhythm” that the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik maintained is present in each individual. That personal rhythm begins with the mother’s heartbeat, followed by the cadence of the mother’s voice, the structures of one’s native language, and the social dynamic. Because this personal rhythm has accompanied …
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