Christian Thorne
Biographic Data
| ID | 3858192 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian Thorne |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | Thorne |
| SIGNATURE | THORNE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Williams College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Telling Stories about Climate Change: Maritime Fiction and the Global Novel
It is proving difficult to write novels about climate change, especially nonspeculative ones, and classical narratology goes a long way toward explaining why this would be. Many of the basic techniques of novel writing seem ill-suited to the distributed nonevent that is climate change. This essay considers recent work on climate fiction by Ursula Heise and Amitav Ghosh before recommending maritime literature as one possible genre whose distinctiv…
Immanuel Kant’s Manifesto for Dad Rock
How to Read the New Histories of Empire
Through a detailed consideration of Richard White’s Middle Ground, the essay identifies a few important features of imperial history writing over the last thirty years: academic apologies for empire have become commonplace. A conspicuously large number of them are left-liberal in orientation, housed in fields with strong anti-imperialist credentials. They are nominally pro-indigenous, Americanizing, generically comic, and silently theory-laden
Conspiracy? What Conspiracy
A wide-ranging interview with Philip Mirowski, in which he, among other things, clarifies his position on the critique of science, issues several challenges to the contemporary Left, and explains why his account of the Neoliberal Thought Collective is not a conspiracy theory
Toward a Sociology of Nescience
The essay surveys the surprising intellectual affinities between Hayekian neoliberalism and the work of one of its leading critics, Philip Mirowski. One of the chief characteristics of neoliberalism, on Mirowski’s account, is its philosophical skepticism or antifoundationalism—its conviction that human beings can know very little about the economy and its hostility, therefore, to any economics that presents itself as scientific. Such skepticism a…
The Old Adam, After All
Hill and Montag’s The Other Adam Smith confirms many of the Left’s established positions on Adam Smith, but does so by framing the philosopher as a standard-bearer of the Scottish Enlightenment, and not just as an arch-capitalist and proto-Hayekian. The book makes a strong case, but also strong-arms its readers into choosing between the Scottish Enlighteners and the Spinozism that its authors prefer
Fulfilling the Fascist Lie
The virtue of a psychological account of National Socialism is that it invites us to think of fascism as something other than an ideology. A person doesn’t become a fascist by reciting a creed or subscribing to a set doctrine. Even so, The Authoritarian Personality draws a caricature of the fascist as character type and so fails to comprehend fascism as a many-sided and contradictory movement. Adorno’s contribution to the volume reads like the Di…
William Cowper, the Georgic, and the Unwritten Literature of the 1780s
Eighteenth-century English poetry, epic in technique and idiom even when not epic in scale, has some unusual ways of telling stories on a multicontinental scale—stories, that is, that are not confined to localities nor even to nations. This is a feat that novels struggle to replicate. The georgic is especially interesting in this regard, since the genre is officially agrarian and provincial—the poetry of a certain crop or USDA growing zone. And y…
Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800–2000
Here is as straightforward an argument as Adorno ever made: If you wish to find an art that is adequate to mass death—an art, that is, that can do right by the Apache in the 1880s and the Armenians in the 1910s and the Palestinians now—you have a few different options. You might consider a documentary and testimonial art, one that gets the word out, peeling back blankets of denial and obfuscation and palm-bearing oblivion—a “photograph of the dis…
The Time without Happiness
Book Review| April 01 2013 The Time without Happiness Soni, Vivasvan. Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 2010). Pp. ix+ 552. $49.95 Christian Thorne Christian Thorne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2013) 37 (2): 140–150. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-2081048 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Sit…
The Sea Is Not a Place; Or, Putting the World Back into World Literature
This essay poses the question, Is it possible to write a novel about the entire world? Is it possible to tell stories whose narrators travel from continent to continent? If yes, why are there so few of them? The essay proceeds in three acts: First, it assesses the accounts of world literature given by Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti, explaining their achievement while also identifying where each finally subtracts the world from world literatu…
The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment
The Antinomy of Antinomies
Research Article| August 01 2005 The Antinomy of Antinomies Christian Thorne Christian Thorne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2005) 32 (3): 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-32-3-81 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Christian Thorne; The Antinomy of Antinomies. boundary 2 1 August 2005; 32 (3): 81–96. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-3…
Providence in the Early Novel, or Accident If You Please
Christian Thorne is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University.
The Revolutionary Energy of the Outmoded
April 01 2003 The Revolutionary Energy of the Outmoded Christian Thorne Christian Thorne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Christian Thorne Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2003 October (2003) (104): 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1162/016228703322031721 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter …
The Lonesome Capitalist
Research Article| October 01 1997 The Lonesome Capitalist Günter Grass; Günter Grass Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Christian Thorne Christian Thorne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1997) 96 (4): 703–713. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-96-4-703 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Günter Grass, Christian …
The Revolutionary Energy of the Outmoded
April 01 2003 The Revolutionary Energy of the Outmoded Christian Thorne Christian Thorne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Christian Thorne Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2003 October (2003) (104): 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1162/016228703322031721 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter …
William Cowper, the Georgic, and the Unwritten Literature of the 1780s
Eighteenth-century English poetry, epic in technique and idiom even when not epic in scale, has some unusual ways of telling stories on a multicontinental scale—stories, that is, that are not confined to localities nor even to nations. This is a feat that novels struggle to replicate. The georgic is especially interesting in this regard, since the genre is officially agrarian and provincial—the poetry of a certain crop or USDA growing zone. And y…
The Sea Is Not a Place; Or, Putting the World Back into World Literature
This essay poses the question, Is it possible to write a novel about the entire world? Is it possible to tell stories whose narrators travel from continent to continent? If yes, why are there so few of them? The essay proceeds in three acts: First, it assesses the accounts of world literature given by Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti, explaining their achievement while also identifying where each finally subtracts the world from world literatu…
The Lonesome Capitalist
Research Article| October 01 1997 The Lonesome Capitalist Günter Grass; Günter Grass Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Christian Thorne Christian Thorne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1997) 96 (4): 703–713. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-96-4-703 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Günter Grass, Christian …
Providence in the Early Novel, or Accident If You Please
Christian Thorne is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University.
The Revolutionary Energy of the Outmoded
April 01 2003 The Revolutionary Energy of the Outmoded Christian Thorne Christian Thorne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Christian Thorne Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2003 October (2003) (104): 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1162/016228703322031721 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter …
The Antinomy of Antinomies
Research Article| August 01 2005 The Antinomy of Antinomies Christian Thorne Christian Thorne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2005) 32 (3): 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-32-3-81 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Christian Thorne; The Antinomy of Antinomies. boundary 2 1 August 2005; 32 (3): 81–96. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-3…
The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment
The Time without Happiness
Book Review| April 01 2013 The Time without Happiness Soni, Vivasvan. Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 2010). Pp. ix+ 552. $49.95 Christian Thorne Christian Thorne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2013) 37 (2): 140–150. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-2081048 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Sit…
The Sea Is Not a Place; Or, Putting the World Back into World Literature
This essay poses the question, Is it possible to write a novel about the entire world? Is it possible to tell stories whose narrators travel from continent to continent? If yes, why are there so few of them? The essay proceeds in three acts: First, it assesses the accounts of world literature given by Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti, explaining their achievement while also identifying where each finally subtracts the world from world literatu…
Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800–2000
Here is as straightforward an argument as Adorno ever made: If you wish to find an art that is adequate to mass death—an art, that is, that can do right by the Apache in the 1880s and the Armenians in the 1910s and the Palestinians now—you have a few different options. You might consider a documentary and testimonial art, one that gets the word out, peeling back blankets of denial and obfuscation and palm-bearing oblivion—a “photograph of the dis…
William Cowper, the Georgic, and the Unwritten Literature of the 1780s
Eighteenth-century English poetry, epic in technique and idiom even when not epic in scale, has some unusual ways of telling stories on a multicontinental scale—stories, that is, that are not confined to localities nor even to nations. This is a feat that novels struggle to replicate. The georgic is especially interesting in this regard, since the genre is officially agrarian and provincial—the poetry of a certain crop or USDA growing zone. And y…
The Old Adam, After All
Hill and Montag’s The Other Adam Smith confirms many of the Left’s established positions on Adam Smith, but does so by framing the philosopher as a standard-bearer of the Scottish Enlightenment, and not just as an arch-capitalist and proto-Hayekian. The book makes a strong case, but also strong-arms its readers into choosing between the Scottish Enlighteners and the Spinozism that its authors prefer
Fulfilling the Fascist Lie
The virtue of a psychological account of National Socialism is that it invites us to think of fascism as something other than an ideology. A person doesn’t become a fascist by reciting a creed or subscribing to a set doctrine. Even so, The Authoritarian Personality draws a caricature of the fascist as character type and so fails to comprehend fascism as a many-sided and contradictory movement. Adorno’s contribution to the volume reads like the Di…
Conspiracy? What Conspiracy
A wide-ranging interview with Philip Mirowski, in which he, among other things, clarifies his position on the critique of science, issues several challenges to the contemporary Left, and explains why his account of the Neoliberal Thought Collective is not a conspiracy theory
Toward a Sociology of Nescience
The essay surveys the surprising intellectual affinities between Hayekian neoliberalism and the work of one of its leading critics, Philip Mirowski. One of the chief characteristics of neoliberalism, on Mirowski’s account, is its philosophical skepticism or antifoundationalism—its conviction that human beings can know very little about the economy and its hostility, therefore, to any economics that presents itself as scientific. Such skepticism a…
Immanuel Kant’s Manifesto for Dad Rock
How to Read the New Histories of Empire
Through a detailed consideration of Richard White’s Middle Ground, the essay identifies a few important features of imperial history writing over the last thirty years: academic apologies for empire have become commonplace. A conspicuously large number of them are left-liberal in orientation, housed in fields with strong anti-imperialist credentials. They are nominally pro-indigenous, Americanizing, generically comic, and silently theory-laden
Telling Stories about Climate Change: Maritime Fiction and the Global Novel
It is proving difficult to write novels about climate change, especially nonspeculative ones, and classical narratology goes a long way toward explaining why this would be. Many of the basic techniques of novel writing seem ill-suited to the distributed nonevent that is climate change. This essay considers recent work on climate fiction by Ursula Heise and Amitav Ghosh before recommending maritime literature as one possible genre whose distinctiv…
History (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Art (7 works) · History (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Law (4 works)