Branka Arsić
Biographic Data
| ID | 813854 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Branka Arsić |
| GIVEN NAMES | Branka |
| FAMILY NAME | Arsić |
| SIGNATURE | ARSIĆ B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Excavations: On Glissant's Trees
Regarding the Commonality of Life: Theses on Vitalism and Ecology
Research Article| March 01 2017 Regarding the Commonality of Life: Theses on Vitalism and Ecology Branka Arsić Branka Arsić Columbia University [email protected] Branka Arsić is Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in literatures of the nineteenth-century Americas and their scientific, philosophical, and religious contexts. She is the author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vita…
Materialist Vitalism or Pathetic Fallacy
My essay revises the inherited understanding of Ruskin's theory of pathetic fallacy by positing that his ideas are close to theories that oppose any strict division of phenomena into persons and things. To elaborate this point, the essay investigates Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," where inanimate things are rendered animate, claiming that such instances are far from being pathetically fallacious and, also, that Poe's ontology is in accor…
Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau
Branka Arsić shows that Thoreau developed a theory of vitalism in response to his brother’s death. Through grieving, he came to see life as a generative force into which everything dissolves and reemerges. This reinterpretation, based on sources overlooked by critics, explains many of Thoreau’s more idiosyncratic habits and obsessions.
Bird Relics
Poetry as flowering of life forms: Rancière's reading of Emerson
The essay discusses the shift in Rancière's theory concerning the aesthetic regime discussed in Aisthesis. Whereas in previous work Rancière treated the novel as the genre that best embodies his understanding of the modern, in Aisthesis poetry assumes such a role, and is afforded the power to express its historical situation. For him the poetics formulated by Emerson announces the arrival of the modern aesthetic regime while simultaneously distan…
Our Things
Research Article| June 01 2014 Our Things: Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives Branka Arsić Branka Arsić Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2014) 23 (1): 157–181. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.23.1.0157 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Branka Arsić; Our Things: Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives. Qui Parle 1 June 2014; 23 (1): 157–181. doi: https://doi.org/10…
Veering, A Theory of Literature
The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America
Book Review| January 01 2013 The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America Seeman, Erik R., The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 163 pp. Branka Arsić Branka Arsić Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2013) 19 (1): 143–144. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-1815926 Cite I…
Mary Rowlandson and the Phenomenology of Patient Suffering
This article is a contribution to the fifth part of the Common Knowledge symposium on forms of quietism. Responding to a sense that prior installments of the symposium had overlooked the phenomenology of quietism, of patient suffering, the essay details the daily life of Mary Rowlandson's captivity during King Philip's War in the 17th century and, in particular, her strategies for surviving the breakdown of every basic taxonomy that had until the…
Decorate the Dungeon: A Dialogue in Place of an Introduction
In the place of an introduction to part 5 of the Common Knowledge symposium on forms of quietism, the journal's editor and one of its longtime columnists discuss, in dialogue format, the case of Thomas More. Could he have evaded martyrdom at the hands of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell? One discussant argues that More could not have done so without contemptibly abandoning his principles and surrendering fully to despotism. The other discussant dis…
The Experimental Ordinary: Deleuze on Eating and Anorexic Elegance
The paper discusses Deleuze's concept of the feminine through exploration of the questions of eating, cooking, and specifically anorexia, as well as an ‘anorexic relation’ to fashion and dressing. It argues that anorexia should be understood as a micro-political experimentation in fashioning one's own body on its flight to becoming woman. In accordance with Deleuze's ontology of the surface, the anorexic body can be seen as the invention of the B…
Melville's Celibatory Machines \-\- Bartleby, Pierre, and The Paradise of Bachelors
Branka Arsić's essay analyzes the complex relations among law, writing, and marriage described by Melville in Pierre, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," and Bartleby, the Scrivener. The major argument of the essay is that Melville conceives of both writing and marriage as "celibatory machines," cut in two by the power of the law, which explains the obsessive return to the question of the law in his writing. The celibatory mach…
On the Dark Side of the Twilight
The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America
Book Review| January 01 2013 The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America Seeman, Erik R., The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 163 pp. Branka Arsić Branka Arsić Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2013) 19 (1): 143–144. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-1815926 Cite I…
On the Dark Side of the Twilight
On the Dark Side of the Twilight
Melville's Celibatory Machines \-\- Bartleby, Pierre, and The Paradise of Bachelors
Branka Arsić's essay analyzes the complex relations among law, writing, and marriage described by Melville in Pierre, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," and Bartleby, the Scrivener. The major argument of the essay is that Melville conceives of both writing and marriage as "celibatory machines," cut in two by the power of the law, which explains the obsessive return to the question of the law in his writing. The celibatory mach…
The Experimental Ordinary: Deleuze on Eating and Anorexic Elegance
The paper discusses Deleuze's concept of the feminine through exploration of the questions of eating, cooking, and specifically anorexia, as well as an ‘anorexic relation’ to fashion and dressing. It argues that anorexia should be understood as a micro-political experimentation in fashioning one's own body on its flight to becoming woman. In accordance with Deleuze's ontology of the surface, the anorexic body can be seen as the invention of the B…
Mary Rowlandson and the Phenomenology of Patient Suffering
This article is a contribution to the fifth part of the Common Knowledge symposium on forms of quietism. Responding to a sense that prior installments of the symposium had overlooked the phenomenology of quietism, of patient suffering, the essay details the daily life of Mary Rowlandson's captivity during King Philip's War in the 17th century and, in particular, her strategies for surviving the breakdown of every basic taxonomy that had until the…
Decorate the Dungeon: A Dialogue in Place of an Introduction
In the place of an introduction to part 5 of the Common Knowledge symposium on forms of quietism, the journal's editor and one of its longtime columnists discuss, in dialogue format, the case of Thomas More. Could he have evaded martyrdom at the hands of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell? One discussant argues that More could not have done so without contemptibly abandoning his principles and surrendering fully to despotism. The other discussant dis…
Veering, A Theory of Literature
The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America
Book Review| January 01 2013 The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America Seeman, Erik R., The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 163 pp. Branka Arsić Branka Arsić Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2013) 19 (1): 143–144. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-1815926 Cite I…
Our Things
Research Article| June 01 2014 Our Things: Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives Branka Arsić Branka Arsić Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2014) 23 (1): 157–181. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.23.1.0157 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Branka Arsić; Our Things: Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives. Qui Parle 1 June 2014; 23 (1): 157–181. doi: https://doi.org/10…
Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau
Branka Arsić shows that Thoreau developed a theory of vitalism in response to his brother’s death. Through grieving, he came to see life as a generative force into which everything dissolves and reemerges. This reinterpretation, based on sources overlooked by critics, explains many of Thoreau’s more idiosyncratic habits and obsessions.
Bird Relics
Poetry as flowering of life forms: Rancière's reading of Emerson
The essay discusses the shift in Rancière's theory concerning the aesthetic regime discussed in Aisthesis. Whereas in previous work Rancière treated the novel as the genre that best embodies his understanding of the modern, in Aisthesis poetry assumes such a role, and is afforded the power to express its historical situation. For him the poetics formulated by Emerson announces the arrival of the modern aesthetic regime while simultaneously distan…
Regarding the Commonality of Life: Theses on Vitalism and Ecology
Research Article| March 01 2017 Regarding the Commonality of Life: Theses on Vitalism and Ecology Branka Arsić Branka Arsić Columbia University [email protected] Branka Arsić is Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in literatures of the nineteenth-century Americas and their scientific, philosophical, and religious contexts. She is the author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vita…
Materialist Vitalism or Pathetic Fallacy
My essay revises the inherited understanding of Ruskin's theory of pathetic fallacy by positing that his ideas are close to theories that oppose any strict division of phenomena into persons and things. To elaborate this point, the essay investigates Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," where inanimate things are rendered animate, claiming that such instances are far from being pathetically fallacious and, also, that Poe's ontology is in accor…
Excavations: On Glissant's Trees
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