Our faculty members are among the leading voices in their fields. Their ground-breaking research and creative works have taken many forms, including novels, works of literary criticism, edited anthologies, public lectures, documentary films, and poems. True to the spirit of interdisciplinary, creative, and politically engaged inquiry that has long been central to York University’s mission, these publications have earned plaudits from audiences around the world. Learn more about some of our recent publications by browsing the book covers below.
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Featured Publication
Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction
Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay
Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction brings cinema studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis into novel configuration around the concept of negative life, a sundering of human and nonhuman relations. Engaging a philosophical and cinematic corpus that rejects the pastoralism of “entanglement” or “enmeshment,” Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay counter ecocritical pieties and cut a new path for theory. They examine films by Julian Pölsler, Kelly Reichardt, Lee Isaac Chung, Mahesh Mathai, Paul Schrader, and others that exemplify the existential contradictions currently intensifying amid the sixth mass extinction. Each case study testifies formally and thematically to negative life as a structural condition of thought and film. Together, the cases reveal the unlivable dimension of life and art, where form, desire, and nonbelonging tarry with the future-oriented promise of ecostudies—where all that lives connects. Negative Life militates against this promise, showing that faith in connection is a dead end.
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Jonathan Warren
2021
“This admirable new and expanded Norton Critical Edition, with its judiciously selected and expertly curated secondary materials, both historical and ...
Allan Weiss
2021
This study introduces the history, themes, and critical responses to Canadian fantastic literature. Taking a chronological approach, this volume covers ...
Allan Weiss
2021
While scholars have been studying the short story cycle for some time now, this book discusses a form that has ...
Elizabeth Sabiston
2020
In Transcultural Migration in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui: A New Ulysses, Elizabeth Sabiston analyses the dominant theme of transcultural migration, ...
Julia Creet
2020
Since the early 2000s, genealogy has become a lucrative business, an accelerating online industry, a massive data mining project, and ...
Allan Weiss
2019
Telescope is a story cycle about Lawrence Teitel, the protagonist of Living Room (Boheme Press, 2001). The collection deals with seeing distances: above ...
B.W. Powe
2019
A new book by York University Professor B.W. Powe explores the radical transformation of consciousness and sensibility through the advent ...
Agnes Whifield
2019
Ethical questions concerning humans’ relationship to nature have so far gained little attention in Translation Studies, whereas an eco-critical shift ...
Elicia Clements
2019
Arguing that sound is integral to Virginia Woolf's understanding of literature, Elicia Clements highlights how the sonorous enables Woolf to ...
Brett Zimmerman
2019
Edgar Allan Poe: Amateur Psychologist is the "first and foremost" major source of information dedicated to the theme of Poe ...
Marcus Boon
2018
The first anthology to investigate what contemporary notions of practice mean for art, tracing their development and speculating on where ...
Julia Creet
2017
Genealogy is the largest historical enterprise in the world and one of the largest data mining operations, driven by the ...
David Goldstein
2016
This volume focuses on hospitality as a theoretically and historically crucial phenomenon in Shakespeare's work with ramifications for contemporary thought ...
Robert Zacharias
2016
For decades, the field of Mennonite literature has been dominated by the question of Mennonite identity. After Identity: Mennonite Writing in ...
Tina Choi
2016
Anonymous Connections asks how the Victorians understood the ethical, epistemological, and biological implications of social belonging and participation. Specifically, Tina Choi ...
David Goldstein
2016
Eating and drinking—vital to all human beings—were of central importance to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Culinary Shakespeare, the first collection devoted ...