We discuss the broad organizational power-structures that regulate the virtues of doing science, the values upheld, and the introduction of novices into the scientific community. Aristotle’s scheme of knowledge is used to introduce the relevance of a value-laden praxis, of phronesis, which is the virtue of ‘doing’. We discuss these ideological issues in the context of classic philosophical notions put forth by Hannah Arendt (and her work on action) and Bruno Latour (and his work on praxis, actor networks, and inscription devices). This chapter thus serves as a broad foundation for analyses of the ways in which scientific virtues are deeply intertwined with the activities of psychological science. It sketches psychology as action-based and virtue-laden, based on the notion of a dynamic praxis consisting of interacting agents.

The ascendancy of new materialist theory in the humanities since the turn of the century parallels the rise of anthropogenic climate change as a central political concern. This is not a coincidence: climate change exposes the limitations of both social constructivism and scientific realism. This essay examines the new materialist approaches to climate change proposed by Bruno Latour, Astrid Neimanis, and Rachel Walker Loewen. In Latour’s account, the categorical distinction between nature and culture has prevented climate science from openly embracing the political task of assembling a new polity encompassing both human and nonhuman entities. Neimanis and Walker Loewen, on the other hand, argue that the abstract quality of climate science is the principal reason for society’s failure to respond to anthropogenic climate change, and suggest that it must be reconceived in terms of concrete entanglements between human and nonhuman bodies. In placing their emphasis on embodied experience, however, both approaches fail to account for the rhetorical frames and the larger dynamics of communication that shape how climate change becomes socially relevant.

If digital technology requires us to completely rethink the fundamental axes of our human existence: time, space and causality, we have to ask the following questions: How are we to conceive of these three axes today when studying and teaching languages as a human activity? How can learning another language help us better understand the symbolic complexity of the human condition? And how can it enable us to engage with symbolic power and respond to symbolic violence? I discuss six scholars that have responded to these questions in recent decades: Judith Butler and her reflections on the time-bound political promise of the performative; Michel de Certeau and his thoughts on the space of strategies and tactics in everyday life; Mikhail Bakhtin on the time/space chronotope and the carnivalesque; Pierre Bourdieu and his Pascalian meditations on causality and the habitus; Alastair Pennycook and Bruno Latour on post-humanist thinking.

Sets out the book’s critical framework and methodology. Outlines the current scholarly consensus regarding the Posthomerica and its place within imperial Greek epic. Emphasises the strong relationship between these readings and the ‘supplementary’ poetics attached to Roman, and particularly silver Latin, poetry.It then demonstrates the ways in which this book will depart from these readings. Introduces the concept of the ‘poetics of the interval’ as the key aspect of this departure: Quintus’ new formative poetics. Sets this poetics within and against various relevant traditions: pseudoepigraphia, the epic cycle, Latin literature. And sets up the political and cultural implications of this new framework: shows Quintus’ politically engaged interaction with imperial Greek performance culture,declamation and rhetoric, and other imperial Greek epic. Ends by establishing the ‘terms of engagement’: the book’s approach to key concepts such as intertextuality, allusion, postmodernism and ‘metapoetics’.

This chapter argues that, despite its reputation, deconstruction constitutes an ethical practice that preserves the possibility of unpredictable transformation. Theorists such as Rita Felski and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claim that critique corrodes the capacity to make affirmative judgments in particular contexts. They echo early critics who associate deconstruction with a pure play that precludes responsible rationality. I argue instead that deconstruction constitutes a discipline of openness to the unexpected. On Derrida’s diagnosis, metaphysical certainty aims to assuage the anxiety that arises in an unstable world; his concern is that this buys some comfort while closing the individual to others. In contrast, deconstructive negativity enables another kind of affirmation – uncertain, subject to revision, and sustained by hope.

The introduction opens by asking the reader to rethink modernism’s relationship to liberal world order and liberalism itself. It outlines the involvement of a wide range of modernists with mechanisms of liberal world governance. After defining interwar liberalism and laying out the central terms and methodology of the book, the introduction engages that framework in a reading of James Joyce’s first draft of “A Portrait.” The introduction concludes by formalizing the argument that will be developed in the following readings: modernists ordered and were ordered by the liberal institutions of the interwar period, a dialectical relationship that informs the politics and aesthetics of their time and ours.