Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry | Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop

Please join us for a workshop with Dr. Jonathan P. Eburne, Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies at the Pennsylvania State University where he will discuss his forthcoming book Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry (University of Minnesota Press, 2025).

We will pre-circulate two chapters from the book prior to the workshop. To receive this selection, please email Tara Kraft-Ainsworth: tara.kraftainsworth@uga.edu. This workshop will be an enriching dialogue about the nuances, curiosity, and forms that underly scholarship and its intersecting fields of study and process. Read what you can but come regardless! 

Book Description from the University of Minnesota Press website:

Idiosyncratic essays use their “exploded” forms to examine how inquiry functions

Insect galls, time, memory systems, orgone energy, and a bookstore that doesn’t yet exist. These disparate topics have persistently fascinated scholar Jonathan P. Eburne, yet each defied his previous efforts at classification through scholarly writing, resulting in five essays suspended in process. In Exploded Views, Eburne returns to these essays with the metaphorical tool of the exploded-view diagram, expanding them into entirely new, hybrid forms that unpack their inspirations and trace the wayward paths they followed.

An experiment into the nature of inquiry that spelunks, rather than shies from, the rabbit holes of scholarly curiosity, each essay gives way to sidelights and dilations to reveal the palimpsest of knowledge hiding beneath the surface of the academic form. A book about process—the process of turning ideas into things, and vice versa, as well as the particular tendency for research, scholarly inquiry, and critical writing to come apart and go awry—Exploded Views is a refreshing exploration of how the tools of creative critical thinking work at their most basic level.

Reflecting on the methods of scholarly knowledge production and the contextual factors that shape new ideas, Eburne boldly replaces the seamlessness of the finished manuscript with the friction and even messiness of the incomplete, inviting readers to think in new and invigorating ways.
 

Speaker Bio

Jonathan P. Eburne is Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is Director of Undergraduate Studies in Comparative Literature. He was born in Massachusetts but has lived in Pennsylvania for over 25 years. He is part of the team launching a new nonprofit bookstore and culture space in central Pennsylvania, called The Print Factory (www.printfactorybellefonte.org).

Eburne’s teaching and scholarly interests revolve around the histories and activities of experimental artistic groups and movements; more generally, his work focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and the arts, transnational intellectual relations, and literary and cultural theory. He is the author of Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming), a book about the process of turning ideas into things, and vice-versa. He is also the author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), which received the 2020 James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, and Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Cornell University Press, 2008). He is co-editor of five additional books: The Cambridge History of Surrealist Poetry (with Anna Watz; Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons (with Benjamin Schreier; Indiana University Press, 2017); Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (with Catriona McAra; Manchester University Press, 2017);The Year’s Work in the Oddball Archive (with Judith Roof; Indiana University Press, 2016); and Paris, Modern Fiction, and the Black Atlantic (with Jeremy Braddock; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). He collaborated with Stacy Klein on her book Collectivizing Art: Writings and Provocations on Double Edge Theatre (Bloomsbury; forthcoming). He is currently working on a number of other projects as well, including a book on the global circulation of surrealism titled The Great Surrealist Bargain Basement.

He is founding co-editor (with Amy J. Elias) and former Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning ASAP/Journal, the journal of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. He is currently a Contributing Editor for the journal’s online platform, ASAP/J. Eburne has also edited or co-edited special issues of Modern Fiction Studies (2005), New Literary History (2011), African American Review (2009), Comparative Literature Studies (2014), Criticism (2015), and ASAP/Journal (2016 and 2018). Eburne is a founder and former acting President of ISSS: the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and was President of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present in 2014-2015. He is also the series editor of the “Refiguring Modernism” book series at the Pennsylvania State University Press and the new “International Surrealism” book series at the University of Minnesota Press.