Through an analysis of literary representations of work, Nicola Masciandaro explores how late medieval authors, influenced by the labor-related crises of the fourteenth century, sought to articulate the meaning of work in fresh and contrasting ways. The cultural landscape of late medieval England was fertile territory for literary representations of work. This territory was shaped by the increasing commercialization of economic relations, the social agitation of the agricultural and artisan classes, and the growing formalization of consciousness of status. In The Voice of the Hammer,...

Essays and documents related to Hideous Gnosis, a symposium on black metal theory, which took place on December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, NY. Expanded and Revised. "Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous." - H.P. Lovecraft "Poison yourself . . . with thought" - Arizmenda CONTENTS: Steven Shakespeare, "The Light that Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils Itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling's Underground." Erik Butler, "The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual...

52 ghazals. "Around the abyss of your radical event / Angels in bliss sing hymns to abnormality."

Although widely beloved for its playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer's poetry is also subtly shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom, scenes and events where everything could possibly go horribly wrong or where everything that matters seems, if even momentarily, altogether and irretrievably lost. And then sometimes, things really do go wrong. Opting to dilate rather than cordon off this darkness, this volume assembles a variety of attempts to follow such...

Schism press brings you its first anthology, edited by Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker.

A collection of essays on beheading and cinema, with full color interior. Contents: Dominic Pettman, "What Came First, the Chicken or the Head?" - Eugene Thacker, "Thing and No-Thing" - Alexi Kukuljevic, "Suicide by Decapitation" - Alexander Galloway, "The Painted Peacock" - Evan Calder Williams, "Recapitation" - Nicola Masciandaro, "Decapitating Cinema" - Ed Keller, "Corpus Atomicus" - Gary J Shipley, "Remote Viewing." Photography by Leighton Pierce.

A collection of philosophical and critical essays on the television series True Detective. "Traditionally, the detective genre deals with the problem of epistemology - how to know something that one doesn't know. There are some things we cannot know, and some things we should not know. Sometimes clues just give way to more clues, and epistemic tedium rules the day. These essays reveal knowledge becoming an enigma to itself, revealing the brilliant futility of the epistemological project." - Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust of This Planet "The television event of the year - I would say...

Glossator 9 (2015): Pearl. Edited by Nicola Masciandaro and Karl Steel. Twenty commentaries on the Middle-English poem Pearl, one for each section of the poem, with a preface by the editors. CONTENTS "Innoghe" A Preface on Inexhaustibility - Karl Steel The Arbor and the Pearl: Encapsulating Meaning in "Spot" - William M. Storm Pearl, Fitt II - Kevin Marti Pearl, Fitt III ("more and more") - Piotr Spyra "Py3t" Ornament, Place, and Site - A Commentary on the Fourth Fitt of Pearl - Daniel C. Remein Meeting One's Maker: The Jeweler in Fitt V of Pearl - Noelle Phillips "Mercy Schal Hyr Craftez...

Essays and artworks related to Mors Mystica, a black metal theory symposium on the theme of mystical death. "Only that person who says: 'My soul chooses hanging, and my bones death' can truly embrace this fire . . . for it is absolutely true that 'no one can see me and live.'" -- Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum CONTENTS Introduction: On "Heroes/Helden" Edia Connole & Nicola Masciandaro Following the Stench: Watain and Putrefaction Mysticism Drew Daniel Ablaze in the Bath of Fire Brad Baumgartner Mycelegium James Harris dying to find I was never there Teresa Gillespie On the Ecstasy of...