In this article I analyse the primary rejections depicted in Herman Melville's Urtext on withdrawal of complicity, Bartleby (1853), and Hito Steyerl's video installation How Not to be Seen (2013), which experiments with a Bartleby-like from surveillance through becoming illegible machine vision. My focus is potential rejection reveal disavowed content racist violence foundational regimes (finan...

Before they met in 1917, Virginia Woolf envisioned a peculiar setting for her first encounter with Katherine Mansfield, the promising young writer who had ‘dogged [her] steps three years’. Intriguingly, imagined she might glimpse not drawing-room of mutual friend or at literary soirée, but ‘on rock sea’ – there, ‘I shall accost her’.1 pictures Mansfield an attitude reminiscent Frederic Leighton...

expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works of Wallace Stevens): all these are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them. . . . the younger generatio...