Nathan Brown, PhD
- Professor, English
- Canada Research Chair in Poetics, English
- Director, Centre for Expanded Poetics, English
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Biography
Professor Brown's current book project is titled The Irony of Ground: Studies in the Romantic Poetics of Modernity. Setting out from the suturing of philosophy to literature by the Jena Romantics, chapters work through case studies in poetry, music, architecture, and painting to situate the enduring importance of romanticism as the interrogation of contradictions attendant upon the positing of subjective, epistemological, artistic, and political foundations.
His 2021 book, Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique, was awarded Honorable Mention for the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. Tracing a dialectic of reason and experience through ancient, modern, and contemporary thought, the book argues that the misleading opposition of speculative and critical approaches to philosophy can be overcome by rethinking the methodological relationship between rationalism and empiricism.
His 2017 book, The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science and Materialist Poetics, studies concepts and ideologies of structure and form traversing practices of material construction in science and experimental poetry. Reviews have appeared in Boundary2 Online, Radical Philosophy, and elsewhere.
Professor Brown's complete translation of the 1861 edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal is forthcoming from Verso on November 26, 2024. His critical study, Baudelaire's Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination (2021), moves through chapters on death, the void, the actuality of the social, and the materiality of the signifier to theorize a dialectic of determination — of agency bound up with its negation — at the heart of The Flowers of Evil.
With Michael Nardone, Professor Brown edits the publishing imprint of the Centre for Expanded Poetics, DOCUMENTS. With Petar Milat, he has organized an ongoing series of symposia in Croatia since 2009, titled Conjuncture: 21st Century Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics. These events have resulted in two edited volumes, The Art of the Concept (2013) and Poiesis (2017).
Education
PhD, University of California at Los Angeles (2008)MA, Queen's University (2002)
BAH, Queen's University (2001)
Fields of research and teaching
Poetry and PoeticsPhilosophy and Critical Theory
Modernism
Teaching activities
Recent graduate courses
Early German Romanticism and the Genesis of Theory
The Poetics of the Untimely: From Negritude to the Haitian Revolution
21st Century Poetry and Poetics
Poetic Determination: Form and Mediation in Les Fleurs du mal
Aesthetic Theory: Romantic, Modernist, Contemporary
Modernist Architecture, Capitalist Planning, and Poetic Critique: Remaking Place Ville-Marie
Blackness, Freedom, Free Verse
Structure / Form
Expanded Poetics
Recent non-credit philosophy seminars
Heidegger, Being and Time
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Lacan, Seminar - Book III
Social Death and Afro-Pessimism: Patterson, Hartman, Wilderson
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1
Publications
Books
Baudelaire's Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination (MaMa, 2021)
The Flowers of Evil, complete translation of Les Fleurs du Mal (MaMa 2021)
*forthcoming in a new edition from Verso, November 2024
Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (Fordham University Press, 2021)
*Book launch
*Symposium (Session 1, Session 2) Mahindra Humanities
Center, Harvard
*Syndicate Symposium
*Review Qui Parle
*Review Radical Philosophy
The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (Fordham University Press, 2017).
*Review Boundary2 Online
*Review Radical Philosophy
*Review Affirmations: Of the Modern
*Review ASAP Journal
*Review American Literary History
*Review British Society for Literature and Science
Poiesis, Ed. Nathan Brown and Petar Milat (MaMa, 2017) PDF Link
January (Berlin: Broken Dimanche Press, 2016).
*Review by Tom Lordon.
Edited Special Issues and Forums
Forum on Audrey Wasser's The Work of Difference, Ed. Nathan Brown, Syndicate (May 2018). Link
Expanded Poetics, Ed. Nathan Brown, Special Feature in The Volta (March 2016). Link
The Art of the Concept, Ed. Nathan Brown and Petar Milat, Special Issue of Frakcija: Performing Arts Journal 64-65 (2013). PDF
Articles and Book Chapters
"The Existence of the Speculative: Hegel's Theory of the Soul," boundary2 51.3 (2024): 221-243. PDF
"Alas, poor Yorick!...The Being of Spirit is a Bone," Problemi International 6 (2023): 51-73. PDF
"The Flowers of Andromache: Allegory, Ontology, and Tragedy in Baudelaire's 'Le Cygne'," Crisis & Critique 10.2 (2023): 56-80. PDF
"Césaire's Claim: On the Retroactive Genesis of Free Verse," Crisis & Critique 9.2 (2022): 112-136. PDF
"Baudelaire's Shadow: On Poetic Determination" in Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production, ed. Audrey Wasser and Warren Montag (Northwestern UP, 2022). LINK
"Reviving the Nameless," review essay on Jed Rasula's History of a Shiver and Acrobatic Modernism, Boundary2 Online (August 2021). LINK
"The Revival of Hegelian Marxism: On Martin Hägglund's This Life," Radical Philosophy 2.06 (Winter 2019): 34-43. PDF LINK
"The Distribution of the Insensible," In the Mind But Not From There, ed. Gean Moreno (Verso, 2019). LINK
*originally published in Mute (Winter 2014). LINK
"Postmodernity, Not Yet: Toward a New Periodization," Radical Philosophy 2.01 (February 2018): 11-27. PDF Link
"Hegel's Kilogram: On the Measure of Metrical Units," Azimuth 10, Special Issue on The Technophysics of Space (2017): 59-75. PDF
"More Beautiful, More Intense? H.D.'s Poetics of Comparison" in Poiesis, Ed. Nathan Brown and Petar Milat (MaMa, 2017). PDF
"The Logic of Disintegration: On the Art Practice of Alexi Kukuljevic," Boundary2 Online (Jan. 2017). LINK
"Avoiding Communism: A Critique of Inventing the Future, Parrhesia 20 (2016): 155-171. PDF
"The Irony of Anatomy: Basquiat's Poetics of Black Positionality," Radical Philosophy 195 (Jan/Feb 2016): 11-24. PDF
"Hegel's Cogito: On the Genetic Epistemology of Critical Metaphysics," Parrhesia 20 (2014): 49-61. PDF
"The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier" in The Lure of Whitehead, Ed. Nicholas Gaskill and Adam Nocek (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). PDF
"Framing Modernity: Sam Lewitt's Aesthetics of Saturation" in Fluid Employment, Ed. Sam Lewitt (Sequence Press, 2013). PDF
"The Proletariat," Transcripts 3 (2013). PDF
"Origin and Extinction, Mourning and Melancholia: On Terrance Malick's The Tree of Life and Lars von Trier's Melancholia," Mute (Fall 2012). PDF LINK
"Rational Kernel, Real Movement: Alain Badiou and Théorie Communiste in the Age of Riots," Lana Turner 5 (Fall 2012). LINK
"Red Years: Althusser's Lesson, Rancière's Error, and the Real Movement of History," Radical Philosophy 170 (Nov/Dec 2011). PDF
"Absent Blue Wax (Rationalist Empiricism)," Qui Parle 19.1 (Fall/Winter 2010). PDF
"The Speculative and the Specific: On Hallward and Meillassoux" in The Speculative Turn, Ed. Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, Nick Srnicek (re:press, 2010). PDF
"Objects that Matter: Olson, Bergvall, and the Poetics of Articulation," How2 3.3. (Winter 2010). PDF LINK
"Immortality by Design," Parallax 14.3 (August 2008), 4-20. PDF
"The Inorganic Open: Nanotechnology and Physical Being," Radical Philosophy 144 (July/Aug 2007). PDF
Reviews, Responses, Interviews, Translations
"Absolute Alienation," e-flux Notes (Dec. 7, 2023). LINK
"In Memory of Photography: Nicolas Baier's Asterisms" in Nicolas Baier, Edited by Dominique Myrand and Dominique Toutant (Division Gallery, 2017), pp. 96-100. LINK
"The Factial," Translation of excerpt from Quentin Meillassoux's doctoral dissertation, L'Inexistence Divine, Parrhesia 20 (2016): 20-40. PDF
"Speculation at the Crossroads," Review of Tristan Garcia's Form and Object in Radical Philosophy 188 (Nov/Dec 2014): 47-50. PDF
"The Nadir of OOO: From Graham Harman's Tool-Being to Timothy Morton's Realist Magic," Parrhesia 17 (2013). PDF
"Next to Now," Review of Colin Milburn's Nanovision in Radical Philosophy 155 (May/June 2009). PDF
"To Live Without an Idea," Review of Martin Hägglund's Radial Atheism in Radical Philosophy (Mar/Apr 2009). PDF
"The Function of Digital Poetry at the Present Time," Response to N. Katherine Hayles in Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008). LINK
"The Politics of Error: An Interview with Shanxing Wang," Jacket 34 (Oct 2007). LINK