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Conjectures
[Door creaks open. Footsteps]: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on Aesthetic Theory
By meticulously translating his recordings of Jameson’s seminars into the theatrical idiom of the stage script, Octavian Esanu asks, playfully and tenderly, if we can see pedagogy as performance? Teaching and learning, about art — as a work of art? more
![[*Door creaks open. Footsteps*]: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on *Aesthetic Theory*](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/mimesis-expression-construction/5448914830_cc288c2266_o.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Chaos Bewitched: Moby-Dick and AI
Eigil zu Tage-Ravn asks a GTP-3-driven AI system for help in the interpretation of a key scene in Moby-Dick (1851). Do androids dream of electric whales? more
Concrete Poetry: Thomas Edison and the Almost-Built World
The architect and historian Anthony Acciavatti uses a real (but mostly forgotten) patent to conjure a world that could have been. more
In the affecting work of sensory history, Peter Schmidt uses the “strikethrough” as a kind of shadow-writing: his “Encyclopedia of Light” reveals little dark threads of undoing — marks of the second thought that endlessly cancels the first. more
By Brad Fox
Brad Fox tells a history-story that pulls on a life-thread in the tangle of things. But that only makes it all a little knottier, no? more
A second life? To live again? Fyodor Dostoevsky survived the uncanny pantomime of his own execution to be “reborn into a new form”. Here Alex Christofi gives these very words a kind of second life, stitching primary source excerpts into a “reconstructed memoir” — the memoir that Dostoevsky himself never wrote. more
In this affecting photo-essay, Federica Soletta invites us to sit with her awhile on the American porch. more
At the intersection of surfing and medieval cathedrals, from the contents of a suitcase, Melissa McCarthy stages a plot that walks its way across paranoia, language, and the pursuit of knowledge. more
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Food Pasts, Food Futures: The Culinary History of COVID-19
By The Global Experimental Historiography Collective
A criti-fictional course-syllabus from the year 2070 — a bibliographical meteor from the other side of a “Remote Revolution”. more
Julian Chehirian goes looking for the history of telecommunication, and is left sitting in the slim shadow of a lightning rod, listening to a voice from beyond the grave. more
Titiba and the Invention of the Unknown
In this lyrical essay on a difficult and painful topic, the poet Kathryn Nuernberger works to defy history’s commitment to distance, to unsettling effect. more
In Praise of Halvings: Hidden Histories of Japan Excavated by Dr D. Fenberger
Roger McDonald on the mysterious Dr Daniel Fenberger and his investigations into an archive known as “The Book of Halved Things". more
By Elaine Ayers
Weaving extracts from a naturalist’s private journals and unpublished sci-fi tale, Elaine Ayers creates a single story of loneliness and scientific longing. more
Remembering Roy Gold, Who was Not Excessively Interested in Books
Nicholas Jeeves takes us on a turn through a Borgesian library of defacements. more
Kant in Sumatra? The Third Critique and the cosmologies of Melanesia? Justin E. H. Smith with an intricate tale of old texts lost and recovered, and the strange worlds revealed in a typesetter's error. more
Lover of the Strange, Sympathizer of the Rude, Barbarianologist of the Farthest Peripheries
By Winnie Wong
Winnie Wong brings us a short biography of the Chinese curioso Pan Youxun (1745-1780). At issue? Hubris, hegemony, and global art history. more
The Elizabeths: Elemental Historians
By Carla Nappi
Carla Nappi conjures a dreamscape from four archival fragments — four oblique references to women named “Elizabeth” who lived on the watershed of the 16th and 17th centuries. more
Dominic Pettman, through the voice of a distant descendant of the Roomba, offers a glimpse into the historiographical revenge of our enslaved devices. more
Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia it Deserves
By John Tresch
In a late 19th-century anarchist newspaper, John Tresch uncovers an unusual piece, purported to be from the pen of Louise Michel, telling of a cross-dressing revolutionary unhinged at the helm of some kind of sociopolitical astrolabe. more
In Search of the Third Bird: Kenneth Morris and the Three Unusual Arts
Easter McCraney explores the ornithological intrigues lurking in an early-20th-century Theosophical journal. more
With our Conjectures series we launch a new laboratory for experiments with historical form and historical method. Why might such a thing be wanted? And why here on The Public Domain Review? The last thirty years has witnessed a genuine revolution in history. The digitization of vast bodies of historical source material (books, archives, images), together with new technologies of access to those sources (the internet, search engines, text tools), has transformed the way we see, feel, read, and imagine what came before the present.
The Public Domain Review was born in response to this new world — a world in which the very volume of historical material and the unprecedented topographies of its availability reveal the urgent need for new platforms, new ways of curating, collating, and celebrating a magnificent, swamping, upwelling cosmos of history-stuff. So far, so good. We are proud to have become a small part of the large work of making the good things of the past present in new ways. With Conjectures we extend that project, by turning to look at some of the new kinds of history-writing that are emerging out of the mini-maelstrom of that revolution — some of the new ways artists and scholars are working in this transformed world of sources (and the transformed means of navigating and manipulating them).
The essays in this section do real historical work, but they do not necessarily do that work in the ways we have come to accept as conventional. The reader is asked to keep a live eye on these texts, which thread between past and present, between the imagination and the archive, between dreams and data. — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor
