Books by John Tangney
Grad School By Gaslight, 2023
Articles by John Tangney
Routledge Companion to Death and Literature, 2020
Like liberal civilization after the Cold War, the Elizabethans celebrated an end of history that ... more Like liberal civilization after the Cold War, the Elizabethans celebrated an end of history that couldn't live up to its promise. They oriented themselves to an uncertain future as their queen grew old and died without an heir in 1603. Meanwhile, new philosophy called all in doubt, and death was becoming an epistemological impasse at the core of the self rather than a straightforward passage to the hereafter. Anxiety about these developments was reflected in a vogue for funeral monuments that recalled the Roman empire, signalling a need to invest in material forms of immortality -- not only in stone, but in writing, and in the production of offspring. This is why sexual difference remains foundational in Shakespeare's imagination despite the homosexual innuendo and theatrical cross-dressing that preoccupied the postmodern generation of critics. His attitudes to death, and the kinds of transcendence he imagines possible, are bound up with his study of the struggles between men and women. His generic choices and innovations through his career reflect his various attitudes to such questions, moving from nihilism to acceptance and guarded optimism based on the possibilities for intimacy in married life.
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Death-and-Literature/Wang-Jernigan-Murphy/p/book/9780367619015
Religion and the Arts, 2017
Michael Madsen’s documentary about the disposal of nuclear waste in Finland uses a symbolic langu... more Michael Madsen’s documentary about the disposal of nuclear waste in Finland uses a symbolic language whose meaning can be amplified by St. Augustine’s theology, and in particular by his theories of reading. Because nuclear waste remains dangerous for 100,000 years, the problem of its disposal forces us to think about the inevitable end of our own civilization. The necessity to place warnings on the waste burial sites demands that we find ways to speak to people in the future with whom we may have no cultural continuity. It makes ancient theories of eternity newly relevant, and potentially awakens our sense of the sacred in a world that has been stripped of sacredness during the scientific era that gave rise to nuclear power in the first place.
Bright Lights Film Journal, Apr 16, 2016
Bright Lights Film Journal, Dec 23, 2014
This essay uses The Crow, Dark City, and Knowing to trace director Alex Proyas’ repeated thinking... more This essay uses The Crow, Dark City, and Knowing to trace director Alex Proyas’ repeated thinking through of a philosophical problem using a stock of images that derives from the literary, artistic and philosophical traditions of Europe. In each film he describes an approach to transcendence that fails because it can never step outside the confines of the anti-Platonic discourses of matter and language that dominate post-medieval thought. To do this would perhaps require an influx of grace or inspiration from a source that Proyas refuses to appeal to but that he is also nostalgic for. For some viewers this may be a heroic refusal of false comfort, and to others a failure to develop his higher contemplative faculties. In either case he exemplifies the way in which modernity is indebted to an earlier theological age for its self-understanding and remains parasitic on what it disavows. Further, he helps us to understand how this theological loss continues to haunt heterosexual relationships and elucidates the connection between misogyny and nihilism.
Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture, Vol 42, Issue 44, Dec 2012
This essay examines the concept of soul in Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, using the theories of... more This essay examines the concept of soul in Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, using the theories of some alternative 20 th -century thinkers in the Platonic lineage: Jean Gebser and Carl Jung. Platonists are interested in the coexistence of incommensurable values in individuals and societies, and in our ability to evolve in ways that can't be explained by material causes, rather than in the celebration of political identities. The affront to the ego represented by the existence of different sets of values necessitates a more capacious kind of selfhood than identity. As such, Soul is an idea that is illegible within the anti-Platonic discourses that dominate academic thought in the postmodern period, and this may be the reason for Murdoch's relative neglect by academic literary criticism. It is also part of the reason why she doesn't fit neatly within the context of 'Irish' writing despite having come from an Irish background.
Literary Imagination, Vol 14, Issue 2, Jul 2012
Magazine Articles by John Tangney
lotuseaters.com, 2021
In former-National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster's account of a 2019 Chinese embassy party in W... more In former-National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster's account of a 2019 Chinese embassy party in Washington DC, his colleague Matt Pottinger quotes Confucius to the Chinese ambassador to explain America's shift from using the language of cooperation to that of competition in describing their relationship with the Middle Kingdom: "If names cannot be correct, then language is not in accordance with the truth of things. And if language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success." By shifting to the language of competition, the Trump administration had begun to acknowledge the de facto situation between the US and China and had moved beyond the post-1989 'end of history' era when it was still thought that opening the Chinese economy would bring a more open Chinese society.
www.lotuseaters.com, 2021
It's a little-known fact that Dave Brubeck came up with his unique jazz sound while riding the ra... more It's a little-known fact that Dave Brubeck came up with his unique jazz sound while riding the range as a cowboy. He was bored by the monotony of the landscape so he started mentally syncopating the beat of the horse's hooves, and by this means created for himself a path into America's progressive metropolitan culture. Conversely, the present-day van dweller, driven from settled life onto the roads by high rents and the gig economy, is the latest iteration of the cowboy, according to a review of the BAFTA-winning movie, Nomadland, in The Guardian last week. In this view, cowboys were not quite the exemplars of freedom and self-reliance they were presented as in classic westerns, but were the zerohours labourers of their day, economic vectors rather than free agents.
www.lotuseaters.com, 2021
www.lotuseaters.com, 2021
New English Review, 2018
Cody Wilson was a law student at UT Austin when he decided to start printing guns using a 3D prin... more Cody Wilson was a law student at UT Austin when he decided to start printing guns using a 3D printer he ordered from a company named Stratasys. Once the company found out what he was up to it repossessed the printer, but he persevered and after much trial and error, his own company, Defense Distributed, successfully used a Stratasys printer to make a single-shot pistol that he called The Liberator. He was legally prevented from publishing the software needed to operate the printer, and even the book he wrote about it has the chapter describing the assembly process redacted for legal reasons, underlining the fact that this was a highly political publishing event. The political is the personal for Wilson, and Come and Take It is a work of autopoesis as much as it is a political tract. It pays great attention to the weather as a cinematic backdrop to the writer's road-trips to various gun dealers, engineers and firing ranges around Austin. He also travels to Europe to hang out with bitcoin radicals and court a Russian oligarch. The Liberator is framed as the end product of a journey from vanilla liberalism to post-leftist crypto-anarchism, driven by disgust with the herd-instincts of his fellow citizens in what he sees as an era characterized by constant deferrals of real politics. These foils to his anarchist rebellion appear as hipster extras populating the UT lecture halls and the diners he visits late at night around Austin. The narrative is elliptical, fragmentary, the central character romantically self-involved, and the ancillary protagonists hard to keep track of because they're sketched so perfunctorily. It also contains political musings that encourage us to think about the era of printable guns as a return to the sources of the Reformation from which modernity and the United States first sprang. The kind of political subjectivity that emerged in the 16th century from the new religious emphasis on individual conscience, and the democratization of knowledge through the printing press, has today been co-opted by the mass media. Wilson describes life in this dispensation as characterized by "the boredom of paradise,"1 positioning himself as exactly what Francis Fukuyama feared when he remarked in The End of History and the Last Man, that boredom rather than political revolution might be what undoes the neoliberal millennium.2 For Wilson the two are connected. Today's universities, the political party system, and their media allies represent homogenizing globalism and ethical universalism, against which is pitted the "dark magic of sectarianism."3 The culture war of many fronts in which they are engaged represents the decadence of the long drawn-out revolution that began with Gutenberg and Luther. Meanwhile, Wilson's personal journey of disaffection draws on his undergraduate reading in continental philosophy to suggest that the arrival of the printable gun is a kind of unearthing of the thing in itself hidden behind the depthless phenomena of postmodernity, which is perhaps his way of admitting that what he's distributing is an instrument of death. His autopoetic narrative about it is a self-undoing. At the end of the book, as he fires the gun in front of a BBC camera crew, he says he doesn't know who he is any more, which sounds like a claim to have escaped from all of the available political identities in contemporary America. In the early stages of its development the single-shot printable gun was more potent as a symbol of individual resistance to the various modern institutions that Mencius Moldbug collectively terms "The Cathedral" than for any real power it conferred on
The Time Traveller, 2017
Some years ago, a visiting writer came to the Singaporean university where I was a lecturer in Re... more Some years ago, a visiting writer came to the Singaporean university where I was a lecturer in Renaissance literature. Such visitors came and went frequently under the auspices of the creative writing program there, and, wrapped up in my own concerns, I usually paid them little attention beyond an occasional hello in the corridor. One day, however, this man's name caught my eye on the spine of a book in the Kino Kuniya bookshop on Orchard Road. I opened it and fell under its spell upon reading the first paragraph. It was a description of a trip to Calcutta, a city that he finds reassuringly unchanged on each return visit, whereas Singapore, his home, has changed beyond recognition during his lifetime. His account of finding the constant in his life in a place he doesn't belong to, and of belonging to a place he has fallen out with, spoke to my own contradictions as an emigrant. In describing Calcutta, he conjured a sense of intimacy with the exotic that I had once felt in Singapore, and that I wanted to recover, even if only in the pages of a travel book. I made a point of getting to know him after that. We had coffee one day outside the Singapore Art Museum. I told him how much I liked his book, and we talked about the corporatized university scene, and the transformation of the humanities into a battlefield in the culture wars. He was experiencing a version of these things in Australia, and I was a refugee from American academe, having spent six years of doctoral work at Duke University during the era of the infamous lacrosse rape case. It
Book Reviews by John Tangney
The Time Traveller, 2016
This hardcover volume with its grey dustjacket, is marked in pencil on the flyleaf with the rare-... more This hardcover volume with its grey dustjacket, is marked in pencil on the flyleaf with the rare-bookdealer's category, 'POETRY', and with the price '€28'. Published in 1950, it is inscribed inside the cover in faded ink with the name 'M Lesley Odom' and the date '31.vii.53'. Its design tells us of the time and place in which it was made, and its markings speak of its journey since then, giving it the kind of aura that Walter Benjamin said artworks no longer have in the age of mechanical reproduction.
The European Legacy, Vol.17, Issue 6, Oct 19, 2012
The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 41 Issue 4, p1240-1242. 3p. , Nov 2010
The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 39 Issue 3, p884-885. 2p. , Sep 2008
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Books by John Tangney
https://www.amazon.com/Grad-School-Gaslight-John-Tangney/dp/B0CKR3N33V/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.-owzL8Q6FUL2DuhV4q9j7zpZ6rl1tfZujpsxo-WwmFCPrqFhFSqt5FdcAMradJml.dR5ixQt077eu9M9dZnJ2w0GDLJtgK-J4N25GqOklU5s&qid=1721565352&sr=8-1
Articles by John Tangney
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Death-and-Literature/Wang-Jernigan-Murphy/p/book/9780367619015
Magazine Articles by John Tangney
Book Reviews by John Tangney
https://www.amazon.com/Grad-School-Gaslight-John-Tangney/dp/B0CKR3N33V/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.-owzL8Q6FUL2DuhV4q9j7zpZ6rl1tfZujpsxo-WwmFCPrqFhFSqt5FdcAMradJml.dR5ixQt077eu9M9dZnJ2w0GDLJtgK-J4N25GqOklU5s&qid=1721565352&sr=8-1
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Death-and-Literature/Wang-Jernigan-Murphy/p/book/9780367619015