Major Publications
Early Modern Écologies. Beyond English Ecocriticism, edited by Pauline Goul and Phillip John Usher. (Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
Early Modern Écologies is the first collective volume to offer perspectives on the relationship between contemporary ecological thought and early modern French literature. If Descartes spoke of humans as being ‘masters and possessors of Nature’ in the seventeenth century, the writers taken up in this volume arguably demonstrated a more complex and urgent understanding of the human relationship to our shared planet. Opening up a rich archive of literary and non- literary texts produced by Montaigne and his contemporaries, this volume foregrounds not how ecocriticism renews our understanding of a literary corpus, but rather how that corpus causes us to re-think or to nuance contemporary eco-theory. The sparsely bilingual title (an acute accent on écologies) denotes the primary task at hand: to pluralize (i.e. de- Anglophone-ize) the Environmental Humanities. Featuring established and emerging scholars from Europe and the United States, Early Modern Écologies opens up new dialogues between ecotheorists such as Timothy Morton, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruno Latour and Montaigne, Ronsard, Du Bartas, and Olivier de Serres.
Chapters by : Kat Addis, Tom Conley, Pauline Goul, Hassan Melehy, Louisa Mackenzie, Sara Miglietti, Jennifer Oliver, Stephanie Shiflet, Antonia Szabari, Phillip John Usher, Victor Velazquez, Oumelbanine Nina Zhiri.
Available here. More details from the press website here.
Early Modern Écologies is the first collective volume to offer perspectives on the relationship between contemporary ecological thought and early modern French literature. If Descartes spoke of humans as being ‘masters and possessors of Nature’ in the seventeenth century, the writers taken up in this volume arguably demonstrated a more complex and urgent understanding of the human relationship to our shared planet. Opening up a rich archive of literary and non- literary texts produced by Montaigne and his contemporaries, this volume foregrounds not how ecocriticism renews our understanding of a literary corpus, but rather how that corpus causes us to re-think or to nuance contemporary eco-theory. The sparsely bilingual title (an acute accent on écologies) denotes the primary task at hand: to pluralize (i.e. de- Anglophone-ize) the Environmental Humanities. Featuring established and emerging scholars from Europe and the United States, Early Modern Écologies opens up new dialogues between ecotheorists such as Timothy Morton, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruno Latour and Montaigne, Ronsard, Du Bartas, and Olivier de Serres.
Chapters by : Kat Addis, Tom Conley, Pauline Goul, Hassan Melehy, Louisa Mackenzie, Sara Miglietti, Jennifer Oliver, Stephanie Shiflet, Antonia Szabari, Phillip John Usher, Victor Velazquez, Oumelbanine Nina Zhiri.
Available here. More details from the press website here.
Exterranean: Ecologies of Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene (New York: Fordham UP, 2019).
Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images from across Europe, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. By shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, Usher reorients our perspective away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by opening the planet to depths within. The book thus maps the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily.
Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, Usher instead elaborates a productive tension between the materially-situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene. In dialogue with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and other interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities, Usher shows what premodern material can offer to contemporary theory. Examining textual and visual culture alike, Usher explores works by Ronsard, Montaigne, and Rabelais, early scientific works by Paracelsus and others, as well as objects, engravings, buildings, and the Salt Mines of Wieliczka. Both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.
Details on Fordham UP's website || Order on Amazon.com
“For anyone who might be suffering from Anthropocene fatigue, this is a book to jolt you from your slumbers. What happens to the globe when we shift attention from the outward projection of emissions to extraction ? The Earth we thought we knew, and were already mourning, takes on a stunning new critical light.” (Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University)
“Usher’s brilliant study is a richly argued, erudite yet lyrical ode to the stuff of which the Earth is made. Exterranean engages with the record of human earthly entanglements in early modern European humanism, but always with a view to counterbalancing current distancing and idealizing views of a globe that is all surface, and no depth. By channeling the voices and agencies of Earth’s nonhuman subterranean elements in all their omnipresent intimacy, Usher thus reconnects us not merely to the history of knowledge and beliefs about the Earth and its contents, but to our own fragile planet.” (Karen Raber, University of Mississippi)
Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images from across Europe, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. By shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, Usher reorients our perspective away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by opening the planet to depths within. The book thus maps the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily.
Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, Usher instead elaborates a productive tension between the materially-situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene. In dialogue with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and other interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities, Usher shows what premodern material can offer to contemporary theory. Examining textual and visual culture alike, Usher explores works by Ronsard, Montaigne, and Rabelais, early scientific works by Paracelsus and others, as well as objects, engravings, buildings, and the Salt Mines of Wieliczka. Both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.
Details on Fordham UP's website || Order on Amazon.com
“For anyone who might be suffering from Anthropocene fatigue, this is a book to jolt you from your slumbers. What happens to the globe when we shift attention from the outward projection of emissions to extraction ? The Earth we thought we knew, and were already mourning, takes on a stunning new critical light.” (Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University)
“Usher’s brilliant study is a richly argued, erudite yet lyrical ode to the stuff of which the Earth is made. Exterranean engages with the record of human earthly entanglements in early modern European humanism, but always with a view to counterbalancing current distancing and idealizing views of a globe that is all surface, and no depth. By channeling the voices and agencies of Earth’s nonhuman subterranean elements in all their omnipresent intimacy, Usher thus reconnects us not merely to the history of knowledge and beliefs about the Earth and its contents, but to our own fragile planet.” (Karen Raber, University of Mississippi)
The Tragedy of Pious Antigone (1580) by Robert Garnier, translated, annotated, and introduced by Phillip John Usher (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018).
The Tragedy of Pious Antigone (1580) is the first English-language translation of Robert Garnier’s Antigone, ou la Pieté. Written by France’s earliest career tragedian, who also worked in the Paris Parliament and as a counselor at a judicial tribunal in the town of Le Mans, the play draws on various classical sources (especially Seneca, Statius, and Sophocles) to retell the well-known story of a family torn apart by war: as brothers Eteocles and Polynices fight to the death, their sister Antigone and mother Jocasta make repeated calls for peace. Originally published at the height of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) that pitted Catholics and Protestants against each other, the five acts of Garnier’s play would have had immediate resonance. Neither extolling nor defending one side or the other, this humanist tragedy, which also anticipates the style of Corneille and Racine, could have been appreciated not only by members of one religious community or the other, but by both as a seemingly non-partisan and earnest lamentation about, and reflection upon, troubled times. This famous story, re-imagined by countless authors including Bertolt Brecht, Jean Anouilh, Griselda Gambaro, Athol Fugard, and many others, is here re-told to emphasize empowered female voices in times of political division.
Details on ACRMS website || Buy on Amazon.com
The Tragedy of Pious Antigone (1580) is the first English-language translation of Robert Garnier’s Antigone, ou la Pieté. Written by France’s earliest career tragedian, who also worked in the Paris Parliament and as a counselor at a judicial tribunal in the town of Le Mans, the play draws on various classical sources (especially Seneca, Statius, and Sophocles) to retell the well-known story of a family torn apart by war: as brothers Eteocles and Polynices fight to the death, their sister Antigone and mother Jocasta make repeated calls for peace. Originally published at the height of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) that pitted Catholics and Protestants against each other, the five acts of Garnier’s play would have had immediate resonance. Neither extolling nor defending one side or the other, this humanist tragedy, which also anticipates the style of Corneille and Racine, could have been appreciated not only by members of one religious community or the other, but by both as a seemingly non-partisan and earnest lamentation about, and reflection upon, troubled times. This famous story, re-imagined by countless authors including Bertolt Brecht, Jean Anouilh, Griselda Gambaro, Athol Fugard, and many others, is here re-told to emphasize empowered female voices in times of political division.
Details on ACRMS website || Buy on Amazon.com
L'aède et le géographe: Poésie et espace du monde à l'époque pré-moderne (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018).
A study of early-modern epic poet-geographers, this book offers new readings of local, national, and global epics written in French and Neo-Latin.
Cette étude démontre que la poésie épique française de la première modernité ne fait pas qu’incarner des aspirations nationales. Les poètes étudiés dans cet ouvrage se font tantôt topographes, tantôt cosmographes.
Published in the "Géographies du monde" series edited by Prof. Frank Lestringant (Paris-Sorbonne) at Classiques Garnier. Order on the Classiques Garnier site.
A study of early-modern epic poet-geographers, this book offers new readings of local, national, and global epics written in French and Neo-Latin.
Cette étude démontre que la poésie épique française de la première modernité ne fait pas qu’incarner des aspirations nationales. Les poètes étudiés dans cet ouvrage se font tantôt topographes, tantôt cosmographes.
Published in the "Géographies du monde" series edited by Prof. Frank Lestringant (Paris-Sorbonne) at Classiques Garnier. Order on the Classiques Garnier site.
Epic Arts in Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). (253 pp.)
".... an exceptional book..." Alice Brown, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, vol. 75 (2015),p. 20. Available from bookstores, in person at Book Culture (112th Street in New York) and elsewhere, or directly from Oxford. -Barnes and Noble (USA) -Oxford University Press (UK) -Amazon (UK) (USA) |
Epic Arts in Renaissance France studies the relationship between epic literature and other art forms such as painting, sculpture, and architecture. Why, the book asks, are epic heroes and themes so ubiquitous in French Renaissance art? Whereas the same period's literary epics, frequently maligned, now go unread? To explore this paradox, the book investigates a number of epic building sites, i.e. specific situations in which literary epics either become the basis for realisations in other art forms or somehow contest or compete with them.
Announced on Fabula.
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Errance et cohérence : Essai sur la littérature transfrontalière à la Renaissance. (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010). (204 pp.)
Errance et cohérence studies the ways in which Early Modern French literature plots and problematizes geographical frontiers, with emphasis on two axes (France/New World; France/Holy Land). |
The Franciad (1572) by Pierre de Ronsard. Translated, annotated, and with an introduction by Phillip John Usher. (New York: AMS Press, 2010). (lxviii + 272 pp.)
The first English translation of Ronsard's Franciad. This epic was well received by its first readers, re-published (including in pirate copies), but then written off by Sainte-Beuve in the 19th century. Here, this fully annotated translation and its extensive introduction invite new readers to discover Ronsard's text.
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Edited Books
Illustrations inconscientes: écritures de la Renaissance. Mélanges offers à Tom Conley (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014). Co-edited by Bernd Renner and Phillip John Usher. (493pp.)
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Articles / Chapitres
2023
2022
2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2010
2009
2005-2008
- "The Great Reversal: Fast Geology and Slow Humanities." H-France Salon, vol. 15, no. 10, #7. Accessible here.
- "Le prologue d’une réhabilitation. Ronsard en anthologie (1824-1825)." L'Année ronsardienne, no 5, 2023, pp. 117-131.
2022
- « “Pourquoy nous avez-vous, diront les arbres, faicts / D’arbres delicieux execrables gibets ?”. Vie végétale dans les Tragiques », Albineana, n° 34, 2022, Présence et paradigmes du monde naturel (fin XVIe-début XVIIe siècles), p. 51-66
- "'Ce qu'on dit en somme avoir ame vegetative': La flore brésilienne selon Jean de Léry." Le Verger, bouquet XXV, décembre 2022.
- "Médée à l'écrit et à l'écran. La tragédie selon Jean de la Péruse et Pasolini." in : Isabelle Garnier, Claude La Charité, Romain Menini, Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, Anne Réach-Ngô, Trung Tran and Nora Viet (eds.), Narrations fabuleuses. Mélanges en l'honneur de Mireille Huchon (Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2022), pp. 901-912.
- “The Night Before Geology: Fossil Stories from Early Modern France” in: Emily Thompson (ed.) Storytelling in Renaissance France (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2022), pp. 240-264.
2021
- "The Revenge of the Mines : Earth-From-Nowhere Versus Surfaces-With-Depths," in : Dorothea Heitsch and Jeremie Korta (eds.), Early Modern Visions of Space : France and Beyond (Chape Hill: UNC Press, 2021), pp. 51-77.
- “Abordages dans le Quart Livre,” in: Mireille Huchon, Nicolas Le Cadet, and Romain Menini (eds.), Inextinguible Rabelais (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021), pp. 631-648.
- “La météorologie épique (Homère, Virgile, Ronsard),” translated from the English by Jeanne Etelain, in: François Rouget (ed.), « Toute l’âme de la poésie héroïque ». Études sur l’épopée en France (XVIe-XVIIe siècles) (Geneva : Droz, 2021), pp. 61-78.
- “Une poésie du vivant: Pierre de Ronsard et la plant theory,” in: Todd Reeser and David LaGuardia (eds.), Théories critiques et littérature de la Renaissance (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021), pp. 347-359.
2020
- “Almost Encountering Ronsard’s Rose,” in: Early Modern Écologies. Beyond English Ecocriticsm. Edited by Pauline Goul and Phillip John Usher. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), pp. 161-180.
2019
- "Atmoterrorism in the Humanist Anthropocene." In: Jeff Kendrick and Katherine Maynard (eds.), Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion (Boston: De Gruter), 2019), pp. 152-71. [Publisher's Website]
- “Double-je en terre sainte. Le Dialogue du crucifix et du pèlerin (1486) de Guillaume Alexis.” In: Anne-Sophie de Franceschi-Germain (eds.), Formes de la relation à Dieu aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), p. 73-86. [See here]
- "L'intertexte virgilien dans les Singularités de la France antarctique (1557) d'André Thévet." In: Véronique Ferrer, Olivier Millet et Alexandre Tarrête (eds.), La Renaissance au grand large. Mélanges en l'honneur de Frank Lestringant (Geneva: Droz, 2019), p. 119-128. [See here]
- "Philippe Quesne's Night of the Moles." NYU Skirball Theater, Indefinite article series. [Read here / PDF version]
- “On the Exterranean.” Alienocene, Stratum 4 (2019). [See here]
2018
- “A Painting of Trojans / A Map of America: Early Modern French Reactions to Ariosto.” In: Jo Ann Cavallo (ed.), Italian Renaissance Romance Epic (New York: MLA, series “Options for Teaching,” 2018), p. 234-240. [See here]
2017
- “Afterword” in: Sara Miglietti (ed.), special issue of Modern Language Notes (MLN) on “Climate and the Humanities.” 134:4 (September 2017, publ. Jan 2018), p. 986-992. [See here]
- "La Crète épique: La Franciade et la tradition des isolarii," Cahiers V. L. Saunier, no. 34 (2017), p. 163-174. [Read on academia.edu]
- "Untranslating the Anthropocene." Diacritics (44:3) (2016): p. 56-77. (Published August 2017) [Details here.] [Available on Project Muse here]
- "Un bien étrange adversaire: Phovère, le géant de la Franciade," La Revue des Amis de Ronsard, n. 30 (special "30th anniversary" birthday edition of the journal) (2017), p. 35-49. [Read on academia.edu]
- Preface to Michel Beaujour, De la poétologie comparative (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017), p. 7-10. [Book here] [Read on academia.edu]
2016
- “Soldierly Masculinity in the Essais,” Montaigne Studies 28 (March 2016), p. 187-98. [Montaigne Studies here]
- “An Anti-Archive of World War I: Philippe de Broca’s Le Roi de coeur (1966).” In: Marcelline Block and Barry Nevins (ed.), French Cinema and the Great War (Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), p. 27-34. [Buy here] [Google Book here]
- "1599: Une année tragico-bizarre." In: Liliane Picciola (ed.), Baroque ou bizarre ? Avatars de la bizarrerie aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (France, Espagne, Italie). (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2016), p. 105-119. [Publisher's Website / Collection website]
2015
- "Courtroom Drama during the Wars of Religion: Robert Garnier and the Paris Parlement." In: Michael Meere, ed. French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015, p. 139-152.
- "Titles and Title Pages: Archives in Undergraduate Courses." In: Heidi Brayman Hackel and Ian Frederick Moulton, eds. Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives. New York: MLA, 2015.
2014
- « Pour une carte tragique des troubles: La Tragédie de feu Gaspard de Coligny (1575) de François de Chantelouve et La Guisiade (1589) de Pierre Matthieu » in: llustrations inconscientes. Ecritures de la Renaissance. Mélanges offerts à Tom Conley. [Ouvrage co-dirigé avec Bernd Renner] (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), p. 143-64.
- « From Marriage to Massacre: The Louvre in August 1572 », Esprit créateur, 54, été 2014, à paraître.
- « Montaigne : Chiasmus as Philosophy and Ethnography », Boris Wiseman et Anthony Paul, ed., Chiasmus in the Drama of Life, Oxford et New York, Berghahn Books, 2014, p. 148-60.
- « A bout de souffle », Tom Conley et T. Jefferson-Kline, éd., Companion to Jean-Luc Godard, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell.
- « ‘Ils n’ont point de ville’ : l’urbanisation de l’espace lointain à la Renaissance », Seizième siècle, no. 10, 2014, p. 229-246.
- « L'unité du genre humain à l'échelle régionale: géographie et généalogie dans deux 'longs poëmes' du XVIe siècle », Cahiers V.L. Saulnier, mars 2014, p. 303-18.
- « Tragedy and Translation », in: Catherine Porter et Sandra Bermann (dir.), Companion to Translation Studies, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, p. 467-78.
2013
- « Prudency and the Inefficacy of Language: Re-politicizing Jean de la Péruse’s Médée (1553) » in: Modern Language Notes (MLN), 128, 4, septembre 2013, p. 868-80.
- « La Défaite des Turcs à la bataille de Lépante: des plaquettes populaires à la poésie épique » in: Esprit créateur, 53, 4, hiver 2013, p. 47-58. [Abstract]
- « Virgil and French Literature », « Montaigne », « Ronsard », « Racine », « Voltaire », « Jacques Delille », « Proust », « Rousseau », in: Richard Thomas et Jan Ziolkwoski, éd., The Virgil Encyclopedia, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. (Now available - December 4, 2013)
- « 'On ne vit pas dans un espace neutre : Pour une lecture hétérotopique de Jérusalem », in Dominique de Courcelles, éd., Parcourir le monde: Les voyages d’Orient au Moyen Age et dans la première modernité, Paris, Ed. de l'Ecole nationale des Chartes, 2013. [annonce sur le site de l'Ecole national des Chartes]
- « Le Nouveau Monde selon Du Bartas et Lescarbot : pour une étude des circuits d’imprimés 'seconds' », in Nuevos Mundos, octobre 2013. [The editors erroneously changed "Du Bartas" to "Du Bartras"...]
2012
- « Tragedy in the Aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre : France’s First Phèdre and the Hope for Peace », Romance Notes, 52.3, 2012, p. 255-62.
- « La poésie sans frontières : pour une lecture globale de Ronsard et d’Aubigné », Revue des Amis de Ronsard, no 25, mai 2012, p. 87-103.
- « Du viatique à l’épique : L’épyllion américain de Marc Lescarbot », Arborescences, no 2, mai 2012.
- « The Aeneid in the 1530s : Reading with the Enamels of Limoges », Phillip John Usher et Isabelle Fernbach, éd., Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance, Londres, Boydell and Brewer, 2012, p. 161-88.
2010
- « Turning Defeat into Nation Building : Etienne Dolet’s Epic Stories About Francis I », Romance Studies, no. 28, no 3, 2010, p. 169-81.
- « Walking East in the Renaissance », Susan Suleiman et Christie McDonald, éd. French Global : A New Approach to Literary History, New York : Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 193-206.
2009
- « De sexe incertain : Masculin, Féminin de Godard », French Forum, vol. 34, no 2, 2009, p. 97-112.
- « Non haec litora suasit Apollo : la Crète dans la Franciade de Ronsard », La Revue des Amis de Ronsard, no 22 , mai 2009, p. 65-89.
- « Of Mute Dolphins and Taking Leave of Kings : The Praise Poems of Ronsard’s Franciade », BHR, vol 71, no 1, 2009, p. 61-75.
- « Prophetic Architecture : Agrippa d’Aubigné in Paris », Andrea Brady et Emily Butterworth, éd. Renaissance Futures, Londres, Routledge, 2009, p. 159-80.
2005-2008
- « Oicoe-gatou : l’altérité linguistique chez Breydenbach et Léry », L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 48, no 1, printemps 2008, p. 5-17.
- « Joyce he war, yes : la microlecture selon Jacques Derrida », LHT, no 3, septembre 2007.
- « Lancelot: le chevalier du circulaire », Equinoxes, no 8, hiver 2006-07.
- « Chopping up Columbus’ pear : World Roaming after 1492 », Emma Gilby et Katja Haustein, éd. Space : New Dimensions in French Studies, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2005, p. 71-89.
Articles pour Encyclopédies, etc.
- « Robert Garnier », The Literary Encyclopedia, septembre 2012.
- « Ronsard’s Franciade », The Literary Encyclopedia, janvier 2011.
- « Jules et Jim » (p. 38-39), « Pierrot le Fou » (p. 40-41), « Baisers volés » (p. 54-55), Marcelline Block, éd. World Film Locations : Paris, Londres, Intellect Books, 2011.
- « Victor Hugo’s Hernani », Literary Encyclopedia, novembre 2010.
- « Maps and Plans », Larissa Juliet Taylor, éd., Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, Leiden, Brill, 2009, p. 366-73. [Now available online here]
- « Translation », Jeffrey Gray, éd., Encyclopedia of American Poetry, Westport, Greenwood Press, mai 2006, vol. 5, p. 1606-09.