The long 1960s saw a broad awakening of interest in the breath. Paying attention to this pneumatic turn reveals new channels of inspiration; this essay considers one such. It listens for a resonance between two artists in separate fields and cultures who knew little if anything of each other: the poet Paul Celan and the musician John Coltrane. Despite their differences, a radical pneumaticism connects them, and it begins around the year 1960. In a series of influential performances, Coltrane and Celan expressed an exhaustion with and of musicality. This exhaustion enabled the development of a new kind of expression, an expression of tightly compacted sound and meaning without conventional development. The aspiration of this expression was toward the other, even the wholly other, and its representation and performance was the breath.

This article troubles the racial foundations of our mediated age by tracking the relocation of the patent form from US intellectual property law to nineteenth-century African American literature. According to an Enlightenment racial schema, people of African descent were considered fit only to be the means for the propagation of European life. This racist ideologeme was enforced by the legal exclusion of free and enslaved African Americans from patenting their inventions. In this article, I examine the Creole inventor Norbert Rillieux’s patented sugar-refining apparatus for how it encapsulates key characteristics of the concept of mediation. I then turn to Solomon Northup’s reworking of the patent form into literary form. In the description of his invention, Northup problematizes notions of intellectual foresight implied in the patent form, ultimately revealing how the power of mediation is tied up with a racial capitalist system that claims to secure property rights while simultaneously undermining them.

This essay examines novels by Tao Lin and Caroline Kepnes alongside data companies’ managerial literature to account for the relation between consumer surveillance and contemporary fiction. First, it identifies the creep as a character type who appears in novels about digital life. Second, it shows that the creep, usually in the guise of an online stalker, shares a key concern with the platforms that structure the commercial space of the Internet: both must conceal the extent of their surveillance for fear of scaring away their object or customer. This essay draws out the literary genealogy of the creep by revisiting canonical theories of the novel and disciplinary surveillance.

This essay draws on a range of theoretical, sociological, and creative texts—including two books by John Rechy and a film by Frank Ripploh—to theorize the perceptual phenomenology of cruising, or the practice of seeking out and engaging in semipublic sex with strangers. I argue that cruising involves a haptic mode of looking, one that facilitates a kind of erotic contact at a distance. This understanding of cruising helps to explain certain aspects of the phenomenon that are often overlooked in scholarly work on cruising, such as its connection to the erotics of the gaze, its association with compulsivity, and its potential to foster selfish forms of sexual experience. I suggest that an attention to the optical mechanics of cruising might not only help to cultivate a clearer understanding of the phenomenon itself but also push back against the prescriptivist tendencies of much cruising scholarship.

Narratives about the rise of English prose fiction will remain incomplete if not incoherent without recognition of a historical breakthrough: first-person prose narration represents a deliberate innovation of Tudor prose fiction. One cannot simply run the I voice together with accounts about the eighteenth-century rise of individualism. When William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (ca. 1553)—a text well known among Shakespeare’s contemporaries—introduces three first-person narrators into Tudor fiction, it does so as a marked turn away from third-person conventions. Baldwin’s work effectively contends for first-person structures in the face of a succession crisis and broader ethicopolitical uncertainty. Formal inventiveness thus meets a set of pressing historical needs: first-person narration functions, in Baldwin’s novel as elsewhere, as a formal device—an aperture and filter—fitted to minoritized and marginalized points of view.