Andreas Elpidorou's "The Anatomy of Boredom"

Andreas Elpidorou is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. His work focuses on the philosophical study of human emotions, with a particular emphasis on boredom. He has published extensively on the subject and developed a novel theoretical model of boredom that sheds light on its complicated nature and diverse psychological, behavioral, and social effects. In his written work, he explores the function, value, and dangers of boredom and strives to offer clear, precise, and critical explications of aspects of our mental lives that often remain hidden from us. He is the author of Propelled: How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Lead Us to the Good Life (2020) and numerous other publications.

Elpidorou applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Anatomy of Boredom, and shared the following:

If a reader were to open The Anatomy of Boredom to page 99, they would be cognitively disoriented—perhaps even lost. Isolated from its context, page 99 offers little insight into either the book’s objectives or its subject matter. The page appears in section 2 of Chapter 3, which belongs in Part I of the book. In this part, the book makes a sustained case—one that unfolds in three chapters—that boredom is, in some crucial sense, a unitary phenomenon. What boredom is, the book argues, is its function: the role that it occupies in our mental, behavioral, and social economy; that is, the ways in which it affects our minds and bodies and drives our actions and opinions. There are many things we have called, and continue to call, “boredom.” As long as they share the same functional core, they count as boredom—even if their psychological, physical, or social expressions differ.

Page 99 is concerned with one of many arguments advanced in this part of the book. It addresses a worry that has been raised by recent psychological studies. Psychologists have observed that the experience of boredom is often associated with different bodily states and levels of arousal. Does this suggest that there are distinct kinds of boredom—perhaps a low-arousal, apathetic type and a high-arousal, agitated type? This section argues that there is no need to divide boredom into distinct affective states on the basis of their associated arousal. Differences in arousal reflect physiological or contextual contingencies, not conceptual or essential distinctions. Boredom’s identity is linked not to its effects on our bodies but to its functional role in our cognitive and behavioral economy. As such, there is unity in boredom despite variation in its somatic expression.

I am not sure there’s a perfect page—one that, if opened at random, would provide not just a concise summary of the main arguments of the book but also a clear view of its methodological commitments. But even if such a page does exist, it isn’t page 99. What page 99 does well is to attune the reader to the level of conceptual and empirical detail that is necessary in order to engage with a phenomenon as complicated and elusive as boredom. This value, however, comes with a cost. The page dwells in the particulars but fails to reveal the bigger picture—page 99 is just one very small part of the fascinating complexities that constitute boredom. It isn’t even a tree, but a bush—perhaps a single flower—in the forest of boredom.

Visit Andreas Elpidorou's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruno J. Strasser and Thomas Schlich's "The Mask"

Bruno J. Strasser is a historian, a full professor at the University of Geneva, and an affiliate of History of Medicine at Yale University. Thomas Schlich is the James McGill Professor in the History of Medicine at McGill University, and a former practicing physician.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air, with the following results:

Page 99 reflects quite well the tone and content of the book!

This chapter—“Fog, Fumes, and Fashion”—explores the use of masks against urban pollution in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the late 19th century, such masks became popular in large British cities like London, Manchester, and Leeds. People sought to avoid breathing the mix of coal fumes, industrial vapors, and cold, damp air that made up the winter “fogs.”

Page 99 examines how French physicians reacted to what they thought was the British craze for masks. They were unanimous in condemning the practice. They found it “ridiculous”—and the fact that it was British didn’t help. Some feared that one day “entire families might be seen masked in the streets.” Masks, they thought, were useless, a symbol of the excesses of the hygienic movement. One physician even warned that if masks ever became mandatory, it would mean “the end of the kiss.”

The chapter then shifts to the Great Smog of London in 1952, during which over ten thousand people died from air pollution. Once again, many people—especially the police—wore masks. Churchill’s health minister, a chain smoker himself, didn’t believe masks could protect citizens from the smog. But facing mounting public anger, he gave in and recommended their use to save his political career.

Page 99, like the rest of the book, shows that masks have always been controversial. Masks were often seen as a convenient “technological fix” for complex medical and environmental challenges, but not everybody agreed on this kind of quick fix. In the book, we tell these stories to help us think about what kinds of environments we all want to live and breathe in.

Visit Bruno Strasser's website and Thomas Schlich's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Moritz Föllmer's "The Quest for Individual Freedom"

Moritz Föllmer is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. He has particular interests in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and concepts of individuality and urbanity in twentieth-century Europe. His publications include Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (2013), Culture in the Third Reich (2020), and, as co-editor, Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany (2022).

Föllmer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book I characterize a “major development in Europe’s political history,” namely, “the dual adoption and expansion of liberalism by social democrats.” By this I mean that important protagonists of European social democracy, from the 1900s to the 1970s, argued that an active state was necessary to liberate working-class people from the dependencies created by capitalism and authoritarianism. In their view, widening educational access and housing provision amounted to widening choices. Hence, these social democrats adopted key tenets of liberal thought. They did so in a way that took working-class realities into account while also appealing to progressive members of the middle class. What I label “social democratic liberty” was a remarkably successful project, but it was also vulnerable to attacks. After all, it required taxation and standardization, which made it easy to accuse it of reducing choices and stifling citizens. While this critique spanned the entire twentieth century, in the 1970s it was shared by left-wing protesters, cultural conservatives, and market liberals. By the end of the Cold War, the project of social democratic liberty seemed exhausted.

Page 99 summarizes one of fifteen sections and thus one of a range of specific arguments. Yet it reflects my book’s broader thesis. Europe’s twentieth century was marked by a quest for individual freedom that assumed different shapes and meanings. In their nineteenth-century heyday, liberals might have been able to define individual freedom and impose their definition on others. But they lost this authority in the decades around 1900, and no new consensus formed thereafter. The quest for individual freedom was composed of a variety of claims and occurred in fits and starts. Still, it became so widespread that it even those who were skeptical about individual freedom (as were many socialists) or outright contemptuous of it (as were most communists) had to accommodate it to some extent.

That said, the impression conveyed on page 99 is necessarily one-sided. It privileges political history, whereas my book gives ample space to the quest for individual freedom as it played out in factories and homes, in experiments with drugs as well as discussions of morality. It also focuses on Europe proper, whereas I devote an entire chapter to how individual freedom was defined in relation to the United States and to colonies in Africa and Asia. And it happens to be the conclusion of a chapter and is thus more systematic than the bulk of the book, which pays much attention to ordinary or not-so-ordinary people’s experiences and efforts – including the working-class people who changed jobs to escape the control of a powerful factory owner or made use of what Sweden’s social democratic government had to offer while also insisting on their own choices.

Ultimately, my book is a twentieth-century European history – of the quest for individual freedom but also, even more ambitiously, through this crucial prism. It treats a variety of political currents and systems and offers many glimpses into European lives under often adverse conditions. It is this richness that motivated me to write the book and that I hope to convey to its readers.

Learn more about The Quest for Individual Freedom at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Rooney's "The Big Hop"

David Rooney is a historian and curator specializing in transport, technology, and engineering, and the author of About Time and The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future. For almost twenty years he worked at the London Science Museum, which houses the 1919 airplane first flown across the Atlantic. He lives in London.

Rooney applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Big Hop and shared the following:

It is Sunday, March 30th, 1919. We join page 99 of The Big Hop just as an aeroplane, carried aboard the Atlantic steamship Digby, has just arrived at the railway station of St. John’s, Newfoundland, after being diverted by an impenetrable pack of ice off the island’s Avalon peninsula that’s so bad nobody has seen the like in decades:

…encountered on the Newfoundland route. But this was the worst the coast had experienced for sixty years. Nothing could get through. The Sopwith aeroplane had been packed into two large wooden crates, each the size and shape of a railway carriage. They were thirty feet long and weighed over five tons apiece. Between them, they held the fuselage, wings, engine, undercarriage, and fittings. Several smaller cases stored in the ship’s hold carried parts, tools, petrol, engine oil, and other provisions. It should have been a relatively straightforward offloading job onto the dockside at St. John’s. Instead, Digby was forced by the ice field to divert to Placentia Bay, off the peninsula’s western coast. There, in the middle of the bay, it drew up alongside the postal steamer Portia, and the entire Sopwith consignment, as well as the men themselves, were transferred from one ship to the other. Then Portia steamed up the bay to the town of Placentia, where its precious cargo of crates and passengers was delivered, leaving Digby to continue on its way. The next stage of the Sopwith saga was a sixty-mile rail journey across the peninsula. The two giant crates were loaded onto flat railcars, and…

The Page 99 Test works perfectly. The Big Hop recounts the story of one of the greatest journeys of the modern age—the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. But it was a journey that started long before the aviators Jack Alcock and Ted Brown made it successfully across the ocean in an epoch-marking sixteen hours in the middle of June, 1919. Moreover, the contest involved a cast of characters far wider than Alcock and Brown. Sopwith was fielding a rival team: an Australian aviator, Harry Hawker, and his avuncular navigator, Mac Grieve.

This is why page 99 is such a great representation of the wider story. It describes, in its single paragraph, a journey that was remarkable in its own right: a perilous ship-to-ship transfer of men and a machine in the cold waters off Newfoundland. Will they reach their destination? It acts as the perfect prefiguring of the aerial journey ahead.

Page 99 also shows us just how long ago the first transatlantic flight took place. On the previous page, we meet a young man named Joey Smallwood, who is waiting at St. John’s station to meet the aeroplane and its airmen off the train. In 1949, Smallwood would become the premier of Newfoundland when the dominion joined the Canadian federation. In 1919, he was an eighteen-year-old cub reporter on the island’s Evening Telegram newspaper. None of the other journalists seemed to care that St. John’s was to become the location of the world’s most thrilling race. One of them reported the passengers due off Digby that day. After naming a few notable St. John’s politicians who had been on the ship, the writer added, “and a couple of airmen to fly across the Atlantic.” As if it was no big deal.

Would the Sopwith team arriving at Newfoundland succeed in flying all the way to Ireland? Or would they be beaten by rival contestants? On page 99 of The Big Hop, all this is yet to come; an unknowable future. Suffice to say—the ice field off St. John’s would prove to be the least of the airmen’s troubles…

Visit David Rooney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's "Heaven Has a Wall"

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States, with the following results:

From page 99:

…the normative order is the sovereign state system and the drive to transcend it the gravitational pull of American sovereign exceptionalism. AmericaIsrael pulls the US toward the latter. It embodies the productive interplay between sovereign territoriality and an American aspiration to collective transcendence of the international order. Performing AmericaIsrael is an exercise in refiguring sovereignty and aspirational borderlessness. This can be seen in the 1985 US-Israel Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the first free trade agreementof its kind. World Trade Organization rules allow FTAs only if they are regional; therefore, the US and Israel have maintained since 1985 that they are a legal “region” together. No party has challenged this claim in WTO courts, and so it stands.

AmericaIsrael is part of a larger mission to realize an American—and would-be universal—political morality. It is not the only example; AmericaUkraine is another. Overwriting sovereign norms of territoriality, and enacting an exception that is also the rule, AmericaIsrael is an example of what Giorgio Agamben describes as “the legal form of what cannot have legal form.” It is an American political theology, in the sense described by Vincent Lloyd, as “a shorthand for religion and politics more generally, or where they overlap, that part of the Venn diagram where religion and politics are connected and that could be approached in a lot of different ways.

I’d say the Page 99 Test works. Heaven Has a Wall is about American borders, and page 99 deals with the US and its (lack of) borders with Israel. I use the term “AmericaIsrael” on this page to refer to a cultural, religious, and political consensus that unites the two countries almost as if they were one, tapping into jointly held fantasies of military prowess, Holy Land fascination, and a righteous overcoming of borders in the name of the right and the good.

The test is slightly misleading in that the book is not only or even mainly about Israel. It’s a broader argument that the US is best understood as a state that simultaneously enforces its borders while also circumventing and even ignoring them. There is something very American about the desire to do both: to enforce and suspend borders, to be first among equals, to make the rules but not be subject to them. The 9/11 commission report captured this with the phrase “the American homeland is the planet.” No limits. Yet borders are limits, liminal zones, places of extremes, exceptions, and special rules. You want to look over your shoulder after you cross. US borders are present and absent, avowed and deferred. Enforced and erased. Fortified and open. Borders are defended even while the ideal of America is borderless. This goes back to the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, debates over annexing Cuba, and today, of course, Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal.

It can be tricky to study something that is both present and absent. If the American border isn’t just a line in the sand, what is it? Borders are political: they’re about regulation, control, checkpoints, violence. But they’re also religious sites of redemption, enchantment, salvation, commitment, emotion, and mystery. Each chapter of the book takes on a different aspect of borders: creating, enforcing, suspending, and refusing. These alternate with short interludes meant for a general audience: Where is Guantánamo? What happens if you openly disagree with a border agent at the airport? How does it feel to cross the border as a pilgrim participating in a pilgrimage older than the border itself? What happens if the river serves as a national border, but the river moves? I also want readers to consider their own border stories, and whether they fit into the book’s framework. Tell me your stories!

Visit Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jules Holroyd's "Oppressive Praise"

Jules Holroyd is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, with research interests in social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology. Prior to joining the department at Sheffield in 2016, they had positions at Cambridge, Cardiff, and Nottingham. They were a Mind Association Fellow 2022-2023.

Holroyd applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Oppressive Praise, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Oppressive Praise is at the heart of Chapter 3 of this book - this chapter sets out a view of what we do when we express praise: such expressions are vehicles for expressing our values. I articulate the mechanisms by which praise does this; and how the view of praise I develop can explain how (even well-intentioned) expressions of praise can embody and entrench oppressive values.

Page 99 wraps up one key part of my view - that praise has the function of signalling our values, by showing what we’re willing to celebrate and promote - the bravery or kindness that the target of the praise has expressed in their behaviour, say. Then page 99 embarks on the articulation of another key bit of the view: that praise expresses values not only in the things it explicitly celebrates and elevates, but in the evaluative frameworks that an expression of praise presupposes.

Here are two examples of this (to mention examples beyond page 99, that I return to, amongst others, throughout the book): someone might express praise towards a father for the childcare they are doing (my articulation of this case draws on an example from Serene Khader and Matt Lindauer’s work on the ‘daddy dividend’). In doing so, they signal - to the target, as well as to other audiences of the expression - that they value his parenting and perhaps more generally the idea of fathers getting involved in the care of their children. Or someone might express praise for someone’s bravery, signalling that they care about courage, and were able to detect when it was displayed.

But expressions of praise might presuppose wider evaluative frameworks and assumptions that audiences might infer, and take to be widely shared by audience members. For example, praising a father for doing basic parenting might presuppose the insulting belief that fathers are not good at parenting, and doing any of it is exceptional and praiseworthy. If part of a wider pattern where fathers are praised and mothers are not, expressions of praise may presuppose - irrespective of the intentions of the person praising - that mothers’ parenting is not noteworthy, to be taken for granted. Thereby gendered stereotypes about parenting and assumptions about whose labour is valuable can be conveyed by what those expressions of praise presuppose. Or praising a fat person for their bravery in choice of dress can presuppose the oppressive idea that they will be, or ought to be, ashamed of their body (as Aubrey Gordon has written about).

Does page 99 give a good idea of the whole work? In a way yes, because it gets to the core idea of the book, about the role that praise can play in signalling and presupposing values (sometimes good values, sometimes oppressive values). It articulates the mechanisms that make praise an important part of our moral interactions but one that can also be distorted by, and can perpetuate, oppression. On the other hand, I think it is pretty hard to get a sense of exactly what is going on just at page 99, since by then we’re already in the details of the conceptual apparatus that, I argue, are needed to make sense of how praise functions. It presents some fundamental ideas of the book, but for them to fully make sense and be understood in context, I think you need to read a fair bit of what leads up to page 99!

Overall, I think you’d get a better first sense of the book by reading the examples that come earlier on - first introduced at pages 18-23, 54-58, and recapitulated at pages 76-80. Those pages give you the examples of the phenomenon that motivates the whole book - sexist praise, ableist praise, racist praise, transphobic praise and anti-fat praise… Then, if you’re super interested in the mechanisms by which praise works to entrench oppression; the implications for thinking about our practices of holding responsible; the norms for expressing praise well; or strategies for resisting and responding to oppressive praise, including when expressed through honorific statues… then please do read on!

Learn more about Oppressive Praise at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Sanbonmatsu's "The Omnivore’s Deception"

John Sanbonmatsu, Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is author of The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves and of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject. He is also editor of the anthology, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation.

Sanbonmatsu received his BA from Hampshire College and earned his PhD in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He lives in the Boston area and has an adult son.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Omnivore's Deception and shared the following:

The reader who opens my book to page 99 will land in the middle of my critique of the celebrity animal farmer Joel Salatin, who was propelled to national fame by Michael Pollan in his bestselling book, The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006). The page begins with Thomas Jefferson's defense of simple American agrarianism against the corrupting influences of European sophistication and "luxury." Similar nationalist and conservative themes, I show, have now surfaced again in a "new" American pastoral ideal that has embraced the supposed "romance" of animal husbandry. The chapter this page appears in offers a critique of Pollan's hagiographic depiction of Salatin as a paradigm of rural virtues and American gumption, with a view to showing how this right-wing libertarian improbably became the doyen of Pollan's legions of well-heeled, urban, educated, liberal readers. As I explain on page 99, Salatin was for many years lionized in the mainstream and progressive press; then, five years ago, Mother Jones published a searing critique of Salatin, exposing his ugly views on race. Salatin, I write, "denied that 'America is systematically racist,' insisting instead that 'the failure in the Black community is dysfunctional family collapse.'"

Although page 99 is representative of my cultural critique of the "enlightened" omnivorism defended by Pollan, Salatin, and others, it is not representative of my book as a whole, because I cover a great many other themes too. My main argument is that we have effectively organized our entire existential identity as human beings around the domination of the other beings of the Earth; that this domination is undermining the ecology of our planet and ruining our souls; and that all exploitation and killing of animals for food--we kill about 80 billion land animals and up to 2.7 trillion marine animals each year--is morally indefensible and must stop. In the first half of the book, I trace the rise and lethal consequences of the modern animal economy, then demolish the myths and bad faith that prop up that system. None of our mass violence against animals, I show, is necessary or justifiable, since we can flourish easily on a plant-based diet. In the closing chapters of my book, I show that other animals have complex consciousness and emotions, and I make the case for treating them as persons or "someones," rather than as things, commodities, and slaves. Animals are not worthless beings--they are worthy of our love.

Visit John Sanbonmatsu's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Crane's "'Gifted Children' in Britain and the World"

Jennifer Crane is lecturer in health geographies at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, working at the intersection of history, geography, and sociologies of health. Before joining Bristol, she held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, including being PI on a Wellcome Research Fellowship. She has published popular and scholarly works exploring how diverse publics access state welfare, analysing diverse case studies of child welfare, the NHS, and gifted children. Much of her work has employed and driven new analysis of 'experiential expertise', including her first book, Child Protection in England, 1960-2000.

Crane applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World: Elitism and Equality since 1945, with the following results:

I looked to page 99 of my latest book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World, with some trepidation, without a clear sense of what chapter or what kinds of analysis would be there. What we see on this page actually feels, to me, central to the ethos and major claims of the final book – the page focuses on making visible and analysing the writings of children and young people themselves. Page 99 discusses a collective letter, written in 1979 by a group of ‘ninth and tenth graders’ in a giftedness programme in California, where, as you’ll see elsewhere in this book, such programmes were relatively prevalent. The ninth and tenth graders wrote to young people who read a British magazine, Explorers Unlimited, produced for child-members of a voluntary group, the National Association for Gifted Children. The ninth and tenth graders reached out, in particular, to share critique of the term, ‘gifted’. They wrote that, having received this label, they were ‘expected to always be straight A or on top’, and ‘push[ed] harder’ by teachers; they could also not always ‘live up to your expectations’. Instead, the children wrote, they’d like to simply be analysed and approached as ‘’human’, and understood ‘a little more’.

This letter, my page 99 argues, shows the ambivalence which many young people felt about the label gifted. And this specific letter, the next Explorers Unlimited edition recorded, merited many responses, with British children agreeing that ‘we are given a label’ and that ‘I felt just like that towards my parents’. The label then travelled, and held similar meanings for children across the Atlantic, despite very different political economy structuring around ‘giftedness’ (also discussed in the book). Some children, discussed elsewhere in the book, of course also loved the label ‘gifted’. Many children relished a sense of specialness attached to it, and in the 1970s and 1980s in particular, when ‘giftedness’ was typically taken very narrowly, to really mean rare, exceptional, special, children mobilised this label to reshape their relationships with teachers, friends, parents, and siblings. Yet other children found the pressure of the label too much, and questioned the arbitrariness of its application and also, significantly, the inequalities embedded in psychological and educational testing, which are also explored in this book. More children still felt ambivalent about this label – these mixed feelings are something that one of my PhD students, Buse Demirkan, is tracing at present through interviews.

Overall then, my book contributes to geographies and histories of childhood by arguing, foundationally, that we can and must trace the voices of the young and include these, and ‘age’ more broadly, as a critical category within our analyses. We can dismiss any claims that the young didn’t have political agency, or that their writings were never saved or recorded, and thus that their stories do not matter or can’t be accessed. With this in mind, the book traces the rise and fall of giftedness as a specific label, and the broadening out of this idea, with new connections to social mobility agendas, in the 1990s and 2000s. And central to the book is the complex ‘agencies’ exercised by young people – both empowered by ideas of their high intelligence, able to access new voluntary spaces, yet also inevitably entwined policy agendas around future leadership and, often, dismissed as critical thinkers with the assumption that any critique merely demonstrated the uniquely disruptive nature of their minds.

Learn more about 'Gifted Children' in Britain and the World at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Eva Leach and Jonathan Morton's "Performing Desire"

Elizabeth Eva Leach is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and the author of Guillaume de Machaut, Sung Birds, and Medieval Sex Lives. Jonathan Morton is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University and the author of The "Roman de la rose" in Its Philosophical Context.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival's "Bestiaire d'amours", and reported the following:

On page 99, the discussion moves between two of the animal examples from Richard de Fournival’s darkly playful thirteenth-century fiction, the Bestiaire d’amours—those of the eagle and the woodpecker. The first-person speaker in the work, whom we call the je (the “I”), uses the eagle breaking its beak to eat as a twisted analogy for the lady needing to break her pride (figured as a “fortress”) to speak and accept the advances of the je. He then describes the woodpecker’s behaviour when a hunter stops up its nest hole with a plug or peg. The bird finds a special herb that has the power to unfasten the plug, allowing it to access its offspring. The je uses this story to figure his own desire to access the lady’s heart, lamenting that he doesn’t possess the “herb” needed to open her up. We read the je’s interpretation as a deliberate but transparent attempt to misdirect the audience of the work away from the clear implication of his own desire to penetrate her, both psychically and physically. This imagery contributes to a sequence of suggestive examples on this page, highlighting themes of penetration and lightly veiled obscenity and potential violence.

This page, nestled within the chapter on “The Place of Bodies,” offers a vivid picture of the complex and often unsettling psychic world conjured up in Richard de Fournival’s prose work. On page 99, we discuss how the Bestiaire d’amours uses animal examples to explore themes of penetration, breaking down barriers, and gaining access to the desired other. This single page represents the whole book in a few ways. It captures the Bestiaire d’amours’s distinctive method of being a warped kind of bestiary, of using animal natures for self-serving analogies. It showcases one of the book’s major lines of argument, namely that the Bestiaire d’amours conceptualises desire and subjectivity through images of containment, entry, and rupture. The overtones of obscenity and the je’s manipulative interpretations, crucial aspects of the work’s unsettling effect, are also clearly visible here.

Of course, page 99 doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t delve into the work’s status as a hybrid “prose lyric”, the subtle games it plays with performance and textuality, the subversiveness with which it parodies authoritative philosophical, Scholastic discourse, or its rich reception history, all things treated in the book as whole. Nevertheless, page 99 offers a glimpse of how the Bestiaire d’amours uniquely (and often disturbingly) uses animal imagery to explore the physical and psychological dimensions of desire.

Learn more about Performing Desire at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders by Elizabeth Eva Leach.

--Marshal Zeringue

Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann, Emily Huddart, and Merin Oleschuk's "Happy Meat"

Josée Johnston is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on food, gender, culture, and politics. She is the co-author, with Shyon Baumann, of Foodies (2015) and, with Kate Cairns, of Food and Femininity (2015). Shyon Baumann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His work addresses questions of evaluation, legitimacy, status, classification, and inequality. Past book projects include Hollywood Highbrow (2007). Emily Huddart is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. She is an environmental sociologist with a focus on consumer attitudes and behaviors. She is the author of Eco-Types (2022). Merin Oleschuk is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Happy Meat: The Sadness and Joy of a Paradoxical Idea, and shared the following:

Page 99 of our book falls in the chapter "Happy Meat Makes Me Feel Good," which explores the happy stories about ethical meat that some consumers focus on when thinking about their meat consumption choices. On page 99 specifically, there is an anecdote from two focus group interviewees about a pig slaughtering they witnessed. The interviewees explained that the event caused them to be especially attuned to the conditions under which animals are raised and killed and to consume mindfully. We argue that this anecdote illustrates psychologist Paul Rozin's idea that meat has become moralized, which is to say that meat consumption was previously morally neutral but has in recent decades come to be seen as having clear moral consequences. We argue also that this anecdote illustrates Sara Ahmed's argument that happiness can be ascribed to an object, which then has enhanced positive social valuation.

Readers turning to this page would learn something significant about our book, but it would be a limited window into what the whole book is about. The book covers many more concepts, arguments, and empirical findings. At the same time, the ideas of moralization and happy objects are two of the most important concepts in the book. In trying to understand why people eat meat, and why happy meat in particular, we find that happy meat helps to manage people's moral qualms about meat. Happy meat is morally acceptable because the animals are treated humanely. Animals raised ethically are objectified as highly valued and they can generate happiness via consumption. These are some of the core ideas underlying why happy meat works well for some consumers to continue to eat meat. It would seem that the Page 99 Test does not work quite as well for our book as might be hoped, but it's also not a total failure.

Our book is perhaps less well suited to the Page 99 Test than many others. It is less about advancing a single argument and is more about examining the multiple angles for understanding happy meat as a consumer phenomenon and in relation to meat eating in general. So it is not surprising that page 99 does not tell us about much of the book as a whole. While page 99 draws on a focus group transcript, the book also relies on survey data, interviews and site visits with farmers, and analysis of news stories. The other themes the book addresses include the emergence of a discursive and material "space" for happy meat aside from the industrial meat system; the meat consumption behaviours and beliefs of the average consumer; the perspectives and experiences of farmers and other workers who produce happy meat; and the social dynamics implicated in the choice to eat, or not eat, happy meat vs. industrial meat.

Learn more about Happy Meat at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Niall Docherty's "Healthy Users"

Niall Docherty is a Lecturer in Data, AI, and Society in the Information School at the University of Sheffield.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Healthy Users: The Governance of Well-Being on Social Media, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Healthy Users explores the hidden political costs of nudge, discussing how its paternalistic interventions manipulate the free choice of (assumed-to-be) irrational individuals living in neoliberal societies. Page 99 characterizes nudge as a system of control, despite its proponents arguing that it ensures the autonomy of people subject to its techniques. By subtly shaping environments, through design cues that range from house flies on urinals or default options on administration forms, ‘choice-architects’ direct human thought and behaviour in certain directions, at the expense of others. The book as a whole explores the effects of this in the context of social media interfaces, arguing that the type of agency afforded to users is incredibly narrow, primarily reflective of normative Silicon Valley values to do with self-interest, self-promotion and social competition. The book argues that to engage with social media is to respond to and action these values. To be a user in the terms offered by platforms is to live the neoliberal dream of nudge. A reader opening the book on page 99 would likely get a sense of these arguments, yet may miss how the book also relates these norms to the economic practices of platforms who are keen to keep users scrolling for a primary capitalist function. That is, despite platforms claiming that the design of their interfaces encourage healthy use, meaningful connection, and social flourishing, they also cultivate habitual interactions and dependencies. It is through these repeated, daily user habits that platforms are able harvest profitable data, which is then used to improve their services and sell to interested third parties for a profit - mainly for targeted digital advertising. Habits, therefore, as the book explores in some depth through a range of empirical and theoretical analysis, are the vehicle of users' own normalization and the principal source of capitalist value extraction online today. Overall, then, I think page 99 of Healthy Users reveals some of the core philosophical ground of this critique, but omits its corresponding technological, and deeply contemporary, applications found throughout the book as a whole.

Learn more about Healthy Users at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eunji Kim's "The American Mirage"

Eunji Kim is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy, with the following results:

Page 99 of The American Mirage zooms in on the idea of a “natural experiment,” a term social scientists use to describe those rare moments when life, not a researcher, does the randomizing. The page opens with this explanation:

It’s as if an experiment has taken place but without any deliberate randomization by researchers.

From there, I walk readers through a well-known example: the rollout of Fox News across the U.S. in the late 1990s. Because cable providers negotiated channel availability district by district, some Americans got Fox News early, others didn’t—randomly, and for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. That quirk gave researchers a way to study the channel’s effects on voting behavior, ideology, and even how members of Congress talked. Later on the page, I mention another stroke of research luck: how state regulations accidentally determined which towns got early broadband access—giving us a window into how online media deepened partisan divides.

Does page 99 reflect the book as a whole?

Honestly? It does more than I expected. At first glance, it might seem like I’ve gone full research nerd (and fair warning, I do love a clever research design). But this page also sets the stage for one of the book’s central moves: showing how entertainment—often brushed off as frivolous—can shape political beliefs in very real, very measurable ways.

Just a few pages later, I introduce my own natural experiment, one that might surprise readers: the hometown locations of successful American Idol contestants. What happens when someone from your small town suddenly becomes famous on national TV? It turns out that people in those towns watch more of that TV show and then start to believe in the American Dream more strongly. They’re more optimistic about economic mobility compared to their similar counterparts who live in otherwise economically similar towns. Page 99 is the bridge between the methodological rigor of social science and the pop-cultural heartbeat of the book. It’s the part where I ask readers to take both seriously.

For too long, political scientists have treated entertainment as a sideshow. But if we’re honest about how Americans actually spend their time, the picture is clear: most aren’t glued to political news—they’re immersed in stories that entertain, distract, and inspire. The American Mirage starts from that simple, overdue truth. This book argues that the tales we consume—from reality TV competitions to influencer glow-ups—aren’t just harmless fun. They shape how we think about success, who deserves it, and what’s possible in America. They fuel our belief in mobility even when the odds are stacked. They blur the line between fantasy and political reality. Once upon a time, Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories lived in dime novels. Today, they live on glowing screens—and they’re still doing political work. The American Mirage shows how.

Visit Eunji Kim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gila Stopler's "Women's Rights in Liberal States"

Gila Stopler is Full Professor of Law and former Dean of Law School at the College of Law & Business, Israel. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Law & Ethics of Human Rights.

Stopler applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Women's Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Women’s Rights in Liberal States says:

The extension of the protection of religious liberty beyond churches to a wide range of organizations with a religious ethos is characteristic of many liberal democracies and is highly significant as far as women's right to equality is concerned. As described above, wide nets of religiously based charitable and educational institutions, many of which are publicly funded, are free to preach and practice discrimination against women behind the protective shield of religious liberty. From emergency rooms in Catholic hospitals that refuse to administer emergency contraception to women, through religious schools that teach school children about women's inferiority, to religious employers who refuse to hire women or who discriminate against them in pay, the liberal democratic state aids, protects, and finances the dissemination of discrimination against women in the interest of protecting religious liberty.

In his study of public religions in the modern world, Casanova posits that there are three levels on which religions can be involved in the public sphere. The first is through its establishment at the state level. The second level is the level of political society, through confessional parties and through the involvement of religious institutions and groups in political and electoral mobilization. The third level is the level of civil society on which religions participate in the public discourse on various issues. Casanova argues that ultimately only at the level of civil society can religions have a legitimate public role, consistent with modern universalistic principles and with differentiated structures. In this Chapter I have shown that in contemporary Western liberal democracies religions have a significant public role on all three levels, which adversely affects the situation of women. I would therefore argue that contrary to common perception religion state relations in liberal democracies pose a serious challenge to women's rights....

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Yes, it does. The crux of the argument in the book, which is reflected very well on page 99, is that Western liberal democracies give patriarchal religions too much power, legitimacy and protection. Patriarchal religions then use their power and legitimacy, and the protection of the state, to restrict the rights of women in both the public and the private spheres and to adversely affect women’s status in society, all with the sanction of the liberal state.

Page 99 is the last page in chapter 3 of the book. While it reflects the crux of the argument in the book, the full argument is more multilayered and complex. The book is divided into three parts. The first part (chapters 1 and 2) discusses the historical, societal, and theoretical roots of discrimination against women. It explains the historical rise of patriarchy through patriarchal religion and culture and shows how patriarchy has been embedded in liberal theory and in the practice of liberal states. The second part of the book (chapters 3 and 4), which includes page 99, explains how, contrary to popular belief, religion state relations in liberal states adversely affect women’s rights. Patriarchal religions are regarded as respectable and as promoting public virtue and moral values regardless of and sometimes because of their discriminatory stances toward women, and the separation between religion and the state which is assumed to protect women against the power of patriarchal religion fails to do so. In part III (chapters 5 and 6) the book discusses the decline of liberal hegemony, the rise of populism, and their effects on the rights of women. Through an analysis of American Supreme Court cases such as Hobby Lobby and Dobbs the book argues that the resurgence and repoliticization of patriarchal religion in the twenty-first century has further magnified the threats facing women’s rights in Western liberal states such as the USA. It argues that the repoliticization of religion in the new millennium is often part and parcel of the rise of nationalism and of right-wing populism, and together these phenomena threaten not only the rights of women, but the future of liberal democracy itself.

Visit Gila Stopler's website.

--Marsha Zeringue

Elisabeth Paling Funk's "The Dutch World of Washington Irving"

Born in the Netherlands, Elisabeth Paling Funk received her PhD from Fordham University, taught English at the university level, and is now a translator, editor, and independent scholar. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Dutch World of Washington Irving: Knickerbocker's History of New York and the Hudson Valley Folktales, and reported the following:

Serendipitously, page 99 of The Dutch World of Washington Irving: Knickerbocker’s History and the Hudson Valley Folktales opens near the beginning of a section in chapter three, entitled “The Oral Tradition.” This chapter deals with all aspects of New Netherland’s popular culture as Irving blends these within the Knickerbocker History’s narrative, and page 99 gives an excellent example of Irving’s major purpose and his way with Dutch-American folk material. Knickerbocker’s History illustrates Irving’s view that traditions and beliefs constitute an essential part of a people’s history. The stories of the Hudson Valley tales are wholly subservient to his purpose: to describe the distinctive life, traditions, and beliefs within the Dutch-American communities of former New Netherland. My first two chapters complete the picture; they investigate Irving’s treatment of New Netherland’s history and the presence in that work of Jacob Cats, a major seventeenth-century Dutch poet. But popular culture in all its manifestations is an important part of Irving’s History of New York and dominates the Hudson Valley folktales. Long before the study of folklore became a scholarly pursuit, Irving’s description of life in the Hudson Valley made him America’s first folklorist.

“The Oral Tradition” of chapter three treats all folk belief—omens, visions, ghosts, witchcraft, demonism—that are represented in The History of New York, and begins with legendry. Much of page 99 examines Irving’s claim, attributed to Juffredus Petri, that America was settled by “a skaiting party from Friesland.” Petri, or Sjoerd Pieters, a sixteenth-century Frisian scholar who intermingled the fabulous with historical facts, told of Frisian noblemen who, in 1030, discovered the New World and populated Chile. The “skaiting party” is Irving’s fiction, but his choice of activity for such intrepid explorers is apt; through the ages, Frisians have been known as master skaters, whose speed skating skills would become legendary in tales of extraordinary prowess.

A discussion of The Flying Dutchman follows. Irving’s use of this legendary ghost ship in the History’s 1809 edition is among the first in world literature and carries all the major elements of the legend in its oral tradition. He returns to it in the tale, “The Storm Ship,” explored in chapter five.

Next, the Dutch Saint Nicholas in religion, folk belief, and celebration is traced from his origin through the Middle Ages, when he acquired an additional role as folk hero. "The Oral Tradition" then follows him through his fateful adventures during the Reformation to his arrival and continued celebration by the Dutch in the New World. Irving’s adoption and transformation of the Dutch folk hero in his History of New York are extensively analyzed and shown to have developed into today’s American Santa Claus, a process that is further investigated in the epilogue.

Learn more about The Dutch World of Washington Irving at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nathan K. Hensley's "Action without Hope"

Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he works on nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory, environmental humanities, and the novel. His other areas of research include Anglophone modernism and the cultures of contemporary globalization. His first book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary form to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity.

Hensley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse, with the following results:

Page 99 of Action without Hope comes in the second chapter, which uses Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to describe the emergence of a modern way of life that's based on a relationship of extraction toward the nonhuman world. With others in the nineteenth century, she witnessed the slow process by which an exploitative and nonregenerative and therefore, in a way, doomed social order came to feel natural. The book as a whole makes the claim that this is the world whose ruins we live in today, "climate change" or the unraveling of earth systems being just one area where the outcome of this orientation is now palpable to us. Anyway in this chapter I'm arguing that Brontë's weird and still challenging novel suggests that this autodestructive way of life is not permanent or universal, but emerged at a specific historical moment. In this sense she departs from her sister Charlotte, who in Jane Eyre gave shape to the far more pacific view that bourgeois society could enable something like happiness or fulfillment. I write:

Written twelve years after this letter [in which Charlotte refers to the 'spoilt' personality of a neighbor from a slave-owning family], Jane Eyre would expunge this spoilt demon [i.e. Bertha Mason] from the record, leaving the stain of the plantation complex behind in a pile of charred rubble so as to clear space for heteronormative futurity between white characters, such that (as Jane reports) “perfect concord is the result” (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 519).19 “My Edward and I,” says Jane in conclusion, “are happy: and the more so, because those we most love are happy likewise” (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 520).

Emily’s view was darker. In a now-famous school essay she composed in Belgium, “The Butterfly” (1842), she wrote that “the universe appeared . . . a vast machine constructed only to produce evil” (178). As the semi-fictionalized speaker of the essay works through this insight, (s)he comes to see in the butterfly an image of how splendid beauty, “lustrous gold and purple,” can emerge from pure violence: nature “exists,” the narrator says “on a principle of destruction” (E. Brontë, “Butterfly,” 176).20 In Emily’s school essay, this principle is imagined as universal, valid in all times and all places.

Wuthering Heights would transform this grim metaphysics into a violent scenario many readers have mistaken for eternal. The tendency toward ruin in the novel appears to be a dynamic outside time. In fact it is rigorously dated, the book’s principle of destruction arriving along with its “suitable pair” of central exogamous characters (E. Brontë, Wuthering, 1). Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights in 1781, at the height of the Liverpool-based slave economy, and Lockwood arrives in 1801, at the dawn of a new, modern century: twinned advents marked with a slanted chronological specificity I will describe more below. In this way is the auto-demolishing character of accumulation by extraction marked as historically emergent and dynamic across time, the “convergence between progress and decay” structuring the book (Hiday 248) only one modality by which it investigates the intimacy between luster and ruin across the period of an aspirationally universalizing Atlantic capitalism.

The Wuthering Heights chapter is crucial to the book because it helps frame my point (which is really Emily Brontë's point) that we currently inhabit a world whose normal order of operation is based, as Brontë puts it, on a principle of destruction. The fossil fueled imperialism of our present is in some ways a ghostly replay of the nineteenth century: the rapacious capture of the object world and the domination of subordinated peoples we see when we scroll through the news are in some ways hyperspeed versions of the social order Brontë watched gathering around her in the 1840s. So in that sense there is a representative quality to this passage, for sure. But the book also ranges further than this local argument about a gathering fossil capitalism and its afterlives. It's about how to inhabit systems that are dissolving and breaking and inescapable, and still find ways to elaborate new worlds out of those broken inheritances.

That's a long way of saying that in some ways the Page 99 Test works for Action without Hope—I think. In fact one thread of the book is about just this question of parts and wholes: how a tiny detail can evoke a much larger configuration. As I try to say in the book, this synecdochal quality is a literary effect, of course, but it's also how all thinking happens. We develop emblems for larger concepts, images that feel vivid, but point to something beyond themselves. Observing this scalar and figural quality of all thinking leads me to spend a lot of time mulling over the idea of the detail: what is a detail, how can small things matter, and what kinds of perceptual capacities do we need to appreciate both the texture of the small thing, and the dynamic ways it connects to the broader world of which it's only a partial evocation? This is the plot of Middlemarch, as I say in the book, and it's also why Action without Hope works on two levels: it's an argument for the quiet power of small, nearly insignificant activities, and also a manifesto for the kinds of reading that are necessary to appreciate those tiny things. I think people should look at page 151, too: that's my favorite one.

Visit Nathan K. Hensley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Matthews's "Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City"

Michael Matthews is professor of history at Elon University. He is the author of The Civilizing Machine: A Cultural History of Mexican Railroads, 1876–1910.

Matthews applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City: A Social History of Working-Class Courtship, and shared the following:

Opening to page 99 takes the reader smack-dab in the middle of one of the many rapto cases that serve as the basis of this book, albeit one of the more salacious and titillating examples. The crime of rapto in turn-of-the-century Mexico, while defined as the abduction of an underage woman from parental authority, also often functioned as elopements planned by young couples in the face of family opposition. This case, which stems from a mysterious set of events that took place in 1907 between one romantically involved couple, although not representative of the entire book, does highlight key themes: societal gender norms and expectations; gendered performativity, especially before legal authorities; concerns about female virginity; and male anxieties about how modernization spurred female sexual freedom. On this page, specifically, we find twenty-seven-year-old police officer Guillermo, defending himself before an investigating judge for the abduction of fourteen-year-old Carmen, a teenage girl who he courted. Guillermo seeks to undermine her social standing before the judge claiming that she was not a virgin when they had sex because she had admitted to him that “one night while dreaming she had introduced her finger and…lost her virginity.” We also find, on this page, that Carmen’s mother seeks to undermine Guillermo social standing and manhood by claiming that he abandoned his pregnant girlfriend to chase after her daughter. The mother, finishing her declaration to the judge, submits a clipping from a popular Mexico City newspaper of a fictional story she claimed Guillermo wrote. Although continuing onto the following page, it tells the tale of a flirtatious coquet also named Carmen—who happens to live on the very street on which the real Carmen lived. In the story, the coquet uses revealing clothes and attractive makeup to lure two young men into a deadly duel over her affection. One dies and the other is sent to prison while Carmen looks on with glee from her tenement building window.

While page 99 highlights key themes, the book, more broadly, seeks to show the vast diversity of different ways that turn-of-the-century Mexico City’s expanding infrastructure, increased factory work, and new leisure and entertainment activities shaped the courtship and sexual practices of the working class.

Learn more about Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City at the University Press of Florida website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eugenia Zuroski's "A Funny Thing"

Eugenia Zuroski is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Ontario. She is the author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (2013) and editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry, Kintail Beach (2022) and Hovering, Seen (2019).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Funny Thing: Eighteenth-Century Literature Undisciplined, and reported the following:

Page 99 of A Funny Thing lands us on the page in which I discuss Horace Walpole’s Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, published in 1765. I would say that this page both does and does not give the reader a good sense of the work as a whole.

It does in the sense that it drops the reader right into a bit of historical literary criticism, in which I analyze how the different prefaces frame the tale for eighteenth-century readers, shifting their expectations of what literature is for. Such is the bread and butter of literary analysis, which is what this book is made of. A reader who is not already interested in literature from this period might conclude that this book would bore them—and maybe they’d be right. A Funny Thing is a work of academic literary criticism, and as such, it dwells deeply with textual detail and cultural context.

But the page does not at all give a sense of the breadth of texts and contexts that the book contains, nor its sense of humor! It doesn’t tell you, for example, that before page 99 you get a long discussion of flying penises in Western art and culture (with pictures!), or that the discussion of Walpole leads to a heartfelt meditation on the forms of intimacy he cultivated through shared creative projects with his friends, or that I connect The Castle of Otranto to Daniel Lavery’s absolutely brilliant series from The Toast, “Erotica Written By an Alien Pretending Not to Be Horrified by the Human Body,” or that the book culminates in an extended reading of Bob the Drag Queen’s “iconic wig reveal” on the show “We’re Here.”

In a way, though, page 99 is perfect, because it contains the epigraph to The Castle of Otranto where Walpole deliberately misquotes Horace from the Ars Poetica in a playful and irreverent effort to make space in British literature for departures from neoclassical standards—to refuse the empirical, the tasteful, the serious, and the proper in favor of the flighty, the silly, the outrageous, the funny. And this exact close reading, of this preface, which I have been teaching for years, was the seed of the entire project. So to me, this page really is the heart of the book, and the book is dear to my heart.

Visit Eugenia Zuroski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf's "Remnants of Refusal"

Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Ohio University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma, with the following results:

On page 99 of my book, Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma, the reader confronts two film stills: the first, from Yasujirô Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), and below, the second, from Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004). In both shots, an elderly couple sits on a low concrete wall, their faces in profile, their expressions impassive, their shoulders slightly hunched. The couples are dressed in traditional or anachronistic clothing: in Ozu’s film, they wear kimonos, while in Jia’s, the man dons a Mao suit and cap- the uniform of the latter-day proletariat. The Japanese couple in the first still, denizens of the provincial city Onomichi, have traveled to Tokyo to visit their adult children. However, they are quickly sent away by their distracted, inattentive eldest son and daughter to a hot spring spa in the tourist city of Atami. The Chinese couple in the second still, from impoverished Shanxi province, have come to Beijing to bury their son who perished under dangerous conditions as an unlicensed construction worker. Though not shown in these stills, most of the young people in these two films contrast to their elders in their energy and their frenzy to “make it” in the big city.

In the short paragraph on page 99, I explain—as other scholars have also noted—that Ozu and Jia’s films criticize periods of national transition following historical trauma- in this case the Second World War and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. I write, “Ozu’s film laments the cultural fallout wrought by the early years of the Japanese economic miracle; Jia’s film likewise questions what has become of time-honored beliefs as China enters the age of neoliberal globalization.” This coincides with my book’s larger argument that certain works of film and literature reveal what I term “remnants of refusal,” echoes and afterimages of the past that have been left in suspension between nationally dominant rhetorics of constant progress and the affective persistence of the unmourned past.

Should browsers apply the significance of the images on page 99 to my book as a whole, they would also glean several additional incitements that lie at its heart. Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma examines literature and film, engaging in how these works speak affectively—though their melancholy, ambivalence, or exhaustion—to the repression of historical trauma. The film stills on page 99—the immobilized elderly couples gazing without a clear aim at the horizon—serve as examples of these affects and of those figures left behind by national campaigns of renewal. My book claims, too, that such responses align with a feminist position. Ozu and Jia’s films feature women protagonists (Noriko in Tokyo Story and Zhao Tao in The World) who identify with their elders, suggesting a feminist protest to historical waves that cast the nation forward over the unresolved past. Finally, while my book primarily stages these arguments though French and Chinese literature and film, the comparison between China and Japan on page 99 reveals a key — if perhaps implicit — argument: that melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion may be affective forms of protest in works of art beyond these two nations, that we might consider how they operate globally.

Learn more about Remnants of Refusal at the SUNY Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexander Menrisky's "Everyday Ecofascism"

Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Everyday Ecofascism chiefly highlights the cultural critic Theodore Roszak’s concept of “reversionary-technophiliac synthesis,” which he developed in his long 1986 essay From Satori to Silicon Valley. In it, Roszak, who popularized the term “counterculture,” suggested that participants in the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s and 1970s were not as averse to technological advancement as popular media often portray them. Rather, they were often confident that new technologies could (perhaps paradoxically) help them to rediscover and reclaim putatively originary lifeways, social arrangements, and authentic modes of being on the earth. Perhaps no primary text of the time captured this optimism better than Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which served not only as a guidebook for many communalists but also as a directory of tools they could purchase to help them establish their communities—as well as a sense of their own privileged belonging in a given environment. As I put in the book, “[c]onsuming (and using) products in a marketplace of organic commodities would itself be one way to prove that one had been ‘chosen’ by the land.”

Readers opening Everyday Ecofascism to this page would get a good sense of the scope of this chapter, which focuses on how commodity consumption grounded certain counterculturalists’ claims to a naturalized relationship with the earth. They would likely not, however, immediately understand its relation to the book’s titular term: ecofascism. The word has become increasingly prominent in both popular and academic takes on right-wing environmentalism, especially among mass shooters such as those who targeted Mexicans and Mexican Americans in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 and Black Americans in Buffalo, New York, in 2022. My argument throughout the book, however, is that we should understand ecofascism much as the field of comparative fascist studies has come to understand fascism in general: not as a stable ideology but as a political genre that reinforces white supremacy, in this case in environmentalist contexts. Scholars of fascism have demonstrated that deep-seated, nonpartisan storytelling patterns in Germany, for example, helped propel Nazism to power across the political spectrum. Roszak’s “reversionary-technophiliac synthesis” speaks to similar cultural narratives in the U.S. that have informed not only actors such as the El Paso and Buffalo shooters, who frame people of color as “invasive species” threatening white Anglo-Saxon blood on U.S. soil, but also certain Silicon Valley executives who believe that only the investment of authoritarian power in the hands of tech tycoons can save the world from ecological catastrophe.

Learn more about Everyday Ecofascism at the University of Minnesota Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathryn C. Lavelle's "Reluctant Conquest"

Kathryn C. Lavelle is the Ellen and Dixon Long Professor of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University and the author of The Challenges of Multilateralism. She has been a congressional fellow and a residential fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

Lavelle applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Reluctant Conquest: American Wealth, Power, and Science in the Arctic, and reported the following:

Reluctant Conquest fails the Page 99 Test. Hopefully, however, it does not fail the entire “Pages 1-269” Course! If someone browsing the book opened it to page 99, they would find an examination of American foreign policy as it changed early in the Cold War. The page summarizes how during the early years of the Cold War, the American government was revamping itself in order to address its new role in the world following World War II. All of these changes would affect Arctic affairs, beginning with the country’s physical presence on the ground and its bilateral relations with other countries in the region, chiefly Greenland, Iceland, and Norway.

Although it is not the best single page to introduce the book, page 99 does demonstrate the book’s overarching effort to situate Arctic strategy within the arc of broader American foreign policy throughout U.S. history. That is, what factors explain the way the U.S. acts and how do the pieces of economics and science fit within overall national interests? To do this, each section draws direct ties to broader events, isolationism, and internationalism and the efforts of Indigenous peoples within a political system they did not create, but have had to work within.

Most other examinations of U.S. foreign policy in the Arctic focus on one or another aspect of this history. Many present detailed histories of Alaska. While they are valuable, Reluctant Conquest is the first comprehensive study that integrates developments in science, commerce, and military affairs. The Arctic is an area that is experiencing dramatic environmental change as well as global political realignments. This book aims to give scholars, policymakers, and general readers an understanding of how the elements have fit together time so that they will be better equipped to evaluate events as they progress in the future.

Learn more about Reluctant Conquest at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ryan Cull's "Unlimited Eligibility"

Ryan Cull is Associate Professor of English at New Mexico State University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Unlimited Eligibility?: Inclusive Democracy and the American Lyric, with the following results:

On the one hand, page 99 of Unlimited Eligibility? Inclusive Democracy and the American Lyric is uncharacteristically almost filled with a quotation of an entire poem. On the other hand, the quoted poem, Hart Crane’s “Possessions,” is pivotal to the presentation of the concept of “looking without recognizing,” a phrase introduced at the top of the page that also serves as the title of the chapter. Why is this distinction (looking vs. recognizing) important and how is it connected to a sequence of movements, from the St. Louis Hegelians to cultural pluralism to 60s/70s-era identity politics to more recent multiculturalism, that serve as the backdrop for the poets considered in this book?

Written in 1923, at a time when the New York state legislature amended a “disorderly conduct” law so that it could target gay men, Crane’s poem boldly invites readers to “witness” his life without “apprehen[ding]” him. The latter word, of course, can denote identifying and understanding – and also the act of arresting. A contemporaneous poem, “Recitative” similarly appeals to the reader to “look” without recognizing him. In these works and others, Crane studies how being seen can be a gateway either to greater social inclusion or to deeper social exclusion (or a messy mixture of both). He knows that those who are empowered predominantly determine a culture's ways of seeing and being seen. Brave appeals and demands by minority populations seeking greater social recognition, which have significantly structured a sequence of social movements (including some of those noted above), have secured important, incremental improvements for those populations. Yet participation within this inherently hierarchical system of social recognition (involving a recognizing class, those who are recognized, as well as those partially recognized, and those unrecognized) also can tacitly reinforce those hierarchies.

By inviting readers to “witness” and “look” without “recogniz[ing]” or “apprehend[ing],” Crane resists this approach to social inclusion. Instead, he is characteristic of a group of poets studied in this book (also including Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer, James Merrill, and Thylias Moss) who explore inclusion in terms of an affirmation of ontological proximity and equality rather than an epistemological confirmation of recognizability, locating an invitation to be-with rather than an urge to know-who at the core of their artistic practice. But the book traces how this approach has limits too. Prioritizing ontological affirmation rather than confirmation of recognizability too often comes close to indulging a naïve hope of establishing a world without labels.

Renarrating the sociopolitical dimensions of American poetry through the tension between these two models of inclusion helps us to reflect on the demand that we, albeit falteringly, keep trying to learn the language of democracy, a task we must continue today.

Learn more about Unlimited Eligibility? at the State University of New York Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue