Jonathan Eburne, "Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry (U Minnesota Press, 2025) is the latest book by scholar Jonathan P. Eburne, J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. An experiment in returning to incomplete scholarly projects to renovate and reimagine them, the book stages a series of encounters with essays “suspended in process”: essays that Jonathan began writing but that didn’t materialize in their intended form.

Fascinating, witty, and original, Exploded Views is a record of Jonathan’s intellectual curiosity in its rich idiosyncrasy—from the parasitical deformations of insect galls to the speculative science of “orgone energy,” from Leonora Carrington’s surrealist art and literature to methamphetamine addiction in the time of late capitalism, and more. It’s also a challenge for scholars to account for the many kinds of labor that make and unmake scholarship, and, just as importantly, an unabashed defence of "nerding out" as the humanities scholar's prerogative.

This conversation brings together Exploded Views with the work of NBN host Alix Beeston, whose interest in abandoned and interrupted scholarly and creative works informs her recent co-edited book Incomplete. Like Exploded Views itself, Jonathan and Alix’s frank and wide-ranging discussion brings to the foreground the kinds of scholarly activity that usually sit in the background of scholarly writing, not least the communities, relationships, and environments that define intellectual labor.

What does it mean, Jonathan and Alix ask, to be doing the kind of work we do as scholars? What does it feel like to do this work? What does it require or cost? And what might be the value of cultural criticism as an inventive, creative practice—or even, perhaps, a form of relational labor akin to friendship?

The non-profit bookstore Jonathan helped to found is The Print Factory in Bellafonte, Pennsylvania—check it out if you’re in the area! Exploded Views is available now from the University of Minnesota Press.

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