Marginalized Work, Innovative Critique
How might experimental forms of criticism better serve marginalized works? Excerpts from a roundtable discussion.
Families Fall Apart While Friendships Flourish in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet
At heart, Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer ask us: what holds people together who are living through this political moment of breakage?
Myths over History: the Strange Story of 21st Century Traditionalism on the Far Right
Geopolitics as a field is catnip for Traditionalists and others attracted by the high-end and fatuous.
Impossible Demand: Utopic Poetry
Reading poetry has felt like a ridiculous use of my time and a necessary one.
Mind Melding Across the Genre Divide
To choose the “we” narrator is inherently political. The collectively narrated novel is fairly new—to literary realism, anyway.
We are not dealing with the end of the human species so much as we are dealing with the end of narcissism. If we want to keep on living on this earth, we have to deal seriously with others’ painful memories.
Most of the time we become through ambivalence—not caring either way—in an ill-fitting place of unfulfilled desire. Essays on ambivalence and forgetting.
A generation of highly original thinkers whose commitment to their work was not limited to the fickle favors of the research and education sector. An all-too-brief introduction.
A Cultural History of the Cranked Snare Drum
The snare sound was designed to obliterate, but on the other side of each strike was a celestial overtone — a halo that hung above the chaos.
The statue was renamed, or named twice: the Dionysus-Sardanapalus. Each name is a mirror of itself and the opposite. The statue embodies the unstable relationship between history, narrative, and artifact.