Was it wrong to present “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” as creative nonfiction? Is it a “true” story, as Daisey claims? These are hard questions in an age where our definitions of journalism and the journalist are being re-drawn.
Stairs and Stares: A Look at Downton Abbey and its Ancestry
There is something doubly satisfying about watching a program which allows modern viewers to imagine themselves both as a lounging aristocrat and as a hyper-attentive servant.
Reading her journals, we are always looking at Sontag looking at us looking at her.
Conversations With Pauline Kael
Why are readers threatened by Pauline Kael? And why do writers and critics still resent her?
Rethinking the Literature Classroom
I begin each semester with the hope of pulling these two poles, the aesthetic and the efferent, closer together. I want my class to be an argument for literature, for its value.
LUMINOUS AIRPLANES is an experiment for living, a model kit for making decisions where the instructions have been left out, or poorly translated, or really never existed in the first place.
Le Havre and the Cinema of Nostalgia
The “nostalgia cinema” designation and its tidy Hollywood ending grossly complicate LE HAVRE, an impossible fairy tale firmly rooted in present-day France’s post-colonial, post-9/11 atmosphere of xenophobia.
These men in their expensive suits, stabbing each other quietly in the back, are Le Carré’s satirical metaphor for the decay of England after the fading of the Empire.
How (Not) to Say “I Love You” with Perec
Perec’s narrative frames and the people who live in them tend to look fragmented, but it’s this incompleteness that invites pathos and attempts to piece a puzzle back together.
All Hail Aphrodite: Venus in Fur’s Media Problem
A show like VENUS IN FUR is a testament to the ways in which power has so totally infiltrated the arts experience.