Illustration by Salvador Bartolozzi. Via. by Lauren Berlant This is a very lightly revised version of the paper I tried to deliver at the American Studies Association conference as a performance piece that also riffed on the talks just given around me: a complete failure as a performance. Amitava Kumar originally called this panel “The…
Read MoreWe are getting close to the 100 year anniversary of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and I dedicate my post to Tzara while reading the recent biography about him.
Read MoreI had never seen a neo-Nazi before. On a cloudless Sunday morning in January, the day of the Greek elections, I was making my way through people holding cups of coffee and pushing strollers in a polling station.
Read MoreAt long last, an electronic book for review! Its title—the beginning of a script—is shebang!—hashbang, pound-bang, hash-exclam, hash-pling!
Read More“I crave the law”: the phrase has always struck me for its surprising vulnerability and emotional urgency. We Americans — we white Americans are used to thinking of the law much as Portia does: a dispassionate system that disregards personal attachments.
Read MoreI write in my rental apartment on Rue de Seine in Paris, while trying to simultaneously ignore the tolling of the church bells in my vicinity as well as the continuous barking of my next door neighbor, Georges. I have never seen him or his owners; however, given the permanent scolding I hear, he must do things well behaved dogs should only do outside.
Read Moreby Hanjo Berressem In “…without shame of concern for etymology,” Hanjo Berressem discusses Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge in the context post-9/11 fiction. In contrast to narratives of posttraumatic melancholy, Berressem argues that Bleeding Edge is a “Jeremiad about the fall and the sins of America.” The result is an essay that makes a powerful case for…
Read MoreOn a chilly October day in 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte’s army laid waste to Prussian troops on the outskirts of Jena, a university town in central Germany. The sounds of his canons reverberated through the town, providing a sound track for the young philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as he put the finishing touches on a work that would change the course of history.
Read MoreAndrola in Labyrinth, Shusei Nagaoka, 1984. Image via by Carolyn Guertin For many the term postfeminist might call to mind the vanilla pleasures of metrosexuality, webcams, online soaps, and blog culture, but, for me, a 40-something cyberfeminist scholar, curator and some time activist, the politically-minded feminist texts I work with are in fact dyed-in-the-wool postfeminist…
Read MoreElizabeth Bisland at the time of her trip, from the frontispiece to In Seven Stages by Matthew Goodman Piece originally published at Public Domain Review. On the morning of November 14, 1889, John Brisben Walker, the wealthy publisher of the monthly magazine The Cosmopolitan, boarded a New Jersey ferry bound for New York City. Like…
Read MoreIn English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.”
Read MoreIn the essay “Hallowe’en? Over Already?” (1999), Thomas Pynchon writes about some of the fall 1998 goings on at the Cathedral School in New York City, where his son, Jackson, was enrolled in the second grade.
Read Moreby Eleanor Courtemanche The Bling Ring, dir. Sofia Coppola, U.S.A, 90 minutes It’s hard to watch Sofia Coppola’s 2013 The Bling Ring, which came out on DVD about a month ago, without feeling like you’re at the end of a chain (no, I didn’t say human chain) of recycled celebrity worship. The film tells the…
Read MoreFrom Dreamaphage, Jason Nelson, 2004 by Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs [W]riting is indeed an act in league with the past and the future, but it also requires that a body move through the space of the now. The gestures of writing can make the body present as well as absent; they do more than…
Read MoreAhmedabad, India. Photograph by lecercle by Samantha Christiansen Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth-Century India, by Howard Spodek, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 352 pp. The field of South Asian urban history has a rich history of examining India’s major urban centers. Numerous astute studies of Delhi, Bombay (Mumbai), and Calcutta (Kolkata), for example, have contributed to…
Read MorePygmalion, Franz Struck, 1879 by Lisa Swanstrom …with wonderful skill, he carved a figure, brilliantly, out of snow-white ivory, no mortal woman, and fell in love with his own creation. —Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book X Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music it is easy enough to see…
Read MoreChicago World’s Fair 1893, H. D. Nichols, 1861-1897 by Ralph Clare Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, edited by Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise, Rowman & Littlefield, 320 pp. Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, edited by Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise, mixes venerable scholars with emerging ones and makes the…
Read MoreFrom cover of The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974 edition. Art by Anthony Roberts. by Andrew Reynolds Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction by Stephen Schryer New York: Columbia UP, 288 pp. Despite not employing much of the jargon, Stephen Schryer is resolutely Marxist –…
Read Moreby Stuart Moulthrop Since this is a paper about the computational context of literary writing, and to some extent poetry, I have invested heavily in metaphor, at least as far as the title is concerned. Taking key terms in no particular order: by end I mean not so much terminus as singularity or convergence of…
Read More
