Tag
Language
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Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley
“Queer theory in general spoke to me in an embodied way, beyond its important theoretical work, because it revealed for me that beautiful sentences matter and that they can be critical aspects of the reading experience.”
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To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi
“What can be said with language, a human invention, about something as ineffable and ephemeral as love or desire or rage or loneliness or despair, fear of God?”
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Arabic ≠ Latin: Sacred Language in a Secular Age
Lienau’s exposition illustrates that the Orientalist position of Quranic Arabic’s essential untranslatability is rooted not in historical fact but racist fantasy.
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Lahiri’s Metamorphoses
Over eight years have passed since Jhumpa Lahiri announced her intention to leave behind the terrain of English letters and write only in Italian.
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“Costs on All Sides”: Annie Dorsen on “Prometheus Firebringer”
“Technology creates the potential for conflict from the very start.”
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Neoliberal Keywords: Creative, Passionate, Confident
When did we all become so empowered, passionate, and self-enterprising?
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Crossing “The Tartar Steppe”: A New Buzzati
Did this 1940 novel use symbolism not for aesthetic purposes, but, instead, to conceal its critique of Italian fascism from the regime’s censors?
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“The Good of the Whole”: Talking Weaving, Coding, and Indigenous Scholarship with Rhiannon Sorrell
”When you work here, you work in the interest of the people in the community, not just your own personal goals.”
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Putting French Literary History on Trial
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Goncourt-winning novel confronts the racist history of France’s literary prizes.
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“Between the Experiment and the Essence”: Emma Ramadan Talks Translation
“For those of us who can feel unsettled in terms of identity, translation can feel like home.”
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Humanities: Let the Hypothesis Testing Begin
The humanities have a replication crisis of monumental proportions: so many theories have never been adequately tested or validated.
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Lyn Hejinian’s “Allegorical Activism”
The revelrous, rebellious writing of Hejinian—arguably our foremost poet-critic—works against our sense of psychological and political isolation.
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How Words Lead to Justice
What words politicians say matters. But which words they use is often the result not of individual choices, but of collective action over years.
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Public Thinker: Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
“The women in my book really disrupted France’s ideas about citizenship, about who belongs. I’d like us to be similarly disruptive.”[none-for-homepage]
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Whose Spanish, Anyway?
Policing the borders of the Spanish language was a tool of religious and racial discrimination. Yet Spanish is not inherently imperial.
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The Hipster
It happens every year. Besides the “Best of” lists that heave into view as early as late November, there are the conspicuous “Worst of” lists. Contrary to their tone, these lists also itemize the things we enjoyed most over the past year, if only too much. These things became part of our daily routine, infiltrated…
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Ben Lerner’s Intoxicating Honesty
Does fiction require anonymity? And if an author chooses to draw heavily from their own life, and the lives of those they know and love, how should a reader judge …
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Translation’s Burden
A book is a strange vessel of expectation. A published book imagines a reader, for a published book without a reader is a book that loses someone’s money. And a book about translation seems to have the added burden of addressing a diffuse and eclectic reading community that may be united only by its shared…
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Trump’s “Radio Machete”
This year, Rwanda commemorates the 25th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi. Americans would do well to consider the sobering similarities between the Rwandan “hate radio,” or “Radio Machete”—which helped to incite that genocide—and President Trump’s tweets. This is not to say that Trump is marching the United States toward genocide, nor that hateful…
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Wild States of Being
A lacquered blue cube and a cat named Labes: these nonhuman characters shed unforgiving light on human frailty in the wrenching new novel by Italian writer Domenico Starnone, Ties, scrupulously …
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The Book That Made Me: Multilingual
Speaking German alongside Spanish seemed as natural as placing scones next to the teapot on the table at teatime …
