Christopher Nealon teaches English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two books of literary criticism, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001) and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), and four books of poetry: The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), Heteronomy (Edge, 2014), and The Shore (forthcoming from Wave Books in 2020). He lives in Washington, DC.
Christopher Nealon
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Writing on Public Books
How Did Humanism Die? How Did It Survive?
In 2019, the idea of “humanism” feels passé. If humanism means “universally shared values,” or “progress,” or an exceptionalism based on the power of …
The Trouble with “Modernity”
It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that capitalism is the engine behind the environmental crises of the early 21st century. It doesn’t even take a Marxist: as the French environmental journalist Hervé Kempf put it in a recent book, it’s not so much Homo sapiens as the rich who are destroying the earth—rich people, […]
Pynchon’s Children
The work of Thomas Pynchon has long been synonymous with literary postmodernism, especially the version that involves manic overplotting and paranoid speculation about sinister systems whose names elude us. He has also always been understood to be broadly “countercultural” in some ’60s sense, championing the little guy against those sinister forces. While these characterizations are […]
The Anti-Revolutionary Science
Speaking to Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in New York City last October, the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs placed himself squarely on their side, saying, “You are doing a magnificent job. This is how history is made. This is how this country is going to turn. Anything I can do, I’m going to […]
