David James is a professor of English at the University of Birmingham. His most recent books are Discrepant Solace (Oxford University Press, 2019) and (as editor) Modernism and Close Reading (Oxford University Press, 2020). For Columbia University Press, he coedits the book series Literature Now. His forthcoming book, Sentimental Activism (Columbia University Press), assesses the contemporary reanimation of sentimentalism across a variety of literary genres and in the itineraries of cultural criticism.
David James
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Writing on Public Books
Reading Patients, Writing Care
A palliative-care physician’s memoir foregrounds the affective aspects of attending to patients as an avenue to political activism.
The Social Lives of Form
Over the past 15 years, the interest in form that has long characterized literary studies has grown into a movement in its own right—the so-called “new formalism.” While its generative debates are no longer exactly new, this formalist turn continues to ignite urgent and animated arguments. Three recent books explore not only how we might […]
Walking with the Unconsoled
What can we expect imaginative writing to do in the face of unalleviated grief? If one of fiction’s strengths remains its expression of irreducibly singular minds, what role then might it play in unbinding the grieving individual from self-isolation? In the slender and unclassifiable narrative Falling Out of Time, David Grossman tackles these entwined questions by connecting one […]
