Category
Reprints
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Kafka: The Impossible Biography
The prospect of a new Kafka biography is like an invitation to a party that is bound to be entertaining but may end badly. Situating Kafka’s writing within the …
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Shirley Jackson’s Two Worlds
Starting in the late 1970s, Revlon (in)famously peddled its fragrance Enjoli to working women by asserting a woman wearing this scent could not only “bring …
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Ordinary People
One fantasy of modernism is telling all there is to tell about the most ordinary of lives. On a train journey from Richmond to Waterloo Station, Virginia Woolf watched “an old lady in the corner opposite” in her carriage. She was “one of those clean, threadbare old ladies,” whom Woolf imagined might well be called…
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The Selfie-Taker and the Dictionary-Maker
Soon after John Simpson was hired as an editorial assistant at the Oxford English Dictionary in 1976, he took on the task of documenting new meanings of old …
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When Stuart Hall Was White
I do not recall when I discovered that Stuart Hall was black. Growing up in Britain as neoliberalism first began to take shape under the rule of Margaret …
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Shoptalk: Overheard At MLA
Literary scholars say the darndest things, and their comments at this year’s annual Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia proved no exception to …
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Who Can Save the University?
That the public university has followed a disastrous trajectory for roughly four decades is a matter of broad agreement. In The Great Mistake, Christopher …
