Tag
Literature
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The Hypochondriac’s Complaint
“Today, health anxiety is characterized largely by the patient’s relationship with healthcare. The hypochondriac is at once suspicious of medical authority and eager for it to advance.”
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The Empty Lab, in Science and in Fiction
When literature refuses readers entry into the laboratory, it fosters suspicions of science itself.
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What Future for Native Sovereignty?
What does it mean to seek shelter on stolen land? asks Jon Hickey’s new novel, Big Chief.
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“Not So Ephemeral After All”: Talking Op-Eds, War, and Memory with Bécquer Seguín
“Why does the op-ed still hold sway over writers who want to be intellectuals or want to have some public presence?”
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Fantasy, Pedantry, and Painting: Stefania Heim and Ara H. Merjian on the Novels of De Chirico
“I came to translating de Chirico very much by accident.”
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Betwixt or Bewitched? Rethinking the “Middlebrow” with Dino Buzzati
Reframed as a “bewitched middlebrow,” Buzzati’s fiction re-enters literary history not as a comforting escape, but as a sharp tool for existential inquiry.
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“Weird, but Fantastic”: Devoney Looser on Those Who Love Jane Austen
“The Austen biography space is fairly saturated and covered. But there’s still a lot more we can learn by seeing her in context: that is, by seeing Austen in relation to her society, her family, her friends.”
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Our Golden Age of Reading (Online)
There is an urgent need for new, more affirmative ways to participate in culture, especially against the ongoing systematic whiteness of publishing and the exclusivity of elite institutions.
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“I Will Write to Avenge My Race”: Baglin, Louis, and Ernaux on Class Transition
“When people write about the working-class world, which they rarely do, it is most often because they have left it behind,” admits Didier Eribon, in his 2009 French memoir of class transition, Returning to Reims. “They thereby contribute to perpetuating the social illegitimacy of the people they are speaking of in the very moment of…
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The Origin of Love and Nightmares
Hong Kong has become an apt prism through which to probe the skin tissue between state violence and victimization, and the widening wounds to personal freedom.
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Time Interpolated
Disruptive and restorative, interpolation is the paradoxical form of life, literature, and time itself.
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B-Sides: Percival Everett’s “Wounded”
“Wounded,” by shutting down fictions of escape, shows readers the struggle for safety is a shared one.
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Aria Aber’s Defiant Love Letter to Berlin
“The experiences of coming of age and coming into art—of finding your own voice and a vision for your craft—are spiritual and psychological journeys, and, for lack of a better word, universal.”
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“Poetry City”: Iowa City, Iowa
Iowa City is the place where contemporary English literature matters more than anywhere else on earth.
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Scholars Have Lost the Plot!
Scholars of literature have often struggled to connect with fans of literature. Both value the same thing, so why the lack of mutual understanding?
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Gatsby @ 100: American Classrooms, American Dreams?
The story of Gatsby, Nick, Tom, and Daisy is also, much more importantly, part of the history of hundreds of millions of student readers and their teachers, spanning eight decades.
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Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey
“All fictional works are in some sense defined by the moment they were written and what their authors were trying to experience.”
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A Brief Queer History of Going to Bed with Your Hot Friends
I worried that, in obscure but consequential ways, I had already begun to fail her.
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Money for Nothing: Finance and the End of Culture
Art continues to get made—that’s what human beings do—but capital devours it.
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Beyond the Doom Loop of High Theory
If paradox can be toxic, what’s the antidote?
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B-Sides: Gloria Steinem’s “The Beach Book”
In Gloria Steinem’s now-forgotten first book, she offers detailed instructions on how to build a sandcastle, how to tan, how to peel if you burn, and more.
