By07.12.2012I've been thinking lately about what I want to call the "rhetoric of contempt" coming out of the Republican party and the Romney campaign. It is a racialized and classed phenomenon.
Conversations
By07.07.2012I've recently returned from an American studies conference on "transnational poetics" at Ruhr-University Bochum. Many of the papers were first-rate, but there was a recurrent problem, namely, a lack of certainty regarding the meaning or value of the word "transnational." What differentiates a "transnational" approach to a literary topic from an "international" or "comparative" one?
By06.27.2012Literature seems to be everywhere in Cartagena and not just because Gabriel García Márquez still has a house there.
By06.03.2012In 2002 Philip Bobbitt published The Shield of Achilles, his response to Francis Fukuyama’s prediction of an era of world peace based on the triumph of capitalism over Soviet communism.
By05.22.2012“Must literary studies confine itself to the margins of the publishing field?” asks Andrew Goldstone in the first of what promises to be an important series of blog posts on John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century.
By04.13.2012Last summer while travelling I read Moby Dick on my iPhone. I am now at a point in my life when, circumscribed by airline baggage weight restrictions, the choice between packing Moby Dick or an extra pair of shoes is no choice at all. So I downloaded a free version and tucked my phone in my pocket.
By03.01.2012I spent this past August at Denniston Hill, for which I curated a month's worth of residents & to which this mix is dedicated. If you are so inclined, go read/watch a bit about my experience there, so as to complement your listening experience.
By07.11.2012“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” --George Orwell
By06.30.2012Is there anyone else out there who wonders what’s going on with copy-editing? Or should I say copyediting?
- By06.04.2012
The New Yorker just released its first special issue devoted to science fiction, including contributions from genre giants like Ursula K. Le Guin and Ray Bradbury as well as rising "literary fiction" stars like Junot Díaz and Karen Russell.
By06.06.2012What are the eras of publishing history? Are they literary eras?
By06.04.2012Over the past few years I have used this space mainly as a sounding board for ideas and arguments that I worked into my book In Defense of Religious Moderation. Looking back over those posts I can see the progression of the project, even down to the change of title, and relive some of the debates that informed it and criticisms that enriched it.
By05.30.2012To read Wilfred Owen as anything other than an English war poet might seem like sheer, anachronistic willfulness.
By05.11.2012"FRANCE HAS A NEW PRESIDENT." It does not look like much of a statement on paper, or on a computer screen: five little words, almost too short for a tweet. But France today is still dazed from the news, floating between disbelief, relief, and exhaustion.
- By11.21.2011
"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street," composed in 1853, is perhaps Herman Melville's most famous short story. It's certainly his most inscrutable.
