Let me begin with a true story: when I was teaching in Berlin, a colleague there shared his lecture notes with me for a large introductory seminar. I couldn’t believe…
Archive for January, 2019
The Hesitations of Speculative History
4In July of last year, Saidiya Hartman published an article titled “The Anarchy of Colored Girls.” It was an accumulation of a style of writing and an approach to the…
Set, Series, Archive, Catalogue, Litany, List
For this forum, we were asked to reflect on “how we write (well).”1 To make sure there was no evading or finessing the first person plural, we were encouraged to…
RT = Endorsement
Academia is not immune to today’s breakneck pace of content generation and dispersal. I confess to feeling pulled in that direction, devoting far more of my reading during “work hours”…
Introduction: How We Write (Well)
It’s become something of a platitude to say that scholarly writing is currently undergoing dramatic change. Diminishing university press budgets and the pressures of the academic job market have pushed…
Sex and the City: Ari, January 21
Crown Heights, Brooklyn Dear Andrea, Lakshmi, and Ned, We knew right away. None of us worked in film or television, but a draft of the script for the pilot of…
Cryptographic Reading: Machine Translation, the New Criticism, and Nabokov’s Pnin
Sean Michael DiLeonardi
Meta-Meta-Orwell
For almost two years, I’ve been playing a kind of intellectual solitaire I’ve dubbed the Orwell game. I check out any hot take, think piece, or news article I think…
Print Culture and Technophilia in The Post
I swear you guys, I’ve never been so happy in all my life. The thrill of discovery; the clacking of keys; the smell of fresh ink; the warmth of a…
Blunt Cinema in the Age of Trump
The homepage for the Trump International Hotel New York features the slogan “Subtlety is not our strength, Indulgence is.” The slogan nicely characterizes the values of the Trump era. How…