My senior year of college I took a seminar on apocalyptic literature. It was a course with a lot of social cachet on our small liberal arts campus. The flashiest…
Archive for October, 2019
A Study in Upholstery
This essay is a highly concentrated inquiry into one weird poetic trope, wherein the sexualized body of a woman is described in terms of upholstered furniture. I’ll introduce and discuss…
Producing Totality
“We were like figures in the same plot, eternally fixed together.” —Saul Bellow, Dangling Man Recently, detail is in decay, as seen in Elif Batuman’s (“Short Story and Novel”; “Get a…
Paper, Scissors, Stone
Language is fossil poetry.— Ralph Waldo Emerso WORDS DIE, THE WORLD IS ETERNALLY YOUNG.— Aleksei Kruchenykh Traditional rhetoric accorded two main functions to metaphor, the first functional and the second…