Sometimes when I teach, I become acutely aware of how curtailed we can be in approaching contemporary texts by the frameworks we ourselves have put in place supposedly to help…
Contemporaries Essays
Melancholy Margery
Note: I wrote this essay in November 2023, roughly six months before students across the United States and in many other countries began setting up encampments to protest universities’ complicity in…
Multicultural Literature in a Superdiverse City
You notice more alertness in the eyes. You sense the stimulated mind. There is something to say, should be said, a willingness to say it. When a person is engaged…
Envisioning AfAm Literary History in Norwegian Fjord og Fjell
To many, Norway is a land of extremes. One of the wealthiest countries in the world, it’s also said to be home to the happiest people who benefit from the…
The Play of Classrooms
Gaming and literature are increasingly entangled, both as media and as academic disciplines. Recent years have seen an explosion of “literary-ludic” games offering inventive approaches to narration, characterisation, and the construction…
“Literature” and the “Contemporary” in the German American Studies Classroom
What’s the use of contemporary literature? I ask the question as someone invested in contemporary literature, and someone whose teaching often is on, or includes, significant elements of what I…
Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
It feels like a precarious moment to be talking from the classroom. It has for a long time. When I originally wrote these words (January 2024) the politicization of the…
Further and Further Away
The most expensive thing you can buy in Disco Elysium is a streetlight. It sits in the corner of the pawn shop on Rue de Saint-Ghislaine and has been modified…
DISCO-ORIENTED HAUNTOLOGY
Psychiatrist Marie Rudden describes a private, internal space her patient would withdraw to whenever he became anxious and confused — when the interpersonal reality insisted upon by others in his…
Inebriation and Allegory
KIM KITSURAGI: “Not being hungover helps too.” I don’t drink anymore. Or at least I don’t drink with the apocalyptic fury I personified around a decade ago. No dramatic event…