In How to be Both, one of Ali Smith’s signature smart and snarky teenage girls, George, and her mother, an online activist-artist, have an argument about the lyrics to the Pet…
Contemporaries Essays
Wordsmith
If you have read anything by Ali Smith, you’ll be familiar with the grip that all things lexical have on her authorial imagination. In the final novel of the Quartet, Summer,…
Introduction: Companioning Ali Smith Now
Hello? tap-tap-tap Hello? Cara L. Lewis: Hello! Here we both are, in a virtual commons. Debra Rae Cohen: This is a virtual conclave, isn’t it — bruited on Twitter, assembled by email,…
The Gift of Epiphany
Here again it was all so natural to me and more and more complicatedly a continuous present. A continuous present is a continuous present. I made almost a thousand pages…
Ali Smith’s Leavings: Postcards, Letters, and the Unbound Book
Emulating Daniel Gluck in Ali Smith’s Autumn, we spent the latter half of the autumn and start of the winter gleaning and gathering loose leaves, scraps, and remnants and stitching our…
What’s Hope Got to Do with It?
Ask us a question and we’ll draw a card for you. Let’s say: How can studying dark academia give us hope for higher education? Ritual from Hannah I light rose-scented…
Dark Academia, Dark Money
The Secret History — Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel and dark academia’s Bible — begins and ends with scholarships. Its narrator, Richard Papen, describes how a scholarship allowed him to attend…
Dark Glamor Magic
It’s not hard to be a professor. It’s hard not to be a professor. For anyone bound to academia by even the most nebulous of ties, these statements seem both…
Too Dark for Dark Academia?
When the pandemic exiled me from my library and my bookstore, it sent me to TikTok, and, more precisely, to dark academia. I spent lockdown days scrolling hungrily through its…
A Touch of the Picturesque
A few years ago, when I was sixteen, the dark academia phenomenon was in its nascent stages. Tumblr users had just caught wind of Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret…