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…
Contemporaries Essays
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…
The Novel of Vibes
Can a novel be a species of ambient media — a portable dispenser of atmosphere, an artificial environment to disappear into? Hasn’t it always been one? The young György Lukács…
The Time Warp, Again?
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”1 So begins Donna Tartt’s 1992…
Tweed Jackets and Class Consciousness
To hear its practitioners tell it, dark academia burst forth from Donna Tartt’s temple fully formed, like Athena. A shared fealty to this mythic parentage plot unites not just the…
Introduction
“There are over a million posts on the ‘dark academia’ tag on Instagram,” Jacobin reports. “Between the start of the pandemic and the spring of 2021,” The New Statesman breathlessly…
Killing Our Darlings
A specter is haunting academia today — the specter of capitalism. All the powers of the neoliberal university have entered into an unholy alliance to disclaim the specter’s pernicious machinations:…
To Be Transformed
A joke has been going around. Maybe you’ve heard it, or a version of it: “_____ isn’t a university. It’s a hedge fund with a university stapled to it.” I…
The Adjunct Complaint
My favorite scene in Christine Smallwood’s adjunct novel The Life of the Mind (2021) takes place at a graduate school colloquium featuring the protagonist’s academic rival, Alexandra. As their shared dissertation advisor…
The Eyes of Nicolas Cage
In 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage is Ben Sanderson, a terminal alcoholic closing out his remaining time on earth with sex worker Sera (Elisabeth Shue). In their first meeting, Ben…