In January 2020, shortly after the official announcement that Lodge 49 (2018-2019) had been cancelled, I published a short piece on Medium, “Crying Over Lodge 49.” I shared it on…
Contemporaries Essays
The Last Days of Books: ageism and the literary millennial in Younger
In Younger (2015-2021), the world of publishing is built on puns and parodies. Characters drink Bridget Jones Daiquiris, Margarita Atwoods, and Bloody Mary Shelleys. Stand-ins for Karl Ove Knausgård and…
“Good . . . or good considering”: Bookish Television and Televised Bookishness in I May Destroy You
If I read one more declaration that the novel is dead and that it is identity politics that have killed it — as though Victorian literature was not at all…
Literary Culture and Achievement Subjectivity from Gilmore Girls to A Year in the Life
Perhaps no image is more representative of the young Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) — protagonist, along with her mother Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), of the TV series Gilmore Girls (2000-2007),…
The New Literary Television: An Introduction
Among the most prominent features of contemporary “prestige” television are a new set of relationships with “the literary.” There is a striking tendency in recent television to foreground acts of…
Pattern Recognition: The Enduring Whiteness of 9/11 Literary Studies
9/11 literary studies are characterized by an enduring whiteness, which detrimentally flattens and skews our understandings of the attacks. 9/11 was not an affront to whiteness, and its consequences —…
Girls Like Us
In summer 2014, as Israel’s war on Gaza intensified, Israeli actor Gal Gadot uploaded a selfie to Facebook that drew worldwide attention. It showed Gadot and her daughter covering their…
In Poetry’s Field: 9/11, Forever War, and Growing Theory
In this Forever War, what good has come is hard to identify (some would argue a modicum of greater safety, but for whom?) but the bad greets us daily. The…
Saturday, Witnessing, and the Cultural Logic of Rehabilitation
Toward the end of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, when the protagonist Dr. Henry Perowne is operating on the man who had just earlier invaded his home and “terrorized” his family, the…
Culture War on Terror
At the Southern Baptist seminary where I attended college at the turn of the millennium, chapel was held three days a week. We gathered at 10am on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and…