On the day of his suicide, Quentin Compson comes across a little girl in a bakery.1 She silently watches as he buys her bread and buns from a shopkeeper who…
Contemporaries Essays
The Lucid Stillness of His Style
The patient who begins a therapy session by naming the topic they refuse to discuss will wind up talking about that very subject before the fifty minutes is up. This…
Suffer a Sea Change
Into Something Rich and Strange
I am only hounding myself with these questions, trying to work myself up by the silence that is my only answer from all around. How long, I ask myself, will…
Come Slowly — Eden —
1. The first time I visited Paris, I tried to act it out. Written in 1919 and published the next year by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Hope Mirrlees’s Paris describes…
Paradise: On-Earthly Dilemmas
You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that. —Samuel Beckett, Endgame for Johanna Winant I. On-earthly delights The painting now known as The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490 – 1510)…
A Friend, An Enemy
On June 21, 2021, I added a postscript to this essay. — Joshua Kotin I On April Fool’s Day, 1965, Amiri Baraka (known then as LeRoi Jones) sent a postcard…
My Interdisciplinary Uncanny Valley
Of all the interpretive experiences, and of all of the analytical puzzles, that might have baffled me, I had never envisioned this one: attempting, as an English professor, to understand…
Bandwidth Imperialism and Small-File Media
We understand the provocation of “new filmic geographies” in two ways: as media geopolitics, explored in the first part by Laura, and as media geopoetics, explored in the second part…
The World Imagined
To see the world in a grain of sand William Blake During Oscars season 2020, the internet was abuzz with a meme of Bong Joon Ho reflecting on the widespread…
Netflix and the Transnationalization of Nollywood
In 2020, middle-class Nigerians basked in the experience of watching the latest Nollywood films on their release dates, previously exclusive to cinema- or festival-going audiences. Meanwhile, viewers in France and…