A Lost Doll In her essay, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick gives an account of a childhood memory that she likes to think of as…
Contemporaries Essays
The Stuff of Figure, Now: Introduction
My senior year of college I took a seminar on apocalyptic literature. It was a course with a lot of social cachet on our small liberal arts campus. The flashiest…
A Study in Upholstery
This essay is a highly concentrated inquiry into one weird poetic trope, wherein the sexualized body of a woman is described in terms of upholstered furniture. I’ll introduce and discuss…
Producing Totality
“We were like figures in the same plot, eternally fixed together.” —Saul Bellow, Dangling Man Recently, detail is in decay, as seen in Elif Batuman’s (“Short Story and Novel”; “Get a…
Paper, Scissors, Stone
Language is fossil poetry.— Ralph Waldo Emerso WORDS DIE, THE WORLD IS ETERNALLY YOUNG.— Aleksei Kruchenykh Traditional rhetoric accorded two main functions to metaphor, the first functional and the second…
Literary Criticism 2.0: Emerging Ideas
If web 2.0 is a place of participatory culture, user-generated content, interwoven and dynamic applications, and overall ease-of-use for the end-user, then literary criticism 2.0 must adapt. This cluster suggests…
Prescribed Print: Bibliotherapy after Web 2.0
When the organizers of this cluster asked us “how have paraliterary genres reframed ‘the literary,'” it was hard not to hear echoes of other paras: paramilitaries, -medics, -legals. That the…
Close Shaves with Content
On social media, there’s always something new to argue about. This January 13th, that temporary object of controversy — designed to infuriate and then be forgotten — was an advertisement for men’s…
Studying and Preserving the Global Networks of Twitter Literature
Given the rise of post-press literature and the continued creation of literary works in what Simone Murray has called the “digital literary sphere,” our seminar “explore[d] the transformative effects of…
The Handwritten Styles of Instagram Poetry
The most widely read poets today share their work on Instagram, where they reach huge audiences. Rupi Kaur, perhaps the most famous Insta-poet, has 3.6 million followers as I write this….