I. Restrained When I am feeling pulled in many directions at once by my interests or my values or my actions, my friend Adam has long advised me that we…
Contemporaries Essays
Back to Plath
Is Sylvia Plath assigned to high school English classes in this forsaken country? I wouldn’t know — at least not from personal experience. I don’t remember reading her in my…
Introduction: Someone Else’s Object
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…
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…