What is a classic? This is “not a new question,” as T.S. Eliot acknowledged more than seventy-five years ago.1 More than simply “not new,” this question now feels decidedly old,…
Issues
Voice
If trade publications like Publisher’s Weekly and Writer’s Digest are any indication, there is no more desirable a trait for a would-be writer than voice. Not talent or technique, not craft or style, not…
A Network Analysis of Postwar American Poetry in the Age of Digital Audio Archives
Writing in 1981, Ron Silliman could not have been more astute in characterizing networks and scenes as the two governing modes of social organization in postwar American poetry.1 According to…
The Asian American Literature We’ve Constructed
Asian American literature has grown dramatically in recent decades, reflecting a broader acceleration in contemporary cultural production.1 While no comprehensive bibliography of Asian American literary publications exists, we can look…
Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980
1: Port Townsend From Port Townsend, Washington, you can watch the Puget Sound meet the Salish Sea: the small water turns west toward the open ocean. In 1982, James Laughlin…
Feminist Bestsellers: A Digital History of 1970s Feminism
Academics have long recognized 1970 as a signal moment in feminism’s history. In the US, it has been labeled “Feminism’s Pivotal Year” when a “wave of press attention” moved women’s…
Cinematography, Architecture, and Design in the Digital Age
Classical Hollywood cinema was a narrative art, a spectacle centered on stars, and an industry producing entertainment for profit. These accounts would be familiar to almost anyone exposed to mainstream…
Hitchcock’s Closed Systems
Alfred Hitchcock had an odd affection for rear projection, matte paintings, and composite shots—in short, an affection for cinematic artifice.1 In his early version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (Gaumont-British,…
Crude Designs for an Oil-Built World
On the morning of November 30, 2015, observant Parisian commuters — yawning at bus stops, crowding onto subway platforms, or walking to their local cafes — could hardly have missed…
Introduction: Design Culture Studies: Between Infrastructure and Image
The essays in this special issue address their reckoning not to designers or designs but to design cultures, that is, to institutionalized and enmeshed modes of designing that sought or…