Issues

In literary studies, queer theory came on the scene around 1990 wielding its formalism as the sign of its politics. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s cheeky description of queer theory…

Form, writes Ali Smith, can be “a matter of need and expectation,” offering “clear rules and unspoken understandings.” But in practice, she adds, form is “also a matter of breaking…

Enjoying a second act that seemed all but inconceivable a couple decades ago, form has recently reclaimed center stage in academic literary studies. This time around it claims greater power…

At fourteen years old, I took a job as a cashier at a Christian bookstore. The owners were Christian fundamentalist-lite, whereas I was coerced by my parents to attend a…

Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but he sees them always in private life, as ‘characters’, not as functional members of society; that is to say, he…

Twenty-eight fat televisions are stacked into a pyramid of sorts in the corner. In the darkened room, each screen plays the same short excerpt of Nina Simone’s 1964 performance of…

1. Look It’s unreasonably hot for an English summer. Moving through the humid chambers of the Victoria and Albert Museum feels like trudging through a steamed treacle pudding, an Edwardian…

From February to April of 1968, Memphis was a focal point of civil rights action, largely due to its nationally prominent sanitation strike. Labor tactics in Memphis insisted on connecting…

Philosophy and literature: an old sibling rivalry. What more is there to say? Certainly not that form is what distinguishes literature from philosophy. If anything, form yokes philosophy and literature…

In Lorrie Moore’s masterpiece of climate fiction, A Gate at the Stairs (2009), the college-matriculating protagonist Tassie describes her mother’s love as “useless,” because she fails to prevent her son from dying…