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…
Issues
On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
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…
Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore’s Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
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…
Introduction: Formalism Unbound
In the decades after the Agrarians drifted from Vanderbilt to points north and established New Criticism as the dominant interpretive method across the United States, formalism came to be understood…
“Now can you see the monument?” Some notes on reading for “form”
Notes on (poets and critics) reading for form The question that concerns me most in thinking about “new” or “old” formalisms, formalism now, is what counts as reading for “form”…
Free Trade Comedy: Slapstick Toggling in Global Supply Chains
We should note from the outset that slapstick is named not after the genre from which it originally derives but from that genre’s defining prop. Although most often associated with…
Gag Reflexes: Sex Doll Slapstick and Fran Ross’s Oreo
Kirk came out of his corner with his nose wide open. As he advanced, his stallion did an impressive caracole right, a no-slouch caracole left, then majestically reared its head….
Norman Mailer and “The Mary McCarthy Case” Revisited
The runaway success of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a novel about the lives of eight Vassar graduates during the 1930s, was one of the most sensational literary events of 1963….
Writers for Goldwater
In Political Fictions (2001), Joan Didion insists that her politics are not “eccentric, opaque, somehow unreadable.” She writes: They are the logical product of a childhood largely spent among conservative…
Photographic Futures
The first illustration in Lydia Millet’s novel Mermaids in Paradise (2015) depicts the back of a man’s head as he gazes down at his laptop. What could be more representative of…