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…
Issues
“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…
Geek Temporalities and the Spirit of Capital
Jeff Bezos begged to appear on Star Trek Beyond. Sergey Brin drew inspiration from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Elon Musk loves video games and cites Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, and…
Queer Times for the Straight Book: Maggie Nelson and Michel Serres
If you read a lot of Michel Serres – and you might: he’s written many books, about a lot of things – a conundrum emerges. On the one hand, he…
Global China as Genre
Sunny Xiang