I came into adolescence in the age of the supernatural teen drama. Spanning across novels, television, and film from the mid-aughts through the 2010s, the likes of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight,…
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Contemporaries Essays, My So-Called Life at 30
Contemporaries Essays, My So-Called Life at 30
Why Jordan Doesn’t Have “Dyslexia”: Refusing the Romance of Literacy in My-So Called Life
In Episode 7 of My So-Called Life, “Why Jordan Can’t Read,” the show’s central character Angela Chase learns that her crush Jordan Catalano has a learning disability and tries to…
Contemporaries Essays, My So-Called Life at 30
A Lover’s Discord: Angela’s Overanalyzing
“But what above love?” asks Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, as part of her attempt to reconsider the role that “passionate attachments” play in academic criticism.1 Such reconsideration…
Contemporaries Essays, My So-Called Life at 30
The Voice of Winnie Holzman
My So-Called Life is full of Angela Chase’s voice. As the protagonist, the young teen’s thoughts — unfiltered, emotional, hilarious, self-involved — are threaded in voice-over throughout the series. The…
Contemporaries Essays, My So-Called Life at 30
Surreal butterflies and alternative kinship futures: revisiting dreams and histories of home through My So-Called Life
Parents! Racontez vos rêves á vos enfants! (Parents! Tell your children your dreams!) – Papillons surréalistes (Surreal butterflies), December 19241 In late 2017, I began writing down my dreams. In…
Contemporaries Essays, Mobilizing Literature: A Response
Moving Beyond Institutionalism
As a graduate student, and later as a junior scholar specializing in the literatures of the Americas, I sought out many books, articles, and reviews by members of the Post45…
Contemporaries Essays, Mobilizing Literature: A Response
Institutional Recalcitrance, Institutional Refractions
Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” argues that Jamesonian cultural materialism and McGurlian institutionalism “have set the agenda for critical debate” among scholars of post-1945 US literature, and that these schools have…
Contemporaries Essays, Mobilizing Literature: A Response
Social Movements, Institutions, and Multiethnic Literatures of the US
Jeffrey’s Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” inspired an immediate and excited response, especially from scholars who ensconce themselves thoroughly in the often-forgotten literary histories of social movements. What has emerged in this…
Contemporaries Essays, Mobilizing Literature: A Response
Not So Systematically
I welcome Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature: Social Movements and Post-1945 US Literary Studies” as an important, timely provocation that urges us to continue placing the approaches, methodologies, and interpretative frameworks…
Contemporaries Essays, Mobilizing Literature: A Response
“What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway”: On Activism and Post-45 Literature
In 1989, black feminist literary critic Barbara Christian published an essay called “But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s) or My Version of…