” . . . exploring coloration and penumbralight-wise coloration magnifies what I seeand eclipse coloration here dense pitch densebeauty all light your halo opened out of darkness your good dense…
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Contemporaries Essays, Little Magazines
Contemporaries Essays, Little Magazines
“Key to a Savage Sideshow”: The Magazines of the Occult School of Boston
“The school of Boston in poetry, middle this century,” wrote Gerrit Lansing in 1968, “is an occult school, unknown.”1 For this school, comprised of the poets Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser,…
Contemporaries Essays, Little Magazines
Introduction: Deep Immersion in the Little Mags
This cluster emerged from two broad, reciprocal realizations about the study of little magazines: that post-1945 literary studies and periodical studies are largely not in dialogue, and that periodical studies…
Contemporaries Essays, Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
Contemporaries Essays, Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
An Interview with Mark McGurl
One of the most influential recent accounts of literary minimalism comes from Mark McGurl, now the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature in the Department of English at Stanford University. His…
Contemporaries Essays, Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
On Undermediation
Hinge Wants You to Find Love Hinge, its tagline wants you to know, is the dating app “designed to be deleted.” This wasn’t always the case: launched in 2012, the…
Contemporaries Essays, Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
Minimally Focused: Carver, TikTok, and Minimalist Form
Raymond Carver is the unwitting poster boy for the minimalist aesthetic in American fiction. His name acts as a stand-in for many things: the institutionalization of writing MFA programs,1 the…
Contemporaries Essays, Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
On Being Okay
“How are you?” “I’m okay.” Sometimes, this quotidian interaction ends there. Other times, the universally neutral refrain of “I’m okay” is countered by “No, but how are you really?” —…
Contemporaries Essays, Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
There’s No Such Thing as Silence: Recovering the Stakes of Minimalism’s Refusal in the Work of Nikita Gale
Installed in a gallery at the California African American Museum from March to May of 2021, Private Dancer was the multidisciplinary artist Nikita Gale’s first solo museum exhibition. Installed in…
Contemporaries Essays, Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
Situating Minimalism: Kara Walker’s Black Dimensionality
Minimalism haunts the production of the present, and over the last decade mainstream attention has been afforded to the graphic elements in contemporary Black arts and culture. Minimalist abstraction manifests…