In Lawrence’s expertly subtle and fearlessly ambitious essay, he draws from two traditions of social movement analysis. The first is sociological and it identifies the “new ways of thinking about…
Site Archives
Contemporaries Essays, Mobilizing Literature: A Response
Contemporaries Essays, Mobilizing Literature: A Response
Left Lineages of Post-45 Literature
Jeffrey Lawrence’s proposal for movements-based study of post-1945 US literature is most welcome. Numerous writers and artists were involved with or influenced by social movements across the twentieth century. Indeed,…
Contemporaries Essays, Mobilizing Literature: A Response
Social Movements, Literature and the Specters of Empire
Jeffrey Lawrence’s bravura essay “Mobilizing Literature” earned my immediate sympathy in its opening diagnosis of a certain — one may say dominant — methodological binary.1 Lawrence lucidly identifies the dominance…
Contemporaries Essays, Mobilizing Literature: A Response
Mapping the Territory
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it took a scholar of Latin American literature to see what was missing in the study of its US equivalent. Although Jeffrey Lawrence rightly…
Contemporaries Essays, Mobilizing Literature: A Response
Introduction
Rarely does the publication of a peer-reviewed essay generate the excitement that accompanied Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” in the Fall 2024 issue of ELH. Lawrence aims for an ambitious intervention…
After the Leftovers, Contemporaries Essays
Carrots & Little Sweet Peas
In early 2020, awash in the emotional lows of the early pandemic, the three of us decided to cope with the uncertain, monotonous days by starting a long-distance “TV club.”…
After the Leftovers, Contemporaries Essays
Hotness at the End of the World
We are not over Nora Durst. But watching just the pilot of The Leftovers, you wouldn’t get it. When the show starts, Nora is the poster child for the collective…
After the Leftovers, Contemporaries Essays
Let the Mystery Be: The Leftovers and the Limits of Explainer Culture
No one knows anything on The Leftovers. It’s a state of affairs established in the series pilot, during which several characters accuse each other of “not know[ing] shit” — specifically,…
After the Leftovers, Contemporaries Essays
“The Book of Nora”: Sentimental Secularism, or Good Religion, in The Leftovers
In the final episode of HBO’s series The Leftovers Nora Durst states, “I don’t lie.” In this spirit, let me begin with a triune disclosure: I suppose this trifecta is…