“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”1 So begins Donna Tartt’s 1992…
Site Archives
Contemporaries Essays, Dark Academia
Contemporaries Essays, Dark Academia
Tweed Jackets and Class Consciousness
To hear its practitioners tell it, dark academia burst forth from Donna Tartt’s temple fully formed, like Athena. A shared fealty to this mythic parentage plot unites not just the…
Contemporaries Essays, Dark Academia
Introduction
“There are over a million posts on the ‘dark academia’ tag on Instagram,” Jacobin reports. “Between the start of the pandemic and the spring of 2021,” The New Statesman breathlessly…
Contemporaries Essays, Dark Academia
Killing Our Darlings
A specter is haunting academia today — the specter of capitalism. All the powers of the neoliberal university have entered into an unholy alliance to disclaim the specter’s pernicious machinations:…
Contemporaries Essays, Dark Academia
To Be Transformed
A joke has been going around. Maybe you’ve heard it, or a version of it: “_____ isn’t a university. It’s a hedge fund with a university stapled to it.” I…
Contemporaries Essays, Dark Academia
The Adjunct Complaint
My favorite scene in Christine Smallwood’s adjunct novel The Life of the Mind (2021) takes place at a graduate school colloquium featuring the protagonist’s academic rival, Alexandra. As their shared dissertation advisor…
Contemporaries Essays, Get in the Cage
The Eyes of Nicolas Cage
In 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage is Ben Sanderson, a terminal alcoholic closing out his remaining time on earth with sex worker Sera (Elisabeth Shue). In their first meeting, Ben…
Contemporaries Essays, Get in the Cage
“I’m a Vampire”: Cage Circa 2000
I understand Nicolas Cage’s professional life from Peggy Sue Got Married (Coppola, 1986) through his late-1990s success as an action star as a series of attempts to identify the genres and plots…
Contemporaries Essays, Get in the Cage
Pedagogy of the Obsessed
One of our first encounters with Nicolas Cage in Alex Proyas’s 2009 film Knowing takes place in the university classroom. His character, Professor John Koestler, is giving some astrophysics students an impassioned…