In January 2020, shortly after the official announcement that Lodge 49 (2018-2019) had been cancelled, I published a short piece on Medium, “Crying Over Lodge 49.” I shared it on…
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Contemporaries Essays, New Literary Television
Contemporaries Essays, New Literary Television
The Last Days of Books: ageism and the literary millennial in Younger
In Younger (2015-2021), the world of publishing is built on puns and parodies. Characters drink Bridget Jones Daiquiris, Margarita Atwoods, and Bloody Mary Shelleys. Stand-ins for Karl Ove Knausgård and…
Contemporaries Essays, New Literary Television
“Good . . . or good considering”: Bookish Television and Televised Bookishness in I May Destroy You
If I read one more declaration that the novel is dead and that it is identity politics that have killed it — as though Victorian literature was not at all…
Contemporaries Essays, New Literary Television
Literary Culture and Achievement Subjectivity from Gilmore Girls to A Year in the Life
Perhaps no image is more representative of the young Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) — protagonist, along with her mother Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), of the TV series Gilmore Girls (2000-2007),…
Contemporaries Essays, New Literary Television
The New Literary Television: An Introduction
Among the most prominent features of contemporary “prestige” television are a new set of relationships with “the literary.” There is a striking tendency in recent television to foreground acts of…
Contemporaries Essays, Legacies — 9/11 and the War On Terror at Twenty
Pattern Recognition: The Enduring Whiteness of 9/11 Literary Studies
9/11 literary studies are characterized by an enduring whiteness, which detrimentally flattens and skews our understandings of the attacks. 9/11 was not an affront to whiteness, and its consequences —…
Contemporaries Essays, Legacies — 9/11 and the War On Terror at Twenty
In Poetry’s Field: 9/11, Forever War, and Growing Theory
In this Forever War, what good has come is hard to identify (some would argue a modicum of greater safety, but for whom?) but the bad greets us daily. The…
Contemporaries Essays, Legacies — 9/11 and the War On Terror at Twenty
Girls Like Us
In summer 2014, as Israel’s war on Gaza intensified, Israeli actor Gal Gadot uploaded a selfie to Facebook that drew worldwide attention. It showed Gadot and her daughter covering their…
Contemporaries Essays, Legacies — 9/11 and the War On Terror at Twenty
Saturday, Witnessing, and the Cultural Logic of Rehabilitation
Toward the end of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, when the protagonist Dr. Henry Perowne is operating on the man who had just earlier invaded his home and “terrorized” his family, the…
Contemporaries Essays, Legacies — 9/11 and the War On Terror at Twenty
Texturizing 9/11 in the Flat World: Screen Culture, Endless War, and the Literature of Terror
In the memorable words of John Updike, who witnessed the 9/11 attacks from a Brooklyn high-rise, 9/11 “had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception.”1 But…