On the day of his suicide, Quentin Compson comes across a little girl in a bakery.1 She silently watches as he buys her bread and buns from a shopkeeper who…
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Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
The Lucid Stillness of His Style
The patient who begins a therapy session by naming the topic they refuse to discuss will wind up talking about that very subject before the fifty minutes is up. This…
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
Suffer a Sea Change
Into Something Rich and Strange
I am only hounding myself with these questions, trying to work myself up by the silence that is my only answer from all around. How long, I ask myself, will…
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
Come Slowly — Eden —
1. The first time I visited Paris, I tried to act it out. Written in 1919 and published the next year by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Hope Mirrlees’s Paris describes…
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
Paradise: On-Earthly Dilemmas
You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that. —Samuel Beckett, Endgame for Johanna Winant I. On-earthly delights The painting now known as The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490 – 1510)…
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
A Friend, An Enemy
On June 21, 2021, I added a postscript to this essay. — Joshua Kotin I On April Fool’s Day, 1965, Amiri Baraka (known then as LeRoi Jones) sent a postcard…
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
My Interdisciplinary Uncanny Valley
Of all the interpretive experiences, and of all of the analytical puzzles, that might have baffled me, I had never envisioned this one: attempting, as an English professor, to understand…
Peer Reviewed Articles
Issue 7: Post45 x Journal of Cultural Analytics, Peer Reviewed Articles
Introduction: Contemporary Culture After Data Science
The computational study of contemporary culture is experiencing something of a renaissance across the university. Computer scientists are writing algorithms to identify the emotional arcs of novels.1 Sociologists are building…
Issue 7: Post45 x Journal of Cultural Analytics, Peer Reviewed Articles
Content-Era Ethics
Between 2008 and 2012, social media changed. Previously, companies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr had been small, independent startups. Their sites were walled gardens where users could create and…