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Twenty-eight fat televisions are stacked into a pyramid of sorts in the corner. In the darkened room, each screen plays the same short excerpt of Nina Simone’s 1964 performance of…

1. Look It’s unreasonably hot for an English summer. Moving through the humid chambers of the Victoria and Albert Museum feels like trudging through a steamed treacle pudding, an Edwardian…

From February to April of 1968, Memphis was a focal point of civil rights action, largely due to its nationally prominent sanitation strike. Labor tactics in Memphis insisted on connecting…

Philosophy and literature: an old sibling rivalry. What more is there to say? Certainly not that form is what distinguishes literature from philosophy. If anything, form yokes philosophy and literature…

In Lorrie Moore’s masterpiece of climate fiction, A Gate at the Stairs (2009), the college-matriculating protagonist Tassie describes her mother’s love as “useless,” because she fails to prevent her son from dying…

In the decades after the Agrarians drifted from Vanderbilt to points north and established New Criticism as the dominant interpretive method across the United States, formalism came to be understood…

Notes on (poets and critics) reading for form The question that concerns me most in thinking about “new” or “old” formalisms, formalism now, is what counts as reading for “form”…