Johanna Winant
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Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
For Inscrutability
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…
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…