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…
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Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 1, Peer Reviewed Articles
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 1, Peer Reviewed Articles
On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
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…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 1, Peer Reviewed Articles
Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore’s Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
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…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 1, Peer Reviewed Articles
Introduction: Formalism Unbound
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…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 1, Peer Reviewed Articles
“Now can you see the monument?” Some notes on reading for “form”
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”…
Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
No Closure
Shortly before the pandemic, I binge-watched all of BoJack Horseman from the dark cave of my late-night living room. I became obsessed with it. I talked about it to everyone…
Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
The Lost Futures of BoJack and Diane
Just before the credits roll in BoJack Horseman’s final episode, the camera tilts leaving BoJack and Diane visible from only the mid-chest up. If we weren’t already paying attention to…
Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
Good Boy Gone Bad: The Rot in Mr. Peanutbutter’s House
He’s a man who has suffered no consequences. His is a recklessness born of experience. He’s like a malevolent Mr. Magoo. He always knows the I-beam is going to swing…
Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
“Now this is television! Turn on the rain!” BoJack Horseman and J. D. Salinger
In Season 2 of BoJack Horseman, Hollywoo agent Princess Carolyn learns that J. D. Salinger is alive, hiding out at Joe Nobody’s Shop for Tandem Bicycles, having faked his own…
Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
It’s Not Ibsen
Back in the 90s, BoJack Horseman was on a very famous TV show. It wasn’t a very good show, but the characters, BoJack tells us, were good people.1 BH: I…