In the 2020 documentary, Miss Americana, Taylor Swift says that “[I was] frozen at the age I became famous.” Signed as a songwriter at fourteen, and achieving her first Billboard…
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Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Taylor’s Sweet Escapes
2020 is the year Taylor Swift decided to take on William Wordsworth. She does so on the standout bonus track to folklore, “the lakes.”1 In a documentary about the album,…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Bad Songs about Bad Things
At some point in the early 2010s, a gif of Taylor Swift was making its way around on Tumblr. In a sequence of images, Taylor Swift wears a wry yet…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Growing Sideways, Gazing Back
The Taylor Swift of evermore is our pop Heraclitus: nothing here happens for the first time, everything’s a return to something, a rewrite, a re-take, a retraction, a chance to…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Introduction: from folklore to evermore
Taylor Swift has a reputation for many things. Dropping surprise albums is not one of them, at least not before this year. If folklore is inspired by William Wordsworth, evermore…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 1, Peer Reviewed Articles
Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
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…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 1, Peer Reviewed Articles
The Sight of Life
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…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 1, Peer Reviewed Articles
Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
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…
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…