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…
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Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 1, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
Major Falls and Minor Lifts: The Character System of BoJack Horseman
BoJack Horseman is set in a cartoonish world where hybrid beings satirize familiar behavior and in which backgrounds keep up the visual equivalent of a laugh track. We notice moles…
Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
Only Connecting in Pacific Ocean City
For the past few years, I’ve been teaching the BoJack Horseman episode “Fish Out of Water” in my writing courses. The episode forgoes dialogue for about 23 of its 26…
Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman
BoJack and #MeToo
For the last three years, I’ve studied masculinity in the context of very public instances of sexual violence, collecting newspaper articles, tweets, documentaries, and books that detail allegations of sexual…