What’s the use of contemporary literature? I ask the question as someone invested in contemporary literature, and someone whose teaching often is on, or includes, significant elements of what I…
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Contemporaries Essays, Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
Contemporaries Essays, Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
The Play of Classrooms
Gaming and literature are increasingly entangled, both as media and as academic disciplines. Recent years have seen an explosion of “literary-ludic” games offering inventive approaches to narration, characterisation, and the construction…
Contemporaries Essays, Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
Envisioning AfAm Literary History in Norwegian Fjord og Fjell
To many, Norway is a land of extremes. One of the wealthiest countries in the world, it’s also said to be home to the happiest people who benefit from the…
Contemporaries Essays, Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
Multicultural Literature in a Superdiverse City
You notice more alertness in the eyes. You sense the stimulated mind. There is something to say, should be said, a willingness to say it. When a person is engaged…
Contemporaries Essays, Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
It feels like a precarious moment to be talking from the classroom. It has for a long time. When I originally wrote these words (January 2024) the politicization of the…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Disco Elysium
Further and Further Away
The most expensive thing you can buy in Disco Elysium is a streetlight. It sits in the corner of the pawn shop on Rue de Saint-Ghislaine and has been modified…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Disco Elysium
Shivers
Shivers come when the temperature drops and you become more keenly aware of your surroundings. It enables you to hear the city itself, to truly belong to the streets. It…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Disco Elysium
Inebriation and Allegory
KIM KITSURAGI: “Not being hungover helps too.” I don’t drink anymore. Or at least I don’t drink with the apocalyptic fury I personified around a decade ago. No dramatic event…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Disco Elysium
DISCO-ORIENTED HAUNTOLOGY
Psychiatrist Marie Rudden describes a private, internal space her patient would withdraw to whenever he became anxious and confused — when the interpersonal reality insisted upon by others in his…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium and Narrative Superposition
Early in Disco Elysium, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi arrives at the Whirling-in-Rags, the hostel where the player character, Harry Du Bois, has just emerged from an alcoholic spiral so intense as…