By05.11.2012"FRANCE HAS A NEW PRESIDENT." It does not look like much of a statement on paper, or on a computer screen: five little words, almost too short for a tweet. But France today is still dazed from the news, floating between disbelief, relief, and exhaustion.
Conversations
By04.27.2012We too find ourselves in a modernidad tardía. That is what my audience reported to me at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogota where I had come to present a series of seminars on Greek culture through the support of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.
By04.13.2012Last summer while travelling I read Moby Dick on my iPhone. I am now at a point in my life when, circumscribed by airline baggage weight restrictions, the choice between packing Moby Dick or an extra pair of shoes is no choice at all. So I downloaded a free version and tucked my phone in my pocket.
By03.01.2012I spent this past August at Denniston Hill, for which I curated a month's worth of residents & to which this mix is dedicated. If you are so inclined, go read/watch a bit about my experience there, so as to complement your listening experience.
By01.13.2012In a recent NPR piece TV critic Eric Deggans cites shows like "Hell on Wheels," Sons of Anarchy," "Dexter," and "Breaking Bad" as evidence of a proliferations of television programs featuring "characters the audience likes and wants to see succeed, even though they act an awful lot like villains.
By12.07.2011Mark Bauerlein--author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) and Literary Theory: An Autopsy--recently released a widely discussed study called "Literary Research: Cost and Impacts" for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
By11.21.2011"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street," composed in 1853, is perhaps Herman Melville's most famous short story. It's certainly his most inscrutable.
By05.04.2012Recently I gave my first poetry reading. Since I am not a poet, this presented a problem.
By04.23.2012You may know that a Russian Court has sentenced Russian poets Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Santsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova to two more months in prison. Amnesty International has declared them prisoners of conscience.
By04.20.2012The formula of the "99 percent" seems at once incredibly rhetorical and real. We are used to hyperbole; we are less used to an absurdly lop-sided figure that is actually matched by a reality. Poetic figuration meets statistical validity.
By03.20.2012Perhaps the best way of outlining a brief definition of what I propose to call Shakespearean countries is resorting to V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, whose title already suggests a Girardian reading of the work of the Nobel Prize.
By03.24.2012Errol Morris is famous for being an amazing interviewer. I think I know why, having seen him with Claude Lanzmann last Friday at Brandeis.
By02.09.2012One of the major difficulties of being a U.S.-based scholar working in Filipino is having access to texts that are only distributed in the Philippines. So it was with enormous joy that I discovered J. Neil Garcia’s Postcolonialism and Filipino Poetics available digitally on Amazon.
By01.27.2012In a recent post about Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's article "Surface Reading," I suggested that the history of a text's reception could constitute a surface-reading practice. Here, I want to take up my promise to discuss the affinities between reception history and one of the modes of reading that Best and Marcus do include: genre criticism.
By01.09.2012Whenever a new anthology of modern U.S. poetry comes along, it seems that some distinguished critic or other is fated to take up arms, defending his or her vision of canonical distinction against the treachery of "inclusiveness." The latest eminence to cast herself as such a centurion is Helen Vendler, who reproaches Rita Dove's Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011) in a review that has garnered no shortage of sensational, morbid attention ("Are These the Poems to Remember?," NYRB, November, 2011).
By12.16.2011Thoughts on two very different recent films from Russia, Silent Souls (Овсянки, dir. Alexei Fedorchenko, 2010) and I Will Remember (Буду помнить, dir.
