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.
Conversations
By01.20.2012I must say that I absolutely love Meryl Streep and I was so happy to see her win the Golden Globe award for Iron Lady. Once the film came out I went to see it with my film critic sister. Once again, I must say I loved the performance by Streep. After Anna Magnani and Giulietta Masina I think she is one of the most outstanding female actresses of the world.
By01.19.2012“Imagine a world without art.” This could easily have been the message greeting visitors to the Wikipedia site on January 18, 2012, when it went silent in protest against legislation proposed in Congress (Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA). For Wikipedia and Google the issue is “free information” in the “open” Internet.
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.
By11.19.2011This week's images of the corporate university turn out to be pretty indelible. Once seen, they are impossible to forget.
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.
By11.14.2011For a long time I used to go to bed with a book by Freud.
By01.24.2012One of the insights I took away from the recent MLA conference was the sheer difficulty both of communicating complicated information in a short amount of time when I went to panels, as well as the impossibility of absorbing such an overwhelming volume of information. A key tool that I felt was underutilized during the conference are graphics that could concisely communicate information relevant to literary study.
By01.23.2012This is the imaginary soundtrack to a film that, knowing the film business, will never get made. You can read about the script online.
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).
By12.19.2011In the work of the most distinguished Latin American authors there is a disquieting circumstance, namely, the virtual omnipresence of a particular semantic field centered upon the concepts of copy, imitation, emulation, plagiarism, and influence.
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.
By11.29.2011My Shakespeare class finally persuaded me to take a class trip to go see the new Roland Emmerich movie, Anonymous. I went forewarned. Multiple reviewers have pointed out problems with the film, which proposes that the Earl of Oxford wrote the literature by William Shakespeare.
By11.26.2011In the last post, I spoke about the difference between King Lear as an abstract idea (what readers want) and the many material copies of King Lear that Google has gathered into its database (what they get). Certainly, the preservationist aspect of the project is impressive.
Transactions
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