Conversations

  • Anne DeWitt's picture
    By
    01.27.2012

    In 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.

  • Irakli Zurab Kakabadze's picture
    By
    01.20.2012
    I 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.
  • Gregory Jusdanis's picture
    By
    01.19.2012

    “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.

  • William Egginton's picture
    By
    01.13.2012

    In 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.

  • Meredith Ramirez Talusan's picture
    By
    01.24.2012
    One 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.
  • João Cezar de Castro Rocha's picture
    By
    12.19.2011

    In 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.

  • Ruth Kaplan's picture
    By
    11.29.2011

    My 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.

  • Hannah Sullivan's picture
    By
    11.26.2011

    In 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.