Blogs

The world is text. Mallarmé and Flaubert described this possibility at the end of the nineteenth century and Derrida proclaimed it again more recently. But now we can say that the world is literature. It is turning literary through the Internet.

I was blithely aldaily-surfing the other day, minding my own business, when a review article in The Nation put an abrupt end to my happy cyber-foraging.

It's been a while since I posted to Arcade.  So many deadlines!  Several times a day I find myself mumbling, "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near." 

The book I've been blogging occasionally about for the last year or more is now coming out in June. I've just written this op-ed piece to accompany its release:

I would like to start my contribution at Arcade by proposing a distinction between “comparative literature as content” and “comparative literature as form.”

In a fascinating parable, "A Story In Two Parts, With An Ending Yet To Be Written," posted on the National Humanities Center's On the Human Web site, Paula Moya tells the tale of a researcher named Kitayama who travels from the land of Interdependence to the land of Independence, conducts research into the way that culture shapes perception, and finds his results grossly misinterpreted by journalists (as reinforcing racist narratives of essential ethnic differences).