Article 9
Re: this nonsense, your occasional reminder: it is completely fine if not every English major reads Shakespeare. He is not the only good writer we have on deck here. English: it’s a college major, not...
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Resilience and unbreakability
Others can be broken, but not Kimmy. Robin James‘s recent book Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism (Zero Books, 2015) isn’t a perfect book, of course. But its theorization of...
View ArticleRecently published work by Hillary Gravendyk
Most of these links are compiled by Cindy Arrieu-King. Cindy is also compiling an edition of Hillary’s unpublished poems. Three poems at Newfound. The current issue of comma is in memory of Hillary....
View ArticleCrash courses for the desperate
Lately I’ve been thinking about what to do with students who suddenly need to get up to speed in a field, and don’t have time to take a course or immerse themselves in it for a year. I’m especially...
View ArticleFAQ about the May 2015 exam for The Novel
Q. How many pieces of novel theory/secondary reading/literary criticism should I mention in an essay answer? A. There is no set number. It is possible to get a high mark by citing many, or none at all....
View ArticleThe Novel (Q3060), Spring 2015: Convenor’s response to module evaluation
Many thanks to the students who took the time to evaluate this module. Your input is very helpful. For Spring 2015, the other tutors and I met to reevaluate the existing reading list. We agreed to skew...
View ArticleAutumn 2015 reading list: American Lit since 1890, part I
Posting a Sussex Library reading list is a lengthy process that involves my curriculum development, the Library staff, and some clunky software. This means that my reading lists can’t be made available...
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The cherry’s on top: Celibacies and surface reading
So, I’m late to this, but I finally sat down and had a proper read of Benjy Kahan’s 2013 book Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life.1)Benjamin Kahan, Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual...
View ArticleThings that look like regular words but are really technical terms
I saw a paper on “Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid” on Twitter this morning (via Sarah Rose Cavanaugh), and it made me think I should post something very slightly related, viz. this...
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Apple’s Modernism, Google’s Modernism: Some reflections on Alphabet, Inc. and...
It’s weird how in the “post-postmodern” era (as Jeffrey Nealon has a ruefully called it) what counts as modernity remains so attached to the styles of modernism, a formal signification of newness long...
View Article“Experimentalism by Contact”
My essay “Experimentalism by Contact” is now available on Project Muse as part of a special issue of diacritics edited by Brian Lennon on “Thinking with the Sciences.” The essay is drawn from my book...
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He just wants to sing
[An incredibly long, rambling, and probably flat-out boring meditation on the Broadway show An American in Paris.]1)Some movie adaptation context: On the Town (1949), a ridiculous and frothy Gene Kelly...
View ArticleMLA 2017
I’ll be on two panels at MLA in Philadelphia this winter. I co-organized “Feelings of Structure,” a roundtable on the ways that affect theory and institutional speak to one another, with the brilliant...
View ArticlePeople confusing Tr*mpian “alt facts” with feminist standpoint theory have it...
People confusing Tr*mpian “alt facts” with feminist standpoint theory have it backwards. Right-wing “alt facts” insists reality is legitimately determined by the powerful, that if someone simply posits...
View ArticlePrecision and the one mile blast radius
There’s been so much scholarship on why the face of neoliberalism is female. The language of precision, targeting, and the “surgical” transforms the weapon into the scalpel, makes the wound into the...
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