I have been thinking a lot lately about the status of this blog in relation to my academic work. When I began this blog, I had the idea that it would be a nice way for me to formalize my note-taking process and create a space within which I could test out ideas before [...]

I link to this Guardian article by everyone’s favorite Slovenian lit. critic Slavoj Zizek. He here criticizes the representation of torture on 24., with a particular focus on Season 4. Now I have all sorts of problems with the representation of torture on the show, for any number of reasons, but Zizek does [...]

So my dissertation keeps changing shape and size. Based on the various critiques that I received at my colloquium, I have been thinking about whether or not the concept of “postirony” has enough in it to carry a whole dissertation. I mean, it seemed that I could do a very detail-level sort of analysis of [...]

I am back in the U.S. after a pretty cool–and rather sick–trip to Barcelona for the New Year, where they stuff their mouths with grapes in the seconds leading up to midnight.
My colloquim went off pretty well, although every member of my committee had mutually irreconcilable advice on where I should take my dissertation. I [...]