Lee Konstantinou
(Crossposted at Arcade.) Is it possible to organize departments of literature, culture, or humanistic study without norms, or around “the general norm that there are no norms,” as Meredith Ramirez Talusan suggests in a provocative Arcade comment? If it were possible, would such an approach be desirable? Should we replace questions of the form “Does this … Continue reading Very Interesting
(Crossposted at Arcade.) Some recent conversations on Arcade have gotten me thinking about midcentury America, or rather our idea of the midcentury as a privileged moment of literary production, consumption, and promise. In particular, I’ve been turning over Natalia Cecire’s query, “[W]hat is to be gained in mourning the passing of a genre or a … Continue reading From “Happy Days” to “Mad Men”
(Crossposted at Arcade.) Continuing my progressive descent into vulgar materialism (I use the words "progressive" and "vulgar" in positive senses!), I’d like to continue the line of thinking of my previous post, "Reading under Neoliberalism." I will use the questions Joel Burges asks in a comment to guide my reflections here. His questions are too … Continue reading Am I Turning Empirical?
(Crossposted at Arcade.) This post is a response to a comment made by Andrew Goldstone in a comments thread on Joshua Landy’s fascinating Arcade blog post, "Human Minds, Literary Texts, and CD Players." I was originally going to post this as a comment, but the response grew too long and unwieldy, so here it is … Continue reading Reading under Neoliberalism
(Crossposted at Arcade.) I’ve been rereading Amanda Anderson’s fascinating and cogent collection of essays, The Way We Argue Now. Reading through her opening account of the debate between Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler, a version of the Habermas-Foucault debate in the domain of feminist theory, we find this cogent summary by Anderson of the differences … Continue reading Norms, Norms, Norms
(Crossposted at Arcade.) I remember hearing once that FBI agents who had wiretaps on various mafia operations noted a change in the speaking style of the gangsters they were monitoring after Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was released in 1972. The real gangsters began imitating the patois of their film counterparts, thoroughly identifying with their brutal ethos. … Continue reading Life, Art, Life
(Crossposted at my new blog at Arcade.) Amir Eshel has been composing a series of fascinating posts on his Arcade blog, which I presume are related to his current book project, on life after the End of History, the return of liberalism as an object of scholarly interest, and recent trends in contemporary literature. I … Continue reading The Threshold of Politics
I haven’t had a chance to write up the MLA panel I helped organize, “The Legacy of David Foster Wallace.” It was very well attended — especially for an 8:30 a.m. panel on the last day of the convention — and the talks were all terrific. Fortunately for me, Kathleen Fitzpatrick has written up the … Continue reading DFW@MLA III
My 2010 resolutions: (i) to separate myself from this diabolical device known as the Internet, which sucks up my time, distracts me from what I would at some second-order level of intelligence prefer to be doing, and doesn’t really lead to lasting learning and/or self-improvement; (ii) to turn this Web site into a real blog, … Continue reading My New Year’s Paradox
Amazon is reporting that on Christmas it sold more Kindle books than physicals books. At the moment, because it insists on charging no more than $9.99 for books, even for best-sellers, and despite publisher protests, Amazon loses money on each Kindle book it sells. Now, we may find this impressive or not in and of … Continue reading eBook Revolution?