criticism
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To Speak Unsatisfactorily
To memorialize a tragedy, one must inscribe unmistakable significance into reticent materials, attempting to curb the natural processes of forgetting and obsolescence. For The Nation, Becca Rothfeld writes about W.G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants, among others, and his obsession with…
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Not Quite Human
For the second time that day, then, I waited in the dark for something not quite human—and all too human—to begin. If you haven’t seen Charlie Kaufman’s new film Anomalisa, we highly recommend that you do. And then after, read…
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The Rumpus Interview with Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell discusses his debut novel, What Belongs to You, crossing boundaries, language as defense, and the queer tradition of novel writing that blurs boundaries between fiction and essay and autobiography.
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Art Should Make Things Worse
Art shouldn’t be mere normalizing sublimation or queer desublimation, which amounts to the same thing. Should actually make your problems worse. Only then can the fantasy of endless role-playing and analysis be traversed. Art is, in this way, less delusional…
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Intellectual Sadism
Lisa Ruddick, at The Point, gives a state of the union address on critical theory, arguing that current trends are leading us down a dangerous, anti-empathetic, anti-individualistic road towards “cool criticism”: Academic cool is a cast of mind that disdains interpersonal…
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The Rumpus Interview with Margo Jefferson
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson talks about her new memoir, Negroland, and about growing up in an elite black community in the segregated Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s.
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The Rumpus Interview with Sarah Tomlinson
Author Sarah Tomlinson talks about ghostwriting, her father and childhood, the tradition of confessional writing, and her new memoir, Good Girl.
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Revising ‘A Wrinkle in Time’
Irony abounds in a story from The Chronicle of Higher Education about Jonathan Gottschall, the pioneering figure of Literary Darwinism, who has taken to MMA fighting since his career as an academic foundered. Gottschall made a splash in literary circles with…
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Derrida Goes to Princeton
New Jersey is about to get Poststructural, thanks to Princeton’s recent acquisition of Jacques Derrida’s library. The collection contains nearly 14,000 books, many of which bear marginalia from the celebrated critic and philosopher. The collection will be available to scholars…
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Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry by William Logan
Zach Savich reviews William Logan’s Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetrytoday in Rumpus Poetry.
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Half a Century Later
Down at the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh asks where the black critics are (and whether we ever had any to begin with, and how the field is irrelevant until they come back): Sociologists who study black America have a name for…
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Criticising Criticism
The more all-encompassing art is becoming, the more we need criticism. The more books there are, the hungrier we are for a way to navigate the field. The more of other disciplines the visual arts take on – poetry, dance…