This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Posts Tagged: Dissent
Are Writers Too Safe?
Is a lack of economic stability making writers too safe? Maggie Doherty argues “yes”: Nearly half a century later, we find ourselves at a different sort of crisis point. Radical literary experimentation continues, but it has become the privilege of a few. In Barth’s day, a robust welfare state supported writers. Public patronage programs provided […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on her new book The Cosmopolites, the citizenship market, nearly getting deported in the Comoros, and learning to show up and wait.
...moreIrving Howe’s Poor Timing
In The New Republic, David Marcus has a comprehensive essay on Irving Howe, exploring, among other things, how the writer’s generation may have had setbacks by arriving too “late” but also too “early.”
...moreThe Art of the Office Novel
Office fiction is deliberately and narrowly construed as being about manners, sociability, gossip, the micro-struggles for rank and status—in other words, “office politics”—rather than about the work that is done in offices. In Dissent, Nikil Saval writes about white-collar alienation and the art and politics of office fiction.
...moreThe Rise of a New Socialist Literary Scene
Facing financial inequality and burdened with debt, millennials have discovered Marxism, writes Timothy Shenk for the Nation. And millennial writers are leveraging technology, rejecting old guard institutions, and constructing new forums for discussion: Combine all this with some fondness for navel gazing and with the fortunes of geography—politics aside, New York writers are New York […]
...moreCracks in the Foundation of the Ivory Tower
If the current economic state of academia seems grim, well, it is. In an essay for Dissent, Claire Goldstene plumbs the ins and outs of student-loan debt, the exploitation of adjunct professors, and what it all means for the country at large (hint: bad stuff): This connection between a more egalitarian politics and a liberal arts […]
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