Literary Criticism
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #211: Rachel Vorona Cote
“Ultimately, this is who I am. I can only write honestly, and from where I live.”
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Dread and Magic
Isn’t the crowd itself a kind of anti-literature, an intensely physical impediment to the inwardness required of poetry and prose? At Lit Hub, Dustin Illingworth writes about literature that theorizes “the crowd,” from Don DeLillo to Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin, with horror…
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Stylistically Tortuous
If you can grope your way through late James, you’ll find you have moved out of the Victorian era into the modern and, beyond that, into what we have come to refer to as the postmodern. Over at the Smart…
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Foundations of Obscure Humanity
If the very rich were to admit that the society in which they live such lush lives is not only immoral but unnatural, it might demand, say, a massive redistribution of their wealth! Over at Lit Hub, Colette Shade writes…
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The Book Must Be Written
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, in an amended excerpt from David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering shares his attempt at tackling the mammoth, labyrinthine task of schematizing DFW’s archival materials into a coherent history of the project that never quite…
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Pernicious Individualism
If anything, Emerson’s transparent eyeball is now a webcam hacked by the NSA. Over at Lit Hub, Jonathon Sturgeon writes about the supposedly rampant and undying force of individualism in American writing—the “imperial self,” an all-encompassing and socially blind thing—from Emerson…
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The Hope Whose Death It Announces
Poetry is defined by a failure to live up to the hype it generates, promising divine transcendence through a medium that is essentially human. This is the paradox Ben Lerner articulates in his dissertation on The Hatred of Poetry. At…
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Imagining the Past
Over at the New Yorker, Lucy Ives writes about how some recent works of fiction challenge conventional definitions of historical fiction by “offer[ing] a past of competing perspectives, of multiple voices.” Citing works by Danielle Dutton, Marlon James, and John…
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Eating at the Table of Another
The critic giveth and he taketh away. In his review of Better Living Through Criticism, Jonathon Sturgeon counters A.O. Scott’s aversion to the idea of the critic as parasite: Maybe the loneliness of the American critic stems from his obsession…
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Exhausted, Frustrated, Probably Depressed
The housewife is to the novelist what the still life is to the painter. For the Slate Book Review, Laura Miller writes a piece exploring the history and resurgence of a beloved literary archetype: the housewife, often made profound by great…
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President Obama, Literary Critic
At the New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson shares with us part of a letter written by a young man who would eventually become President Obama, a small piece of literary criticism written in earnest to help his then-girlfriend unpack…
