literary theory
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Maria Cichosz
“Thinking about blurring those lines got me closer to the truth of the clichés.”
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The Rumpus Interview with George Saunders
George Saunders discusses his new (and first) novel Lincoln in the Bardo, Donald Trump, and a comprehensive theory of literature.
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The Rumpus Interview with Brendan Jones
Brendan Jones talks about his debut novel, The Alaskan Laundry, living in Alaska, his time as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and living and loving what you write.
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Video Games as Poetry
Space in video games is not, strictly speaking, physical. It’s made of pixels on a screen, and the movement of objects within it are governed by the algorithms of its central processing unit. This artificiality has the ironic effect of…
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Lit Theorists for Babies
WOMAN: Peekabo! I see you! Peekaboo! I see you! BABY DERRIDA: How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? Over at The Toast, Mallory Ortberg has another entry, this…
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The Poetics of Everything
Sure, there’s poetry and there are certain conventions associated with it, but the notion of poetics can exist outside of a literary space. The Believer blog interviews poet Lucy Ives and discusses her views on applying literary theory outside of…
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The Novel of Economics
Following her essay about the influence of Adam Smith’s economic theories in Jane Austen’s novels, writing at The Atlantic, Shannon Chamberlain gets back to the topic, this time debating what influence fiction had, and in particular the emerging genre of the novel,…
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Monkeys Don’t Have Stories
The question, “why fiction?” has very much been on my mind lately, and it’s one of these things that, again, is so big, and so obvious that most people just don’t think about it. It seems obvious to people that…