reality tv
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A Rhetorical Tragedy
We enjoy tragedy because through it, we are able to purge those aspects of ourselves with which we are most uncomfortable. Our onstage avatar embodies all those thoughts and feelings, desires and fears, ambitions and delusions with which we are…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Valuation Methods
In some of my fantasies, I make a pitch for art or for truth, defend them like commodities.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: All Bodies Count
Personal representation weighs heavily on the disabled because we don’t often see each other out in the world.
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The Rumpus Interview with Alex Dimitrov and Kate Durbin
Alex Dimitrov and Kate Durbin interview each other about place and poetics and poetry in performance, as well as poetry in LA and New York, and using culture as a prop.
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Is the Essay like Reality TV?
In an article about the contemporary form of the essay, Adam Kirsch states, “The new essay is exclusively about the self with the world serving only as a foil and an accessory.” This article compares essayists such as Rothbart and Crosley…
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Fictional Characters Are Not Your Friends
Critics who fault a character’s unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability. In a cheekily titled BuzzFeed Books essay,…
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Portrait of an artist in 7 minutes
Rumpus artist MariNaomi has her first published essay over at The Weeklings. She writes an about an honest, raw experience about what creative people will go through for the sake of “exposure”: “The gig was unpaid, but I was promised…
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15 Words Officially Banished, Including Tweet, Bromance
Last summer, we had a discussion here at The Rumpus about the worst words ever. Well, it turns out that for the last 35 years, Lake Superior State University has been doing even more: a “List of Words Banished from…