This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in January 2018. The Italian intellectual and novelist Umberto Eco died on February 19, 2016, just four short months before the surprise result of the British referendum on the European Union. During
This review was originally published on OperaWire Cecilia Bartoli’s latest album, “Antonio Vivaldi” (2018), comes almost twenty years after her historic recording, “The Vivaldi Album,” which was released in 1999 to wide critical acclaim and incredible popular success. The 1999
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in March 2019. The “sexism of genius” has been well studied and widely reported. Male professors are more than three times as likely to be described as “geniuses” by their students than female professors,
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in February 2019. George Eliot had a great interest in music. Her partner, George Henry Lewes, was friends with the pianist and composer Franz Liszt and, through this connection, Eliot met many
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in January 2019. What makes a novel “difficult,” and why does that label matter? When we think of traditionally “difficult” writers—James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon, for example—the answer to the first part
In her recent book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne offers a framework for understanding how misogyny operates in contemporary Western societies, and a vocabulary (‘himpathy’, ‘herasure’) for discussing some of its more insidious aspects. Drawing on recent
1) Nightwood by Djuna Barnes Published in 1936, Nightwood is a haze of alcohol, glamour, sex, and love in all its desperate, unconventional, and painful forms. It tells the story of the mesmerising Robin Vote, who leaves a trail of cigarette ends and
Fredric Jameson’s controversial essay ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1) sets out his theory of what he calls ‘third-world literature,’ positioning it as a form of national allegory. Since its publication in 1986, this essay has
First published in 1975, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Theory of Minor Literature (1) draws on many of the themes of their earlier works; a critical stance towards psychoanalytical hegemony, an emphasis on the continuities between human
An edited version of this review appeared in issue 9.3 of ImageTexT: read it here To what extent can our favourite comic book superheroes be viewed as sovereigns in their own realms? And how does the role of superhero complicate or otherwise