Playing with Helpless Dead Puppets
‘Ragtime,’ E.L. Doctorow’s forgotten novel of Progressive Era New York, is a reminder of how much American politics have changed over the past century.
Josh Allan
· 9 min read
literature
A collection of 50 posts
AI and the Death of Literary Criticism
The discipline of English literature seems unlikely to survive the coming technological tsunami—and maybe it doesn’t deserve to. And I say this as a professor of English, who believes in the power of the written word.
Thomas P. Balazs
· 8 min read
Evolutionary Psychology in the Humanities: Shakespeare’s Othello
Othello and Iago represent two enduring behaviours whose conflicts have shaped much of humanity’s theory of mind and moral emotions to the present day.
Helen Pluckrose
· 17 min read
From Skies to Screens
Our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by digital technology. This is stripping us of our sense that the physical landscape is infused with meaning.
Robert Huddleston
· 9 min read
Monstrous Things
Dostoevsky, Alice Munro, and the nature of fiction—what does our inability to forgive do to our ability to confess?
Allan Stratton
· 11 min read
The Problem with Utopias
The history of utopian fiction proves that we can’t even imagine a better world.
Ewan Morrison
· 15 min read
Desire and Ambition
Today, most of John Braine’s work is out of print and forgotten. But he was an underrated writer, unafraid to confront the complexities of masculine sexuality with terse precision, self-deprecation, and emotional candour.
Brad Strotten
· 11 min read
Against Agency
Attending to Shakespeare on his own terms may allow us to reclaim the erotic warmth that is latent in our human condition.
Marilyn Simon
· 8 min read
Beginning in Gladness, Ending in Madness
1900–1950 was a golden age of literary eccentricity.
Stephen Akey
· 14 min read
A Dense Thicket of Contending Visions
In his latest novel, Tom Piazza imagines the finest meeting of American minds never to have happened.
Matt Hanson
· 6 min read
The Genocidal Imagination
Philosophies of human cruelty, from Sade to October 7th.
Pascal Bruckner
· 21 min read
Robots, Rats and Hoverchairs: Three Dystopian AI Fantasies
Human beings need meaning, and a life in which all one’s needs were met by external agents would fail to provide it.
Stewart Slater
· 9 min read
‘Augie March’ Turns 70
An Interview with Saul Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader.
Riley Moore
· 12 min read
Our Lost Classical Learning
The Western canon was not an unchanging set of texts, but an ongoing conversation that lasted thousands of years—enabling each generation to build on the intellectual heritage of the past.
Brian Kaller
· 7 min read
Milan Kundera: The Nobel Prize for Literature Winner We Never Had
Few writers in our time were more committed to the novel or had more idealism about the heights the form could scale.
Robin Ashenden
· 12 min read