July 2012

The County Election, George Caleb Bingham, 1851 by Ash Amin If democracy means rule by the people for the people, it has broken down. At pivotal moments in the past, altering the rules of the political has been a defining trait of the organised left, able to project a...

Theory graffiti tags by Kenneth Reinhard [In this talk, I am drawing largely on the work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau. In particular, I am guided by Badiou’s essays “Philosophy and Desire,” “Eight Theses on the Universal,” and his books Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and...

The national curriculum for England and Wales, introduced at the end of the 1980s, made it mandatory for schools to teach English grammar. Yet the myth still persists that grammar has not been taught since the permissive 1960s. For politicians in need of a populist gesture, that belief has...

“Dr Faustus in the Magic Circle”, from The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, P.F. Gent, 1969 From Lapham’s Quarterly: If the paramount project of W. B. Yeats’ professional life was the perfection of the art of poetry, it was intertwined with a personal preoccupation, the...

From The Threepenny Review: It is a nostalgic poem, so let me start with my own memory of it. Seventeen or so years ago, I came to The Waste Land in the way I then came to most poems—high on caffeine, late at night, crouched on the floor of...

Passages from Finnegans Wake, Mary Ellen Bute, 1966 From The New York Review of Books: I got my first real glimpse of that beast in the Burger Chef restaurant that used to occupy the basement of the Cathedral of Learning, at the University of Pittsburgh, in my senior year,...

I am growing ever more convinced that a great deal can be learned about a culture by looking at the way it exercises its control over the exchange of fluids. I'm not talking about semen and menstrual blood (though surely those too). I'm talking about alcohol, soda water, fruit...

Superman, DC, series #1, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, 1939 From The New York Times: “Superman!” gasps Lois Lane, freshly scooped from beneath the nodding carbines of a South American firing squad. “Right!” says the boxy blue-and-red figure who holds her in his arms. “And still playing the role...

by Legacy Russell Poet Richard Siken begins his “Dirty Valentine” by confessing, “There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you. / I touch myself, I dream.” I do, too. We live in a confessional culture wherein the most detailed minutiae of everyday life is splayed...

Joyce had a lot of bad luck in the literary marketplace. Four publishers turned down his first book, a volume of poems called “Chamber Music.” He spent nine years getting his story collection, “Dubliners,” into print. It was rejected by eight publishers. At least thirteen printers refused to set...

A little more than four years ago, the phrase heard throughout the world was the catchy “Yes, we can.” A rallying cry of the best sort—devoid of any referentiality—“Yes we can” could refer to both anything and nothing at the same time. Not as if catachrestic metaphors ever got...

Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly in Back to the Future, Universal Pictures, 1985 by David Beer In the 1980s one of the defining images of cool, for me and my friends at least, was Michael J. Fox skateboarding away from school whilst listening to his Walkman in the...

by Bill Benzon I’ve just been watching Dumbo. I suppose it’s been over thirty years since I last saw it, or some part of it, so my expectations were most strongly influenced by what I’ve read in the last year or two. I was primed for the “Baby Mine”...

To what extent can literature be used as a source for gaining historical knowledge? This question has challenged historians and literary historians ever since the development of ‘history’ as a scholarly discipline. The answer tends to be moderately positive: literature may reveal specific information that can increase our historical...

Grass Mud Horse, Ai Weiwei From The Chronicle Review: Katrien Jacobs, a conference speaker from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, studies what she calls porn activism. In People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet (Intellect, 2012), she discusses the recent flourishing of that culture’s pent-up desire...