Posts tagged: literature

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  Look within: literary diaries and the culture of narcissism

  Our appetite for literary diaries has never been greater, with TikTok and Twitter feeds filled with snippets of writing from Virginia and extracts from Sylvia Plath’s food diary. But what can the contemporary desire for the diaries of others tell us about our individualistic society?
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  Choose your side. Choose your weapons

  Published 20 years after the 1984-85 miners' strike that it portrays, David Peace's kaleidoscopic novel GB84 depicted the affective realities of the struggle as it was fought by pickets, policemen. Alexander Curtis asks what the literature can teach us about the past and present of class war.
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  Remembering Martin Amis

  Martin Amis, who died aged 73 earlier this year, has long been criticised from the left but for his political positions––first with Stalinism in Koba the Dread and then Islamic terrorism and his mishandled remarks about the Muslim community. But, argues critic Jared Marcel Pollen, it is for his style that he should be remembered more than his punditry.
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  How It Should Be Between People

  The novels of Vigdis Hjorth, one of Norway’s most celebrated writers, offer a powerful meditation on what it means to relate to other people.
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  The Right-Wing Avant-Garde in American Fiction

  In recent years, the New York literary avant-garde has shifted from a Sanders-aligned socialism to a far more amorphous politics, taking in online reactionaries like Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin. But how did this happen, and what can this tell us about the idea of the avant-garde today?
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  Capital and Culture: Musil's Politics

  Robert Musil was one of the great novelists of twentieth-century Europe. A recently translated collection of his essays, Literature and Politics, Drew Dickerson argues, can help us see more clearly the historical and political context of his masterpiece, The Man without Qualities.

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  Fredric Jameson Bookshelf

  Complete your Fredric Jameson bookshelf with this reading list! All 40% off (print books) and 60% off (ebooks) until January 4th.

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  A conversation with Vigdis Hjorth and Nicole Krauss

  A discussion on autofiction and the construction of self, on who has the right to tell their family narrative and the trauma of not being heard.

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  Reading the Revolution: A Memoir of 1968

  "Our reading in 1968 and thereabouts, done in the context of mass movements of social protest, helped to transform us into revolutionaries."

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  Havana Under Water

  The sea has long been a defining feature, indeed an inevitability in Cuban art, literature, and life. Now it turns ominous.

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  Rethinking the Cultural History of Chinese Film: A Conversation with Dai Jinhua

  Marxist Feminist film scholar Dai Jinhua, one of the preeminent cultural critics of China's New Left, historicizes the rapid cultural and intellectual developments that took place in China during the 1980s and 90s. 

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  A New Form of Practical Criticism: Michael Denning on Raymond Williams

  In a conversation with Phil O'Brien of the Raymond Williams Society, Michael Denning discusses his four decades of learning from Williams' work.