A couple of days ago, while surfing through the internet, I came across this very fine review of Angus Fletcher’s new book on environmental poetry. What a surprise it was for me, a big fan of his old, now standard work on allegory published in 1964. Somehow you tend to see standard works as lacking any relation to an actual author. Standard works become properties of disciplines or institutions, a type of acknowledgment that you imagine as s...

Pretending, for the occasion, to have a Central Committee, the journal Tel Quel sent a delegation to China in the spring of 1974. Spring 1974: the campaign “to critique Lin Biao and Confucius” was in full spate, and any pauses in the chorus of blame could be filled with the detestable names of Khruschev (revisionist!) and Liu Shaoqi (capitalist-roader!). Mao was still shuffling from palace to palace, Jiang Qing’s Four Model Revolutionary Opera...

One of my longstanding dreams is to have a website on which people can post ideas for books, articles, or inventions under a Creative Commons license that allows for use with attribution. Obviously I'm not the first on the block to this idea. Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig's book, The Future of Ideas, is available for download via a CC license. The book is largely about the ways in which copyright stifles dissent and innovation; in ...

Somehow it's easier to deal with long comments in this format for me, mainly because I can break things down into pieces. So. Babykong writes: Do you think there is a connection between what you are saying the the oft-heard idea that “there is nothing truly exciting going on” in literary and cultural criticism these days? I guess the first question would be: Do people still say that, or has the rise of the globalism thing, the science and lit...

It occurred to me the other day — and in fact I may have already bored one or two Printculture readers with this — that it would be useful to think about why so much academic work on contemporary material isn't very good. But perhaps the premises bear repeating: (1) a higher percentage of literary critical or cultural analysis of contemporary material — fiction, poetry, film, the culture in general — says, by my standards, completely predictab...

A few years ago E Wesp and I published an essay in Postmodern Culture that attempted to think through the sociocultural structure of the online virtual world of Norrath, best known for being the home of EverQuest. One of the things we were very interested in at the time was the way in which the gameworld organized relationships among players, about which we made two major points:

We have spent two weeks now on this process of dissecting, marinating, fermenting, and squeezing Mallon’s questions, hoping, perhaps, for some alchemical transformation to occur. I almost feel sorry for the guy... NOT. (I finally saw Borat.) Despite Mallon we have, I think, managed to have an interesting discussion about the current intellectual environment, and pose some of our own questions. I’m going to follow E Wesp’s lead and step back fr...

In today’s post on the Mallon list, which has been read fairly thoroughly at this point, I’ll offer a thought on the context of the list in a publication named for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “American Scholar” address. The publication takes not just the name, but also inspiration from the speech, as “the magazine aspires to Emerson’s ideals of independent thinking, self-knowledge, and a commitment to the affairs of the world as well as to books,...

After the fine posts by E Hayot, C Bush, and S Shirazi on Mallon's unfortunate list, I feel a little like the last guy on line at the Kiwanis dunk-tank booth at the local fair--the clown inside is already pretty soaked. Still, I've paid my dollar, so to speak, and it's fun to send Mallon down into the cold water again. And it's for a good cause. So to speak.

Next week we'll be devoting the site to answering a series of questions posed to humanists by Thomas Mallon, author of a number of novels and former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanites, in a recent issue of The American Scholar (the official publication of Phi Beta Kappa, for those of you hooked up to the secret handshake). We'd like to invite you all to participate in this series of responses, either via the comments o...

About a month ago Salon featured a review, by Gary Kamiya, of Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. Accompanying the review --entitled “How Edward Said Took Intellectuals for a Ride” –was an image of Said on a magic carpet. Folks, you can’t make this stuff up.

1. Visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California. In his book on the museum, Lawrence Weschler quotes Marcia Tucker, the director of the New Museum in New York, about MJT director David Wilson: “He never breaks irony — that's one of the incredible things about him.” Indeed, if the museum is about anything, it is about the slightly disturbing totality of its performance, what amounts to an expression of ...

Madame de Stael's 1813 De l'Allemagne is widely credited with being one of the founding documents of the discipline of comparative literature. The book “described verbal art as the expression of a people, its culture, its spiritual life and institutions,” thereby initiating the kind of literary study that reflects on “national differences through the themes, attitudes, genres, devices, styles, and occasions of imaginative wri...

In yesterday's overwhelming discussion of Deal or No Deal, S Shirazi referred to a study that showed how losing makes people less risk-averse, rather than more, which explains why gamblers who lose risk more and more to get back to their break-even point. “Being unable to adapt when faced with a change for the worse,” he wrote, “people are often 'shattered' and grow desperate trying to return to their peak position, that irre...

A month or two ago, during a series of internet searches designed to turn up images for the first day of my course on theories of the photographic, I came across this anonymously taken Polaroid of someone I do not know. It has haunted me ever since. And not just because I paid $3.50 a gallon yesterday to fill up the car.

Objectivity in journalism BEIJING, March 9 — China criticized the human rights record of the United States on Thursday, arguing that racial discrimination remained pervasive and that the American military abused prisoners held at detention centers abroad. In the choice of the word "arguing," as opposed to, say, "pointing out" or "reminding everyone," witness the patriotism of the American press.

I have writer's block. It's not crippling, but like a chronic illness, it's something that needs to be managed, and I am at an impasse right now. I've always struggled with writing—I was the kind of writer who spent hours and hours on a single introductory paragraph, unable to move forward until I felt I had each sentence and word in its place. I'm a little better now. I can use some form of note-taking and freewriting to get myself started; ...

"We dangle our three magic letters (Ph.D.) before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time of life when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent" ––William James, "The Ph.D. Octopus", 1903. In 1978 Theodore Streleski, a Phd student in Mathematics at Stanford, bludgeoned his advisor, Karel deLeeuw, to death with a ball peen hammer...

"Important works of art embody important innovations. The most important works of art are those that announce very important innovations." &nbsp So begins David W. Galenson's recent working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, "The Most Important Works of Art of the Twentieth Century." Something about these opening sentences makes me cringe. I locate it not so much in the content, which makes an argument I can imagine having, a...

One of the things about living in Los Angeles is, everyone you know has already tried the new-agey thing your midwestern self is afraid of. I have been writing lately about acupuncture, specifically about a brief moment in the early 1970s when doctors in the People's Republic of China began using acupuncture to produce anesthetic effects during surgery. The results caused a brief stir in the West, largely because acupuncture anesthesia (it's ...

On Comedy Central's celebration of the year in comedy, which aired Sunday night, Lewis Black (who I find kind of shouty) spent some time joking about the Terri Schiavo case. We can't figure out when life ends, Black complained, and we can't figure out when life begins, either; Schiavo and the abortion debate thus illustrate, he said, that we're so stupid we can't even figure out the most basic information about who we are. This was comedically...

This morning when I stepped out of my apartment to head down to campus I noticed the imprint of a solitary and apparently naked foot in the snow near the bottom of my steps. Though a balmy 31 degrees out this morning, the shoeless footprint struck me as an odd occurrence. Riding the bus it continued to perplex me, and all my thoughts of the day ahead were replaced by a curiosity about the foot. My mind assembled a variety of associations dur...

One of the better catch phrases to come out of the studies in new media is "remediation," the term Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use to describe the ways in which certain forms of relatively stable content change as they cross mediatic boundaries. The Tomb Raider movie remediates the video game, is the easy case; but I think that films in general remediate certain kinds of narrative processes or concepts (character, for instance, probabl...

Does anyone "do" theory anymore? Depends on what you mean by "do," I think--with a wink to my favorite ex-president--and also on what you mean by "theory." But the answer is more or less, "no," no one does theory, if by "theory" you will allow me to mean something a little bit different than it usually does (and the same for "does," I guess). I'm also not sure--even though I love theory and lots of the people who did it--that this is such a te...

At a recent tutor training meeting for the Writing Center, the get-to-know-you activity included sharing three random facts about yourself. Perhaps because I was in a room full of undergrads, I said, “when I was in college, I rowed crew and at one point, I could bench press my body weight.” From the vantage point of my life now, spent mostly in front of my computer doing mental labor, the memory of this physical feat made me painfu...