Critical Essays Archive
Elizabeth Bishop’s Eczema
Writing about Elizabeth Bishop, one hesitates over how much time to spend on biography. Readers are now familiar with many of her biographical details, though she was long known for not being known. But what about her eczema, the first of three lifelong conditions to develop and which quite
How Do You Fictionalize the Experience of Social Media?
Lauren Oyler’s debut novel is an audacious, mordant, and frequently hilarious sendup of internet culture at the turn of the decade, and a likely harbinger of how books about the internet will read in years to come.
Our Lady of the Floss
Never losing sight of the sensibilities that make the protagonist of her 1860 novel fallibly, achingly human, George Eliot also venerates Maggie Tulliver’s passions and feelings, suggesting that the path to virtue may not lie in rigidity and conventional moralism, but in the volatile, messy outpourings of the human
Food and Identity in First Generation: Recipes from My Taiwanese-American Home
Though Frankie Gaw’s debut book is ostensibly a cookbook, it’s also an archive of the Taiwanese American experience and an earnest exploration of the many facets of the author’s identity.
The Foreboding Landscape in The Impudent Ones
In her debut novel, Marguerite Duras builds a visceral sense of foreboding through the beautiful and unnerving landscapes in the life of protagonist Maud Grant, who is both captivated by the land around her, and often swiftly shut off from it.
Gender Euphoria in Frankissstein
Contrary to the arguments made for the total disembodiment of humanity through digital consciousness, the protagonist in Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel presents a striking argument for remaining in human bodies: gender euphoria.
Birds as Metaphor in Birds of Maine and Big Questions
What Michael DeForge and Anders Nilsen have managed to do is highlight some of humanity’s best traits—and reflect them back to us through the use of these flighty, flittering creatures. Life is beautiful, they seem to be pleading. Take a moment to look at things from a different perspective.
Hurricane Diane’s Exploration of Discomfort, Capitalism, and Our Climate Crisis
Madeline George's 2017 play lays bare a difficult reality: that any meaningful action on climate change will be uncomfortable, that it's dangerous to avoid discomfort, and that there are many for whom comfort is the only thing they can cling to in the boxed in world of late capitalism.
Anaphora and Propaganda in The Mother/Child Papers
Propaganda is inevitably all about power, and Alicia Suskin Ostriker both describes and questions power dynamics in her 1980 collection—from the power of nation states to wage war, to the ever-shifting power that children and parents have over each other.
Bridget Jones’s Anxiety
Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel uses the journal format for its intense relatability, leading to a claustrophobic portrayal of the intrusive nature of societal expectations that never lets up, even when its heroine finds herself pulled into madcap office romances and a time-share embezzlement scheme.