Critical Essays Archive
Visual and Literary Representation in White on White
Ayşegül Savas’s 2021 novel is less an act of purification than a challenge to the reader to accept art on its own terms as an achievement of presence. It frames each reading, each act of looking, as an act of faith.
Blessed Cat Jeoffry
In conversation with Christopher Smart’s “My Cat Jeoffry,” Elena Passarello’s “Jeoffry” is an empathetic duet that reaches both forward and back with gentle humor and sparking wit, a perfect companion against the dark.
Richie Hofmann’s Ekphrastic Poetry
It is commonplace wisdom that our enduring ekphrastic poems do not merely transcribe or represent their source material. Like all poems, they enact an experience for their readers. This particular experience happens to be guided by one’s own transformation while encountering a visual work of art.
The Search for Home in Away to Stay
Mary Kuryla’s debut is a coming-of-age novel, a story about a girl slowly finding her way—though in this case, the narrative is turned upside down: Olya finds a home rather than leaves one.
Place and Character in True Grit
Charles Portis’s 1968 novel demonstrates how a story’s setting can be inextricably linked to its other elements: it would be hard to imagine Mattie and Rooster anywhere but the Arkansas “borderlands.”
In Defense of Comfort
Two “women’s” novels by Stella Gibbons and Dodie Smith, from 1932 and 1948 respectively, quietly pose the suggestion that to be concerned with comfort is not shallow, but merely practical, and that taking control of your surroundings, either forcefully or with empathy, can lead to self-actualization.
Women’s Rage
Claire-Louise Bennett’s new novel stirs up all the women in literature who have been sealing their anger away, letting it churn undisturbed at the center of themselves.
Memory and Transformation in Aurelia, Aurélia
Kathryn Davis’s new memoir explores memory as something formative—something that begins as a static point then transitions into something alive, yielding something new, remembering becoming an experience in its own right.
Solmaz Sharif’s Look and the Reclamation of the Stories of Those Redacted and Erased
While Solmaz Sharif’s poems tackle large subjects that concern large populaces, you can also see the power of the personal in her work. In fact, it is her personal journey that makes her 2016 collection universal: the closer you get to a subject, the more universal it becomes.
The Homo Sacer Figure and The Time Traveler’s Wife
While Giorgio Agamben notes many modern examples of his homo sacer figure, another can be found in Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel, via her reluctant time traveler, Henry.