Critical Essays Archive
Lydia Davis’s “Ethics” and the Instability of Logic
The short stories of Lydia Davis, in spite of their infamous brevity, often work on at least three levels. In the case of “Ethics,” a paragraph-long fiction that humorously interrogates the Golden Rule, the story works as a character study, a reductio ad absurdum argument, and a larger
Humor and Moralizing in The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Violence is rationalized, often via the expectation of sympathy and understanding from the very people who are most harmed by it.
The Shape of Desire
When confronted with relentless male longing, there is nothing so spectacular about female flesh: human or animal, it answers to the same name.
The “We” in Barbara Jane Reyes’s Invocation to Daughters
Women’s writing is so often ghettoized and hidden from view. Women write from the private, individual “I,” while men write of the public and the universal “we.” In her newest collection, Invocation to Daughters, Filipino American poet Barbara Jane Reyes boldly and loudly refuses that division.
When Change Doesn’t Happen: School Shootings and the Piles of Novels That Follow
Since the year after the Columbine tragedy, 2000, a total of 113 novels have been published in English about school shootings. The number of novels published on school shootings before Columbine? One.
In Defense of The Catcher in the Rye
The best piece of writing I’ve ever read about The Catcher in the Rye is Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Salinger and Sobs.” The essay is about D’Ambrosio’s brother’s death by suicide and about the underlying threat of suicide that runs through so many of Salinger’s stories.
Conversations about Trees: Engagement and Retreat in Brecht, Rich, and Marvell
Nature offers the comforting suggestion of continuity, an awareness of scale; it can be both menacing and welcoming; it’s fertile ground for symbol and simile. However, in times of heightened political tension, poems about trees can feel like a cop-out, or especially irrelevant.
The Domino Effect of Maleness in Literary Criticism
Studies consistently show that women read more than men, and that the publishing industry is dominated by (white) women. So why, then, are male writers still reviewed in prestigious publications at far higher rates than women?
“Is this the truth of our historic encounter?”: Museums in Literature
Not all representations of museums overtly highlight the way they structurally rely on certain power dynamics, and yet the adherence to a certain normalizing discourse is always there, lurking, even when the explicit intention of the museum is to reconnect with a lost past.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Humanizing People In Literature
In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision ruling that immigrants, documented or not, can be detained indefinitely without right to a bond hearing, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we produce and consume narratives about class and race in contemporary American literature.