Critical Essays Archive
Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods and the Supremacy of Capitalist Masculinity
Lightning Rods, Helen DeWitt’s 2011 follow up to her critically acclaimed novel The Last Samurai, satirizes not just the “sexual harassment problem” in white collar offices, but a business culture that puts a premium on cutthroat masculinity.
The Casual Classism of Agatha Christie
I’ve read more books by Agatha Christie than by any other author, and am happy to read each multiple times. But there’s also a lot about Christie for the contemporary reader to dislike, including the way much of Christie’s work seeks to bolster the rigid class system.
Consciousness and the Creative Impulse
The language of literature has an existential condition. Poetic consciousness is a term that, generally, speaks to the ability that language has when employed with artistic intention, to alter perception, to heighten it.
Norman MacLean’s Classic Jogs His Memory—and Jogs Ours Too
Norman Maclean’s novel A River Runs Through It is a variation on the tale of the prodigal son, represented by the narrator's younger brother Paul, a gifted fly fisherman and newspaper reporter.
Pasternak: the People’s Poet
Boris Pasternak is best known for writing Doctor Zhivago, a novel which documents these years of national upheaval through the eyes of a poet and physician. Like his eponymous character, Pasternak was famous in his native Russia for his verses.
Loving the Stranger Beside You: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian
In The Vegetarian, a collection of three linked novellas, author Han Kang creates and then protects an open moral space between Yeong-hye’s sudden conversion to vegetarianism and her family’s perception of it.
What Endures: 25 Years After the Onset of the Bosnian War
Even with the latest sentencing of war criminal Ratko Mladic at The Hague, Bosnia’s path to justice is long and complicated; one of its greatest hopes for truth and reconciliation lies in the persistent work of artists and writers.
Marriage as Domestic Imprisonment in Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban
Nineteen years after Betty Friedan wrote Feminine Mystique, Rachel Ingalls published Mrs Caliban, a subversive fairy tale that just so happens to serve as a perfect allegory for the “woman problem” as conceptualized by second-wave feminism.
Cyclicality and Distance in Two Stories by Breece D’J Pancake
Breece D’J Pancake’s stories often begin in the intersection of the highly permanent and the temporary, and unfurl in moments of instability.
Expired Futures in Ali Smith’s Autumn
Written in the immediate aftermath of Brexit, Ali Smith’s Autumn questions how ripping up common ground in favour of enhanced borders reverberates through time and into living human bodies.