Series Archive

The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: Truman Capote’s Shifting Proximity to New Orleans

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Truman Capote often returned to New Orleans, his hometown. In his 1950 book of essays entitled Local Color, Capote writes detailed observations of the cities he visits, the first among them his Louisiana home.

Imagining the Anthropocene: Evoking an Ecological Occult

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Human society is built on superficial impositions of order: government, religion, science, and language attempt to enervate chaos. But for Jane Mead, a poet entrusted with her family’s California vineyard in the midst of a historic drought, there’s no hiding from earth’s mists and windstorms.

Stories Strangely Told: Stuart Dybek’s “Misterioso”

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An art that constantly changes contour is an art that keeps us free, keeps us questioning and alive.

Throwback Thursday: Animal Farm by George Orwell

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The moral of the story is perhaps a bit dark, and the suggestion that there is no way to revolt and gain substantive change is perhaps one that has evolved in the nearly three-quarters of a century since the time that the novella was published.

Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find

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These narratives depict a South struggling for identity in the middle years of the twentieth century, peopled with crooked Bible salesmen, earnest preachers, escaped convicts, one-armed grifters, and wayward souls seeking salvation, or at least satisfaction.

Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: The Tragic Possibilities

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Tragedy opens up aesthetic possibilities, allowing suprahuman forces to partake as literary subjects that overwhelm individual characters. It is a mode of expression that goes beyond what realistic fiction can provide.

Imagining the Anthropocene: The Dissolving, Consuming Selves of Jane Wong’s Overpour

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Landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy has said, “The field is a beautiful forum for the fight for nourishment.” Jane Wong brings that forum to the page.

Imagining the Anthropocene: What We Belong To and the Appeal of First-Person Plural

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Symbolic as my singular action was, it was optimism in practice, opting for the choice to join a collective demonstration of resistance. These days, I’m far more likely to feel that “we” have ruined things than that “we” can affect the world to come.

Stories Strangely Told: Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands”

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On quick glance then not much of "Hands" seems overtly experimental—the only oddity is that without George asking and without Wing disclosing, we somehow arrive at Wing's backstory.

The Black Aesthetic: Guns & Execution in TI’s Us or Else

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In his latest album Us or Else: Letter to the System, T.I. exposes America's obsession with guns, questions the senseless killings of African American men by both blacks and whites, and the imminent need for social retribution.