Series Archive

Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: Climate Change, a Secular Christian Story

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The narrative surrounding climate change shares a number of surprising similarities to the Christian story. Developed in the shadow of an apocalypse, both present a set of ethical ideals that may be beyond human capacity to realize.

The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: Edward P. Jones and the Other Side of Capitol Hill

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Edward P. Jones does not represent the Washington D.C. of the mainstream—no national monuments perforating his setting, no overt commentary on policy, no presidential-brand elitism lacing his words. Instead, he simply writes the life of the local everyman and pushes anything beyond that into the background, making excess as

Stories Strangely Told: Borges, Bad Art, and the Infinite Aleph

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"The Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges concerns, along with mirrors and the infinite: the demolition of a house, literary prizes, fragile egos, café lighting, the death of Beatriz Viterbo, and a few terrible stanzas by Carlos Argentino Daneri, a pompous and longwinded academic.

Fiction Responding to Fiction: James Joyce and Joyce Carol Oates

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There’s something wonderful in the thought of the subconscious of James Joyce meeting with that of Joyce Carol Oates to create her story “The Dead,” a response to his story of the same name.

Imagining the Anthropocene: Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem

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Language retains the rhetorical barrier between the wild and the civilized, the false dichotomy upon which humans have built cities and established nations. It’s within this partition that poetic genres like the Romantic lyric and the pastoral took root, ensconcing the obfuscations that Tommy Pico rails against.

Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

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Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, published March 31, 1969, follows anti-hero Billy Pilgrim, inspired by Edward Crone Jr., as he survives the Battle of the Bulge, German internment, and the Dresden firebombing, finally settling into a comfortable life as an optometrist in upstate New York.

Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: Climate Change and the New Romanticism

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Last year Amitav Ghosh asked: where are the novels of climate change? Arguing that a limited sense of reality prevents us from accepting the truly uncanny threat that is climate change, Ghosh urges writers to be imaginatively bold and dynamic, and calls for a revival of Romanticism.

Imagining the Anthropocene: Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria

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The Black Maria, Aracelis Girmay’s intricate epic of black survival, enraptures the reader in a gaze that looks simultaneously backward and forward, toward past and future that are impossible to see yet crucial to imagine.

Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”

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The sickly and nightmare-plagued Lovecraft shows an inclination toward the sciences as a child, but his passion for literature emerges in his early adulthood. At thirty-seven, the master of cosmic horror publishes his genre-defining story “The Call of Cthulhu” in the February 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Weird

The Black Aesthetic: Sexuality in Beyoncé’s Grammy Award Winning Lemonade

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When Beyoncé dropped her masterpiece Lemonade last year, the world was abuzz. In her groundbreaking visual album, images of black femaleness manifest as not only sexually pleasing to imagine, but empowering to behold.