“The text delves into the recesses of primordial memory, cuts up and rearranges history and figures nation as dream; memory, history, and nation inform, antagonise, and haunt each other.”
Category: Literature
[Essay] Metaphysical Detectives: Guilt, Grace, and Gaze in the World of Twin Peaks — Cam Scott
“Lynch and Frost are especially masterful where this feeling of estrangement is concerned.”
[Essay] Bacon’s Hysteria, van Gogh’s Shoes: Deleuze and the Problem of Affect — Josh Mcloughlin
“Bacon’s paintings insist, with some violence, that affects are not sensational properties but exist in relation to an outside—whether other bodies, as Deleuze concedes, a Barthesian ‘ongoingness’ that connects body to atmosphere, or a primordial being-in-the-world, as in Heidegger’s Dasein.”
[Review] The Year in Books 2019 — James Mcloughlin
“Coming up on Christmas, the 20-book mark seemed like a doomed dream.”
[Essay] Thought and Judgement in Hannah Arendt and Hamlet — Oliver Deasy
“Following her experience as a journalist at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt’s thinking about thought became more sophisticated as she began to consider the relationship between immoral actions and the activity of thinking.”
[Essay] ‘Becoming-Animal’: Idle Bodies in Marie Darrieussecq and Lucien Freud — Susannah Farrell
“In Darrieussecq and Freud, the possibility of becoming is tied to the in-human and to nothingness, so that idleness, and animality, no longer nihilistic, render affirmation.”
[Essay] Unamerican Fictions: All that is Solid Melts into Weird — Louis Armand
“Thor Garcia’s novel is a swan song for an amnesiac America’s ‘innocence regained’, afforded by the supposed victory over the communist USSR; a kind of ‘fear and loathing’ in the age of hyperreality.”
[Essay] On the Aesthetic, Psychoanalysis and Dasein — Josh Mcloughlin
“Like theory, Dasein emerges as the allegory of an allegory.”
[Essay] American Honey and The American Dream – Will Moffitt
Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, brilliantly crafted by Paul Schrader, inverts the utopian model of the dream. The film’s protagonist, Travis Bickle, is a disillusioned Nam Vet, an alienated loner who skulks around New York’s decadent underbelly, aping literature’s recalcitrant sulker-in-chief, Holden Caulfield.”
[Essay] Politics, Ideology and Comedy: John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera — Josh Mcloughlin
“Gay’s joke engages the ‘liberating’ and ‘rebellious’ potential of Freud’s theory of humour to present a radically egalitarian politics.”
[Essay] On Affinity — Charles Bliss
“Neither animate nor inanimate, we vitalise these abstract forms like Dr Frankenstein.”
[Essay] Flat Affect as Deconstruction: Berlant, Derrida and Tilda Swinton — Josh Mcloughlin
“Swinton’s flat affect reiterates Butler’s always-already inscribed gendered body.”
[Essay] Queer Time in Woolf and Wilde — Josh Mcloughlin
“Muñoz’s theory is based on a flawed understanding of Heideggerian philosophy, because a truly ‘unbounded’ ontology would reject the very ‘equipmental’ being Heidegger attacks – and the utopianism Muñoz mistakenly celebrates.”
[Essay] Amazon, e-books and the State of Publishing Today — Daniel Formby
“If authors cannot survive, the whole industry will go down with them.”
[Essay] Soliloquy and Prayer in Early Modern Drama — Josh Mcloughlin
“Soliloquy and confession become intertwined in post-Reformation England.”
[Essay] Fade to Black: Film Noir and The Fatality of Genre — Louis Armand
“Reminiscent of Hemingway’s assault on overwritten, adjectival prose, noir is short on metaphysics and restricts its action to the surface of the image.”
[Review] Goya in the Wilderness: Louis Armand’s Abacus — Jim Chaffee
“If Armand is lucky this book will be recognized for the important literary work it is.”
[Essay] Elizabethan Travel Writing and The Merchant of Venice — Josh Mcloughlin
“In the same way Edward Said describes orientalism as regulating otherness by ‘making statements about it, authorizing views about it, describing it,’ Shakespeare and Coryat fix Jewish visual and linguistic difference, the one theatrically, the other through ‘observation’”.
