“David Foster Wallace fucked his students, fucked his audience, fucked his reader. David Foster Wallace abused women.”
Category: Literature
[Review] The Brown Anthology edited by Sofia Amina — Daunish Negargar
“This anthology is refreshing in its boldness and authenticity, particularly at a time when major publishing houses are tripping over themselves to make promises on Twitter to ‘do better’ in highlighting more authors of colour.”
[Essay] The Teratologists — Louis Armand
“Post-war nuclear technologies represented the first instance in which direct transformation or even control of the planetary environment came into view as a scientifically achievable proposition.”
[Essay] ‘…And now I am cast as a ghost’: Spectre(s) of India in Midnight’s Children — Seamus McGinley-Hughes
“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.”
[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] Madness and Jouissance: Hölderlin, Benjamin and Hopkins — Josh Mcloughlin
“In Hopkins, the caesura constitutes the relationship between utterances, gives form to Gedichte, and reveals the intimate link between madness and jouissance.”
[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.”
