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native anti-foundationalism
Matt Jakubowski interviewed me for his series on “the role of the critic” Can you describe a few of the ways that studying theory has affected you as a reader and a critic? The most revealing thing is...
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metamorphosis of colours
a review of Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days In Erpenbeck’s world, everything is connected. Stylistically, this is conveyed through tiny parallels and repetitions—elusive leitmotifs that echo across...
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vanishing acts
a review of Cathy Caruth’s Literature in the Ashes of History Trauma conveys a kind of philosophical force: it puts pressure on the epistemological status—and the evidential value—of recollected and...
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parallels and recurrences
a review of Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism Pressman’s historical picture is one of subtle parallels and recurrences, rather than dramatic ruptures. This nuanced approach yields numerous insights....
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patterns of anticipation
a review of Jane Unrue’s Love Hotel The novel’s knowledge of the connection between the seen and the unseen—between what O’Connor calls “the concrete world” and its invisible outside or underside—is...
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an imagining of an image
the second of my yearly essays on contemporary theory ‘Theory on theory’ is not in itself a project or program. Rather, work in this register represents something less explicitly thematised, yet more...
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loving literature
a review of Deidre Shauna Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History Sometimes it’s expressed; sometimes it’s repressed: either way, emotion is deeply embedded in literary criticism. As I. A....
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centers of gravity
a review of Chad Harbach’s MFA vs NYC The basic idea behind Harbach’s essay – and of the book after which it is named – is that American fiction now has ‘two centers of gravity: “MFA”, which is...
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unspoken, unseen
an interview for Bomb Magazine If I can return to the misuse of philosophy in fiction — that is, to novelists who engage in overt philosophical posturing — I suppose my disappointment stems from my...
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a thousand miles away
a review of Stewart O’Nan’s West of Sunset Change is the only constant in West of Sunset: from Scott’s short-lived scripts to the stars’ ageing faces, the whole world seems fated to fade away. Some of...
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relative danger
an interview with Gordon Lish WINTERS: Critics of you and your ‘school’ have dismissed your interest in the sentence as trivial and superficial. But my understanding is that your aesthetic contains a...
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simply to persist
a review of Noy Holland’s Bird Holland’s writing accumulates a series of recurring objects, weaving an implicit order from apparent chaos. The novel is full of these tiny likenesses; symmetries and...
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theory and the creative writing classroom
an essay on Gordon Lish, pedagogy, and literary theory Lish’s teaching was inseparable from his intellectual formation, including his extensive reading of philosophers and literary critics. But Lish...
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post-critical reading
a review of Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique “Why is it”, Felski asks near the start of her book, “that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel,...
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infinite fictions: recent reviews
I’ve done little to promote Infinite Fictions—partly for reasons of silence, exile, cunning, etc, but mostly because I’ve been focusing on my PhD—so it’s been great to see the book getting some good...
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beyond the attention space
a review of Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now Hungerford’s attack on the ‘sainted posthumous reputation’ of David Foster Wallace illuminates a broader problem faced by scholars of contemporary...
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theory and the creative writing classroom
an essay on Gordon Lish, pedagogy, and literary theory Lish’s teaching was inseparable from his intellectual formation, including his extensive reading of philosophers and literary critics. But Lish...
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the digital critic: literary culture online
I enjoyed co-editing this essay collection, forthcoming from O/R Books. Publisher’s blurb below: What do we think of when we think of literary critics? Enlightenment snobs in powdered wigs?...
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books in the making
Kasia Boddy and I have edited a special issue of Critical Quarterly, titled ‘Books in the Making’, following on from a symposium we held at Cambridge University in 2016. The issue explores the social...
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aladdin’s cave
a review of Colin MacCabe’s Perpetual Carnival and Studio Studio is subtitled ‘Remembering Chris Marker’, but as Ben Lerner writes in his introduction, ‘how do you memorialize an artist who refused to...
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