Featured Literary criticism essays
Furnished Minds
Kate Briggs’ The Long Form is equal parts fiction and a critical survey of the history of fictionality. In her review, Sophie Gee shows how Briggs’ formal experiments and portraits of intimate relations return us to the origins of the novel form.
Literary criticism
Furnished Minds
Kate Briggs’ The Long Form is equal parts fiction and a critical survey of the history of fictionality. In her review, Sophie Gee shows how Briggs’ formal experiments and portraits of intimate relations return us to the origins of the novel form.
Calling Bullshit
The gimmick, is, therefore, perhaps the aesthetic category that captures the affective experience of life as mediated by the capital relation. The gimmick names the ambivalent judgement by which we come to apprehend the very process through which capitalism reproduces itself, and the abstractions that naturalise that process. When we judge something to be a gimmick, we are experiencing ‘dissatisfaction—mixed, for all this, with fascination—linked to our perception of an object making untrustworthy claims about the saving of time, the reduction of labor, and the expansion of value’.
A Dying Art
These letters may refuse the methodological stringency of academic literary criticism, but beyond some epistolary scaffolding (an addressee, a conversational tone, questions answered or posed) they are largely close textual analyses performed by astute readers with comp lit bona fides and early-career positions at Yale, Princeton and Oxford.