Desks
Literature
The parameters for literary scholarship are still unstable in the 21st century. The object of study, the optic through which it is regarded, and the profession itself are all in debate. Has theory replaced literature? Has literature replaced activism? The scholar replaced the critic?
Home and Homelessness in Queer Poetry, Politics, Places: Reading Loma’s Sad Girl Poems
When the poet Christopher Soto, aka Loma, debuted their chapbook Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, January 2016), they took it on what they called a “Tour to End Queer Youth Homelessness.” […]
Incomparable: Richard A. Macksey, 1931-2019
It is with deepest sorrow but also with recharged inspiration and resolve, that the critical community has learned of Dick Macksey’s dying, on July 22, 2019, on the eve of his 88th […]
Muhammad Zafzaf’s The Elusive Fox
Muhammad Zafzaf’s The Elusive Fox Moroccan literature written in Arabic has never made a name for itself outside of the Arab world. A rare exception would be Mohamed Choukri who owes his […]
Lee Chang Dong’s “Barn Burning” (2018): Adaptation in Full Torque
Lee Chang Dong’s masterpiece, “Burning” (2018), currently winding its way along the screens of art cinema, is a guided tour through the contemporary Korean economy and its cultural surround. All the more […]
Grand Strategy and Curricular Politics: Book Review–John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy
John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy, New York, Penguin Press, 2018, xi-xiv, 368 pp. Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right […]
Back to the Critical Future: Romania
Exceptionality rules every attempt to narrativize the history or culture of the states (or quasi-national entities) making up the Balkans. And in this respect, Romania is no exception. Romania is the “Balkan” […]
Remembrance of Things Past
The Jewish writer Edmond Amran El Maleh, also known in some academic circles in America as the James Joyce of Morocco, once wrote a novel with the symbolic title: Mille ans, un […]
Reading at the Roche Limit: A Review of “Fantasies of the Library”
In commemoration of National Library Week I want to share a remarkable new book, a book that gathers many libraries between its cerulean covers, a book whose bibliographic imaginary is not national but planetary. […]
Brenda Hillman’s Seasonal Works With Letters on Fire
I love this book so I want to explore the grounds of my pleasures. What is the volume’s power to modify our understanding and develop a distinctive sensibility, and why does it […]
Literary maps: México, DF
I’m preparing for a research trip to Mexico City. As always when I travel, I’ve been looking at maps—maps of the metro, maps of neighborhoods, maps of the whole city and the […]
Pure Language 2.0: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language and Translation Technology
Walter Benjamin once proposed that the “history of every art form has critical periods in which the particular form strains after effects which can be easily achieved only with a changed technical […]
Helen Tartar, Editorial Director, Fordham University Press, 1951-2014
Helen Tartar Editorial Director, Fordham University Press, 1951-2014 The critical community staggers at the news that Helen Tartar, Executive Editor at Fordham University Press, perished on March 3 this week in an […]
On Jane Gregory’s My Enemies (The Song Cave, 2013)
Discovering a new poet whose first volume promises greatness is only half the fun; the other half is trying to share the pleasure by sketching one’s reasons for this judgment. […]
The Audio File Audiophile: Listening for Ambient Poetry
Already by 2007, eight million files were being downloaded annually from PennSound, the audio poetry site housed at the University of Pennsylvania and curated by poet Charles Bernstein. The question arises, […]
On Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Hello, The Roses
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s new book offers what I take to be an original way of reconciling realism and lyricism and, through that, finding roles for a lyric “I” that is not marked by […]
Feedback Book Review: Haruki Marukami, 1Q84
“That’s it. 1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything […]
Call/Appel/征集/Ruf—for Submissions
Feedback is a weblog publication of Open Humanities Press, a community of critics dedicated to writing at the generative interfaces between established disciplinary, institutional, and social territories and protocols. The […]
About Feedback
Feedback is a weblog publication of the critical theory community. It is the current expression of a network of readers, scholars, and critics that has dedicated itself for some decades already to […]
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