It’s hard for me to believe sometimes, but I submitted my dissertation prospectus in December of 2005, during my fourth year as a graduate student in the Department of English at Stanford University. At the time — having recently read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and feeling vaguely dissatisfied with his argument in “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” — I […]
Browsing the archives for the Uncategorized category
I wrote an essay called “A Theory of Here” for The Account, which is now available online. It’s a preliminary analysis of Richard McGuire’s great new book Here (based on a six-pager he did for RAW back in 1989). The essay will, I think, find its way into “Rise of the Graphic Novel,” specifically into a hypothetical chapter on digital […]
A few years ago, when I was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Princeton, I taught an undergraduate lecture course called “Rise of the Graphic Novel.” The title was meant, in part, to be a joking allusion to Ian Watt’s classic book, The Rise Of The Novel: Studies In Defoe, Richardson And Fielding, but it was also […]
We need to talk about zombies. In a recent article in Inside Higher Education about the precipitous decline in the number of English majors at my institution, the University of Maryland, College Park, the undead rear their charred and mutilated heads. Our zombie friends, we are informed, promise (or threaten) to help lure resistant students back into the English major: […]
My review of William Gibson’s newest novel The Peripheral is now up at the Los Angeles Review of Books. NEAR THE END of The Peripheral, William Gibson’s latest novel, there is a short chapter dedicated to the problem one character faces in acquiring a breakfast burrito. The burrito is for one of the novel’s two protagonists, Flynne […]
Earlier this month, an essay I wrote about Alfred Korzybski appeared on io9. Korzybski’s the founder of General Semantics, which is a sort of meta-science that tried to give an account of humanity’s relationship to language and abstract thought. I first learned about Korzybski through my research on William S. Burroughs (who was a big fan of […]
Last week, I had a short essay published in Slate that discusses the failure of recent popular science fiction to imagine Socioeconomically Less Awful Futures. This failure is, in many ways, understandable, given how Socioeconomically Awful the present is, but I suggest that it might be interesting to conceive of science fiction as a genre with a special power to help us think […]
I’m going to be participating in the Infinite Wallace / Wallace infinite conference in Paris next month (Sept. 11-13). The conference features a cool-looking lineup of talks. My own talk is entitled “What is a turdnagel?” and will, as the title makes apparent, be a preliminary effort to answer this very important — and woefully understudied — […]
I’ve published a few pieces since I last blogged. 1. Over the summer, my review of Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism came out in Contemporary Literature. My review is mixed. Post-Postmodernism is an engaging book, sometimes even fun to read (a rarity for academic prose), but it’s ultimately too beholden to Fredric Jameson’s […]
Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Review of Books ran my review of Jonathan Lethem’s newest novel, Dissident Gardens. IN 2004, The New York Times reported on the effort of the borough of Queens to find a replacement for Hal Sirowitz, its departing poet laureate, “one of those rare New York writers who is willing […]