literature 
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SOURCE: Boston Review
4/12/2022
Leo Bersani: Contrarian Critic of Gay Desire
by Jack Parlett
"For Bersani, reading is meant to hurt a little or you’re not doing it right. A preface that preempts what you’ll take away, or paraphrases what is particular, can have, he suggests, a simplifying or even sanitizing effect."
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SOURCE: Austin American-Statesman
3/31/2022
Tom Staley, 86, Built UT's Ransom Center into Key Research Destination
"Staley turned the archives into a global powerhouse that rivals the collecting achievements of Harvard University, Yale University and the British Museum."
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3/20/2022
The Two Russias
by Walter G. Moss
Russia's literary traditions evoke a national character in stark opposition to the belligerent machismo of Putin, but it's unclear which Russia will prevail today.
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SOURCE: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
2/16/2022
"The New Negro" Launched a Renaissance, and Not Just in Harlem
Alain Locke's anthology proposed and modeled a new image of Black life that held room for artistic creation and criticism of art and society.
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2/20/2022
Why the Short and Rebellious Life of Stephen Crane Still Matters
by Linda H. Davis
Though he quickly became a model of literary celebrity of the sort we would recognize today, Stephen Crane's more crucial legacy is of the pursuit of truth without regard to consequence.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
2/9/2022
Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy as an American Historian
by Bennett Parten
"One of the most striking things about reading Blood Meridian now, almost 40 years since its release, is that it anticipates some of the major historical turns of the past decades."
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SOURCE: Contingent
2/4/2022
Man of Smoke
by Jason Ridler
The task of literary biography can be made much more difficult when authors fictionalize the sparse details of their own lives.
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2/13/2022
Anyone for Existential Torment this Valentine's Day?
by Barbara H. Rosenwein
From ancient Greece to the Romantic period, philosophers and artists have endorsed an idea of love that was closer to torture than to the anodyne sentiments of contemporary Valentines.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
1/7/2022
Was "Slaughterhouse Five" Vonnegut's PTSD Novel?
Is examining Kurt Vonnegut's writing through the lens of suspected posttraumatic stress disorder a worthwhile line of inquiry?
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SOURCE: The Guardian
12/7/2021
Orwell Estate Approves Feminist Retelling of "1984"
"Orwell’s estate said it had been “looking for some time” for an author to tell the story of Smith’s lover, and that [Sandra] Newman, who has previously been longlisted for the Women’s prize and shortlisted for the Guardian first book award, 'proved to be the perfect fit'."
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SOURCE: Vice
11/11/2021
America's Only LGBTQ Historic District Is Falling Apart
"Because of centuries of general anti-gay sentiment and laws punishing queerness, little queer history has been preserved, and much of it has been erased."
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
11/9/2021
Emerson Never Practiced the Self-Reliance He Preached
by Mark Greif
Historian Robert A. Gross's new "The Transcendentalists and Their World" sets the famous experiments in living of Emerson and Thoreau in the social context of the town of Concord, through which the writers understood the shocks of modernization.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
10/28/2021
Banning "Beloved" Won't Help Protect Kids, But it Will Help Sanitize Racism
by Farah Jasmine Griffin
It's worthwhile to consider Morrison's characterization of censoring Huck Finn as a “purist and yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children.”
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SOURCE: CNN
9/28/2021
Why I Hope My Kids Never Read Roald Dahl
by David M. Perry
"The Dahl family has apologized for Roald Dahl's anti-Semitism, but the question remains, for readers and viewers, for TV producers and writers: what might it mean to eat the fruit from this poisoned tree?"
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
9/22/2021
Climate Anxiety and the Return of Arctic Horror
by Bathsheba Demuth
As climate change driven by capitalism threatens the polar ice caps, new miniseries return to the themes of arctic exploration, where cold and ice threaten humans and commerce, rather than the other way around.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
9/13/2021
Is this the Moment for Dante's Purgatory?
by Judith Thurman
Dante's epic examined the uncharted space of the new Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. New translations make his vision speak to today's mood of unsettlement and uncertainty.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
9/7/2021
Giving the Women of the Divine Comedy their Due
by Laura Ingallinella
One scholar's project is using Wikipedia and her students to recover the historical personhood of Dante's women and elevate them above literary symbols or caricatures.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
9/7/2021
Toni Morrison's Vision of Justice Was an Ethos of Care
by Farah Jasmine Griffin
"What does justice look like for centuries of systemic abuse and violence enacted by a society built upon withholding justice from Black people? In all of her novels Toni Morrison contemplates the nature and practice of justice."
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SOURCE: The Baffler
Those Who Can Do: Rewriting the History of Literary Studies from Inside the Classroom
by Dennis M. Hogan
A new history of literature pedagogy reconsiders teaching as a site of intellectual ferment and makes important claims for the value of the academic humanities.
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9/5/2021
The Scandalous Six Week Walk That Inspired D. H. Lawrence's Most Popular Novels (excerpt)
by Annabel Abbs
In 1912, Frieda von Richthofen made a six-week hike from Bavaria to northern Italy with her lover D.H. Lawrence. It was, for him, a journey of of inspiration. For her, it was a more complicated search for liberation.
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