Despite the fact that I have been a university student for the past eight years, staring down the reading list for my PhD comprehensive exam is the first time I have felt truly overwhelmed by the literary task set in front of me. I am starting a PhD in Theory and Criticism this fall, the […]
With fashion resurgences and a 2012 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby captures not just a period of time, the 1920s in America, but a lifestyle that seems to be perennially fascinating to a wide audience. However, it is very much a product of its time and lacks representations of […]
I find critical theory deeply fascinating and enjoyable to read. Partially because I like the challenge of dense texts that build up specialized vocabularies to try, and partially because, for me at least, they create a space to unpack the affective experiences of culture. Despite my personal love of theory, I am also very aware […]
In one of my photography courses this past semester we talked about the idea of ‘darkest Africa’ and how images of the continent intentionally excluded the evidence of the cultures that already existed in order to present a view of Africa as an empty place for Europeans to come in and illuminate through industrial development. […]
I get asked about what I read fairly often and usually by people who encounter my reading habits in the context of higher education. This is unsurprising given that my reading strategy very intentionally is designed to give me an edge in a classroom, but I always have mixed feelings about suggesting that others read […]
In many ways society has moved beyond the traditional Western stories, largely because most people have a much more rounded view of history that does not allow for straight forward narratives about heroic cowboys on some empty American frontier. An understanding of the colonial process and the long term impacts of how the United States […]
An element of the past is often central to fantasy texts, they are set in worlds where characters fight with swords rather than guns and cell phones are more impossible than magic, but the degree of history that slips in shifts a great deal with the author. Canadian writer Guy Gavriel Kay is praised for […]
When TV shows do a spin off series it often feels like a money grab, but when an author publishes a parallel novel to one of their existing works many readers are simply thrilled to access the narrative from another angle. This is a type of writing that is found most often in the speculative […]
Ray Bradbury’s work is most often discussed in the context of censorship and the restrictions in the flow of ideas. But it is also fundamentally a novel about book ownership, in fact this comes through just as clearly because of the physical nature of the book burnings that represent censorship in this text. Examining Bradbury’s […]
Res Gestae 