Before The Abyss or Life Is Simple came to my attention, Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book 1 was a fixture on…
Experiments in collective labor
literature
Modernity’s residues
How is modernity sticky—prone to leaving a residue? How are secularization theses still affecting us “as gelatinous or glutinous matters…
Bolshevism as secular religion? A discussion of The House of Government
In order to expand the discussion of Slezkine’s study, we asked scholars of religion familiar with the Soviet and other…
Seeking stranger things
Sometimes, it seems to me, SF’s defining feature is its simple cosmopolitan longing. After all, what better place to teach…
In the Shadow of World Literature—A reply
In what follows, I have hopes of acknowledging my debt to the various participants of the forum from whom I…
For the love of literature—A critique
No intervention in literature studies could be more urgent than the one offered in Michael Allan’s In the Shadow of…
The contested worlds of world literature
Reading Michael Allan’s In the Shadow of World Literature, I thought of two competing ways to understand political impasses. On…
Future fanatics of world literature?
While this future world literature is hospitable—more broadly, to aspiring critics, and, in a more specialized sense, to literary scholars…
Criticism and catastrophe
Rather than a cosmopolitan space where all national literary traditions can finally cohabitate on an equal footing, world literature is…
Worlding with the Rosetta Stone
Throughout his study, Allan's sensitive attention to forms and practices transports us to the constitutive limits of world literature. Questions…