A little while ago, I had a quick exchange on Facebook with a friend who said, in the tone of admitting something gauche, that she didn’t like Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”. I responded, sort of flippantly, that it’s the best breakup poem ever. Then I thought a little bit more about my [...]

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When I was a sophomore in college, I used to have arguments with my Humanities 220 professor about affect. The class was a year-long interdisciplinary survey of Modernism, and we, its students, used to joke that it existed to give us a thorough enough greatest-hits grounding to participate in cocktail-party conversations of its topic: [...]

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I first read this article way back when it actually came out, but I return to it periodically because there’s something so weird about it.
I also have a thing about Harold Bloom. I got sidetracked into a substantial discussion of his peculiar aesthetic neurosis in the introduction to my undergraduate thesis, because [...]

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