What is It is also Other (Or So Chuang-Tzu Tells Me…): Questioning Common Sense and Ideology
What is It is also Other, what is Other is also it. There they say ‘That’s it, that’s not’ from one point of view, here we say ‘That’s it, that’s not’ from another point of view. Are there really It and Other? Or really no It and Other? Where neither It nor Other finds its
Slow and Steady Wins The Race (Unless You Prefer to “Spritz”): Debunking the Myth of Faster = Better (So You Can Feel Better About Yourself)
In my first year of graduate school I discovered I was not as strong of a reader as I had fancied myself to be. I discovered the amount of pages to read every week was massive in comparison to undergrad, which wouldn’t be so bad if this were still high school English and I was
Changing The World From Within to Without: My Take on the Importance of Critical Theory
The fact that there is a so-called “crisis in the humanities” is old, though persistent, news, with many theories behind its impending demise. The main culprits are understood to be funding cuts at the state and national level as well as an overall cultural shift toward valuing professional degree paths in the private sector, spurred
Cortana: Gender Devolved
For many, the summer’s release of Windows 10 marked a return to form for the venerable series of PC operating systems. It minimized the presence of the much reviled “Metro” styling, restored the Start menu to its former prominence, and made the OS free to anyone who already had either Windows 7 or 8 installed.
Sex on the (Game) Table
I’m going to pivot here from the past two weeks, away from 2000 word theoretical arguments and critical close readings to something a little bit looser. In the process, I also hope to turn away from the world of video games for a little while and towards the cardboard world of the table top. If
Part 2: Critical Witching
We started talking last week about CD Projekt RED’s enormous, dark fantasy role playing game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. I promised we’d try to salvage something useful out of the kerfuffle over Polygon’s “pompous,” gender-concerned review, something that might highlight some deficiencies in the way we think about games as representational works and, in
PLAYING, WATCHING, WANTING: A SUMMER IN REVIEW
PART 1 – ICKY WITCHER (4 Sept. 2015) By the time you read this it will have been September for at least a few days. This means, undoubtedly, an endless stream of friends asking what we did this summer. I, having been well trained in the art of back-to-school vacation reporting, dutifully explain that I
The Dust-Heap of the Database and the Specters of the Spectator
In 2014, networks launched some 1,715 new television series, a staggering number that prompted many articles to declare variations on the theme “there are too many shows to watch.” Same story, different medium, I say. Franco Moretti, a contemporary literary scholar, writes that while twenty-first century Victorianists may (may) read around two-hundred Victorian titles, that
“While the dearest of friends lays in the cold ground”: Epidemic Disease, Incarceration and Patriarchal Control; The Continuing Story of Josiah Spaulding
After Josiah Spaulding, Jr. was chained to the floor in his room in about 1812 by his minister father, he would never again live a life unfettered by his father’s religious and patriarchal control—a control which extended over the Spaulding family long after the Reverend’s death in 1823. Oral history of Buckland tells the tale
Only a Being of Senseless Existence: The Continuing Story of Josiah Spaulding, Jr.
Josiah Spaulding outlived almost everyone in his family by many years. He was about age 81 when he died, and at that time had been put on display at the Deerfield Poor Farm, where admission was charged to see him. Massachusetts journalists traveled to the area to view Josiah and write articles about him, but