The Homo Sacer Figure and The Time Traveler’s Wife
While Giorgio Agamben notes many modern examples of his homo sacer figure, another can be found in Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel, via her reluctant time traveler, Henry.
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The Disembodiment of Work in Severance and Several People Are Typing
Ling Ma and Calvin Kasulke’s novels explore the disembodiment of contemporary work culture as a grand coping mechanism, providing characters with a numbing, and even joyful, distraction from ongoing trauma.
The Insomnia and Dream Visions of Medieval Literature
Medieval literature’s exploration of insomnia demonstrates a grappling with what it means to live with, and accept, fear and anxiety.
Tracking Time in Kate Zambreno’s Drifts
Kate Zambreno’s 2020 novel explores the self that comes into being through an ongoing “dynamic contemplation” and co-creation with the surrounding world, and the idea that all that ever happens is our understanding of what happens to us, and how we filter that through our minds, mediated by our bodies.
The Joy of a Disabled Life
Nancy Mairs’s 1996 essay collection has a clear, singular, and unfortunately still radical intention: to demonstrate to “readers . . . who need, for a tangle of reasons, to be told that a life commonly held to be insufferable can be full and funny.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Disruption of Language
The difficulty of communication between writer and reader illustrates the instability and contradiction Theresa Hak Kyung Cha saw in the roles she inhabited. Cha understood herself as a series of multiple, fragmented identities, the makeup of which could not be fully or accurately articulated using the crude tools of language.
States of Unknowing in Paul Tran’s All the Flowers Kneeling
Tran’s poems are an antidote to a world that asks us to prioritize progress over reflection, mastery over ambiguity. Their collection is a necessary reminder that states of unknowing, too, are fruitful.
The Afterlife of History
By taking the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes and his readers through a history of Africa and its diaspora, Adekeye Adebajo interrogates Eurocentric history and what it chooses to suppress.
Disconnect and Dissuasion in Ella Baxter’s New Animal
Ella Baxter’s debut novel is a raw, unflinching look at the aftermath of grief.