“In a world where the imagined purpose of the novel is to entertain—not to teach or spark further inquiry—The Last Samurai dissents.”
Tag: Columbia University Press
Subaquatic Homesick Blues
A Taiwanese scifi novel—set under the sea, after the surface becomes unlivable—reveals the remarkable burst of cultural freedom in 1990s Taiwan.
Brilliant Together: On Feminist Memoirs
Collective feminist narratives can acknowledge, to differing degrees, the stories that are missing from them.
Mission Impossible
The university has been changing, to be sure. But has the proportion of students who want to devote themselves to acts of humanistic creativity?
To Read against Ferrante—or alongside Her?
Despite using a pseudonym, Ferrante has made clear how readers should understand her work. Should critics listen?
The Manifest Destiny of Computing
Today is overwhelmingly defined by white-supremacist violence and the whiteness of AI technology. Can seeing them together help defeat them both?
Remembering Is Resistance
Confronting painful pasts gives society an opportunity to change. This is why those invested in the amnesiac status quo fight against memory.
Storytelling Is Big Business
When creating and selling culture, you’re also selling a story about that culture—for good and for ill.
For the Slow Work of Critique in Critical Times
With so many crises—environmental, humanitarian, racial, viral, and economic—the work of “critique” can seem to be a luxury. But is it?
Editor 2 Editor: Greg Britton and Jennifer Crewe
Where do scholarly editors find their authors? How do they decide which ...
Public Picks 2019
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a curated list of the titles that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us most over the past year. For this, the seventh-annual edition of ...
Bearing Risks and Being Watched
If two features define contemporary capitalism, they are first the tendency of each individual to increasingly bear alone the risks associated with living in a ...
Free Speech and Equality on Campus
Every day at one of the over four thousand colleges and universities in the United States, some eager individual is denied the opportunity to speak to college students ...