How should readers and scholars look on the tangible traces writers leave behind?
Tag: Writing
Carolyn Heilbrun Told You So
The late literary scholar hoped the writings of older feminists in the academy would help younger women “name their anger and find companionship in enduring it.”
All the World’s a Page
Paper was never simply a writing surface, but a complicated substance that folded itself into the fabric of culture and consciousness.
Pencil Leaners
The collective ventures of the Federal Writers’ Project force us to think about how writing might be reinvented in the context of economic crisis.
Toward a Cellular Humanities
Are our phones the bane of critical thought? Or might they be our latest texts to read and interpret—objects worthy of inquiry and analysis?
Public Thinker: Tressie McMillan Cottom on Writing in One’s Own Voice
“You don’t tell children not to grow. And you don’t tell a writer not to write.”
Caught Mapping
The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives.
We Other Victorians
The late 19th and early 21st centuries share a common loss of technological innocence.
Writing for a Global Audience: An Interview with Poet Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Reed is one of the most significant literary figures of our time. He has ...
Chicago Yesterday and Today: A Conversation with Carlo Rotella
Carlo Rotella is a professor of American studies, English, and journalism at Boston College; he’s also one of the most talented writers in the humanities ...
Carolyn Heilbrun Told You So
Over the course of a few weeks in April, amid the usual tiny indignities that beset women in academe, I read through Carolyn Heilbrun’s entire oeuvre. April ...
Down with the Scribes!
Mesopotamian scribes knew a story about the invention of writing. According to this story, the momentous event occurred in the city of Uruk, where King Enmerkar coveted treasures from the neighboring ...
Public Thinker: Jill Lepore on the Challenge of Explaining Things
Scholars who want to write beyond the academy often ask, where are the ...
Is Handwriting History?
Have you got a pen? My answer to such a question, following some clumsy digging in my backpack, is increasingly no. Sometimes, embarrassment giving way to defensiveness, I wonder why anyone bothers ...
Live Theory: An Interview with Tom McCarthy
“It might just be that the final measure of a writer is not so much what they achieve themselves as what they render possible for others.” This is the final sentence of ...
Public Thinker: Jill Lepore on the Challenge of Explaining Things
Scholars who want to write beyond the academy often ask, where are the ...
