Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal Fall 2015
The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal "No Crisis” issue considers the state of critical thinking and writing — literary interpretation, art history, and cultural studies — in the 21st century. The last several years have been an era of crisis for the academic humanities, traditionally the home of the interpretive disciplines. Across the system of education in the United States there are, in fact, many crises. For our part, we see the crisis as the effect of economic and administrative decisions, not a failure of ideas. So, we asked a group of eminent critics to choose a recent critical text and to write about why it matters: not to coolly evaluate it but to stand and think with a critic whose writing they value. The essays produced are works of criticism in themselves; in them, and with "No Crisis," we hope to show that the art of criticism is flourishing, rich with intellectual power and sustaining beauty, in hard times.
TOM LUTZ is the Editor in Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, a nonprofit, multimedia literary and cultural arts magazine that combines the great American tradition of the serious book review with the evolving technologies of the web. Readers of the LARB Quarterly Journal join a community of writers, critics, journalists, artists, filmmakers, and scholars dedicated to promoting the best that is thought and written, with an enduring commitment to the intellectual rigor, the incisiveness, and the power of the written word.
SARAH MESLE (PhD, Northwestern) is faculty at USC and Senior Humanities Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
MERVE EMRE is a Visiting Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016, she will be an assistant professor of English at McGill University.
CALEB SMITH is professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 2013). His essays on contemporary culture have appeared in BOMB, Paper Monument, Yale Review, and Avidly.org.
NAMWALI SERPELL is an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley. Her writing has been published in McSweeney’s, The Believer, Bidoun, Callaloo, Tin House, n+1, The Caine Prize Anthology, and a collection, Should I Go to Grad School? . Her first published short story, “Muzungu,” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009, shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize for African Literature, and anthologized in The Uncanny Reader (St. Martins, 2015). In 2011, she was selected to be one of six recipients of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers. Serpell is currently working on a book of essays, Losing Face, and a novel, The Furrows.
MICHAEL W. CLUNE’s most recent critical book is Writing Against Time. His first work of creative nonfiction, White Out, was named a Best Book of 2013 by The New Yorker, NPR, The Millions, and elsewhere. His most recent book is Gamelife. He teaches at Case Western Reserve University.
PETER COVIELLO teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He has written about Walt Whitman, the history of sexuality, queer children, 18th- and 19th-century American literature, Mormon polygamy, and Steely Dan. His most recent book is Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America, a finalist for a 2013 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies.
KATHRYN BOND STOCKTON is Distinguished Professor of English and Associate Vice President for Equity and Diversity at the University of Utah, where she teaches queer theory, theories of race, the 19th-century novel, and 20th-century literature and film. Her most recent books, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” and The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century were both finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies (2007 and 2010).
VIRGINIA JACKSON is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric in the departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) and the co-editor (with Yopie Prins) of The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Her book Before Modernism: Nineteenth-Century American Poetry in Public is forthcoming from Princeton, and she is now at work on After Poetry, a book on 21st-century American poetics.
JOHANNA DRUCKER is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide.
KENNETH GOLDSMITH is the author of eight books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which is the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, which premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. Goldsmith is also the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive.
DIANA FUSS is Louis W. Fairchild Class of ’24 Professor of English at Princeton University. Fuss is the author of Essentially Speaking (Routledge, 1989), Identification Papers, and The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them. Her most recent book, Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Fuss is also the editor of several volumes: Human, All Too Human, Pink Freud, and Inside/Out.
KENNETH W. WARREN is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
JONATHAN FREEDMAN is Professor of English at the University of Michigan.
TAVIA NYONG’O is a cultural critic and an Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He writes on art, music, politics, culture, and theory. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory, won the Errol Hill Award for best book in African American theatre and performance studies. He is completing a study of fabulation in black aesthetics and embarking on another on queer wildness. Nyong’o has published in venues such as Radical History Review, Criticism, GLQ, TDR, Women & Performance, WSQ, The Nation, Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, and n+1. He is co-editor of the journal Social Text and the Sexual Cultures book series at New York University press. He regularly blogs at Bully Bloggers.
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS is a writer, artist, and translator. He is the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, Roman Letters, and, forthcoming, Against the Flood: The Italian Critique of Gender and Capital and Donkey Time.
