Bruno Schulz’s Poetics of Golus

On the Polish language as a medium for diasporic modernism

For many readers, Bruno Schulz‘s interwar short story collections evoke the memory of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust. To Karen Underhill, Schulz’s stylistically innovative writing is also a movement through transient forms—the Polish language and childhood experiences in interwar Poland—into the exegetical “margins” of Jewish tradition." Recently, Underhill ...
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Bruno Schulz’s Poetics of Golus

Vladimir Putin, Man of Yesterday

While the global community dreams of the future, the Kremlin fixates on a retrotopia

In September 2024, the United Nations convened for the Summit of the Future. In it, diverse global communities came together to dream of the utopia tomorrow might offer. Yet as the Russian state declares its desire to restore the territorial holdings of the old Russian empire, these same global communities ...
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Vladimir Putin, Man of Yesterday

Misanthropy Is Having a Moment

A self-help guide for pessimists

If you or someone you know is experiencing symptoms of a negative outlook on humanity, then David E. Cooper’s Pessimism, Quietism, and Nature as Refuge (Agenda Publishing, 2024) might be just the book for you.  Cooper’s “negative judgement on the moral and spiritual failings of humankind” focuses readers’ attention on our ...
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Misanthropy Is Having a Moment

Election Anxiety Mixtape

What a Public Seminar editor is listening to in order to alleviate election dread

For the past year, commentators from all sectors of the American political spectrum have remarked on the impending enormity of the 2024 US presidential election. I am here not to join them but to offer a token of wellbeing.  This week, Public Seminar’s editorial team is turning to music for escape, ...
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Election Anxiety Mixtape