Reviews Archives - Page 14 of 17

Education

“Great Books Camp” as Political Education

A Reply to Molly Worthen

December 23, 2016 • by Michael Weinman

In “Can I Go to Great Books Camp?” which recently appeared in the New York Times, Molly Worthen provides an historical account of the development of the “Great Books” program and related curricula inside American universities. It is a report about the present deployment of such “canonical” works in various ...

“Great Books Camp” as Political Education

Literature

A Pure Solar World

Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism by Paul Youngquist

December 21, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

One of my favorite moments of personal cognitive dissonance goes back to my time at Michigan State in the mid-1970s when at brunch at IHOP one Sunday morning I looked over to see John Gilmore, June Tyson, and Marshall Allen seated a couple of tables over from me. They were ...

Feature

The Lady in the Van (2015)

Movie Review

December 20, 2016 • by Margaret Kim Peterson

“One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation.” Mary (or is it Margaret?) Shepherd was a pianist. And then she was a nun. And then… well, it’s not clear just what happened next. But by the time we meet her, in Alan Bennett’s ...

Reviews

What Can Cinema Teach Philosophy?

Badiou and Rancière on Film

December 19, 2016 • by Emmanuel Alloa

Philosophy’s general distrust of cinema is a thing of the past. Cinema no longer serves only as a placeholder for reproving wrong conceptions of time (Bergson on the “cinematographic illusion”), as the incarnation of the distraction industry (Adorno), as a symptom of cultural depravation (Heidegger on the remove from “Japanese ...

Feature

Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, by Jonas Mekas

December 6, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

Back in the day when I was an aspiring young artist, one of my bibles was a well-worn copy (gotten at the late-great independent bookstore Paperbacks Unlimited) of Movie Journal, a collection of columns by filmmaker/impresario Jonas Mekas that had originally appeared in the Village Voice from 1959 to 1971, trumpeting the ...

Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, by Jonas Mekas

Feature

Remaking the Rust Belt

The Postindustrial Transformation of North America

November 20, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

The decline of American manufacturing and what to do about it has been a key topic in the current election cycle. The demise of the nation's industrial plant, and its implications for manufacturing cities such as Detroit, Akron, and Pittsburgh, has often been seen as inevitable, a result of blind ...

Reviews

The Banality of Woody

Reviewing Irrational Man (2015) and Cafe Society (2016)

November 15, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

Irrational Man, a film by Woody Allen (2015) Café Society, a film by Woody Allen (2016) (Caution: mild spoiler alerts) “You’re a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes”, says the space alien in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), which still, despite its ambitions, falls into the category ...

Feature

Prophets of Irony: a Discussion with Richard J. Bernstein

November 2, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

Richard J. Bernstein, Ironic Life (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2016), pp. 184, $64.95 hardcover, $22.95 paperback. There is a certain irony about contemporary attitudes toward irony. According to the late novelist David Foster Wallace, our culture is steeped in the ironic reluctance to commit to ideals and thus embrace moral seriousness. ...

Prophets of Irony: a Discussion with Richard J. Bernstein

Feature

The Order is Rapidly Fadin’

Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize

October 17, 2016 • by Emily Edwards

The Internet has been ablaze with celebration and criticism as the news broke that musician Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan’s win against traditional novelists and poets is both surprising and significant, but the importance of the Nobel prize has little to do with Dylan ...

Feature

On Dylan Anxiety

October 16, 2016 • by Zachary Sunderman

Bob Dylan is the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Literature. Some people love it, some people hate it. That’s to be expected. But why do the people who hate it, hate it so much? There are all sorts of possible explanations, and certainly more than one of them has purchase. We can ...

Feature

Category Anxiety: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

October 15, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

It’s been a weird year (the weirdest I can remember at least), and Thursday morning’s announcement that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature made it weirder still. But, overall, it is weird in a welcome way.

Pre-announcement speculation centered on the possibility that the prize might be awarded to an ...

Category Anxiety: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

Feature

Bob Dylan: Nobel Laureate?

October 14, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

I can’t say that I am a huge Bob Dylan fan. I may have been born just a little too late to have been caught up in the folk craze, though I do remember singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” along with “This Land is Your Land” and “Where Have All ...