Jeff Dolven Archives - Public Seminar

The End of the Sentence

No one gets to decide how language responds to technological changes, and maybe it is a tease to gather the considerations that might best inform such an imaginary decision. But here we go.

September 14, 2026 • by Jeff Dolven

Here is a definition of the sentence, strict and recent: the minimal theoretical entity required to account for the formal syntactic relationships found to exist among the constituent syntactic units of a language. It is the entity which allows coherent statements about the lower-level constituents of the language, identifying a domain ...

The disruptive speech act

January 6, 2017 • by Miranda Young

This post is part of the Bodies, Gender, and Domination OOPS Series. When I first heard that the writer and attorney Vanessa Place had written a performance piece entitled “Rape Jokes,” I was intrigued. Within feminist discussion, the concept of “the rape joke” was always batted down as morally repugnant and triggering, and ...