Writing Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

The New Millennium

What might the autobiographical project mean for readers if a published “I” is produced artificially, by a bot?

July 21, 2026 • by Nancy K. Miller

Every style is a means of insisting on something.—Susan Sontag, "On Style" Language expresses and style stresses.—Michael Riffaterre, "Criteria for Style Analysis" Inevitably, in the collective imagination of what developments the new millennium might bring, new social and cultural innovations were anticipated, projected, and marketed. But while such transition from one century ...

Artificial Intelligence

What If Using AI Isn’t Cheating?

Meghan O’Rourke’s essay about technology’s uses and abuses makes me wonder if students can help us reinvent the humanities

September 22, 2025 • by Claire Potter

In the last 18 months, publicly available artificial intelligence (AI) programs have turned conversations about the humanities on college campuses into conversations about cheating. Do you remember when life was easy, and all you had to detect was whether a student had purchased a paper or plagiarized portions of it? I ...

Literature

Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence

Under the author’s microscope, the affectations of the literati come into focus

February 20, 2025 • by Madeleine Adams

It’s difficult to write about The Rest Is Silence (trans. from the Spanish by Aaron Kerner, New York Review Books, 2024) without sounding like Eduardo Torres, the puffed-up literary critic and protagonist of Augusto Monterroso’s metatextual satire—but I will do my best. The novel, originally published in 1978, is the ...

Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence

Literature

Why It’s Hard to Write About Joyce Carol Oates

At 85, the author is still too quick for her critics

September 25, 2024 • by Alexander Sorondo

One of the challenges for a reviewer looking to write about Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent books is the context of her larger body of work, which is so huge that a mere mention of it can eclipse the new release. The two titles released this year join more than ...

Why It’s Hard to Write About Joyce Carol Oates

Higher Ed

Camille Bordas’s Latest Novel Follows Comedians on the Hunt for Material

A novelist questions the price artists pay when mining personal life for inspiration

September 20, 2024 • by Emma Minor

The Material opens with a classroom of aspiring comedians workshopping their latest creations: “On Wednesdays, three of them had to perform, in turn, a four-to-six-minute routine that the whole class then proceeded to rip apart, joke by joke, beat by beat, until there wasn't anything left and the budding comedians ...

Camille Bordas’s Latest Novel Follows Comedians on the Hunt for Material

Film & Performing Arts

American Fiction Offers a New Spin on the Challenges Facing Black Artists

Director Cord Jefferson tackles Percival Everett’s 2001, novel Erasure

February 12, 2024 • by Zenzelé Soa-Clarke

Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction is garnering praise this awards season for its satirical approach to Black representation...

American Fiction Offers a New Spin on the Challenges Facing Black Artists

The Arts

Don’t Read the Wall Text

A first-time visitor confronts the jargon of International Art English at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale

June 21, 2023 • by Shweta Nandakumar

A first-time visitor confronts the jargon of International Art English in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale wall text...

History

Writing in Third Person

An excerpt from Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography

March 8, 2023 • by Enzo Traverso

Historical narration had to be anonymous and the historian undetectable lest they make their presence known in any way. ...

Uncategorized

What’s the Story at Creative Nonfiction?

A premier journal that pioneered a literary form has gone dark, and readers want to know why

March 1, 2023 • by Vicky Oliver

Was the decades-old, and recently suspended, Creative Nonfiction doomed? Is it even dead? ...

What’s the Story at Creative Nonfiction?

Interviews

The Nitty-Gritty of Craft

A conversation with writer Mychal Denzel Smith

April 20, 2022 • by Mychal Denzel Smith and Erica Marrison

“Coming off of a decade or so—oh God, this year marks 12 years since I first published—of thinking about the worst things that happened to Black people in the United States, I just wanted some pleasure in my life,” says writer Mychal Denzel Smith from his balcony in Brooklyn. Smith’s most recent ...

Sex & Gender

Remembering OutWrite

Something extraordinary happens when queer writers gather together

March 15, 2022 • by Julie Enszer

How did OutWrite, the annual conference of queer writers come to be? Let’s time travel for a moment to back to the late 1980s and early 1990s and try to see the world through the eyes of queer people. AIDS is raging. In 1989, 14,646 HIV-infected people died; in 1990, 27,311. ...

Literature

The Goths & Other Stories

June 17, 2020 • by Sasha Kaoru Zamler-Carhart

I In the winter of 476 A.D. the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months through barren hills along the confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum, and just kinda crash and charge their phones. “My ...