...Adam Shechter © 2007 the minnesota review 2007 Adam Shechter On Actively Halting Nostalgia—A Self-Referential Critical Essay on the Heroics of Family Crisis as the Only True Subject of the Chassidic Tale Jews who...

...Maria Whiteman © 2012 by Virginia Tech 2012 Maria Whiteman Taxonomia: A Photo Essay My ongoing work engages in an exploration of the complex ways in which we have come to understand animals and our relationship to them. As a visual artist I am especially compelled by the ways...

...Susan Rich Susan Rich Outline for Freshman Comp Essay Question at issue: Did you agree to an abortion to appease a sister? Question at issue: What did you fear? Question at issue: Are a bomb and an abortion detonated the same? Possible thesis statement: Maybe not a sensible idea to allow someone...

...CD Eskilson Copyright © 2021 CD Eskilson 2021 CD Eskilson Essay on Witchcraft Statues of Hecate show a triple-headed goddess. A being far too myriad for just one mouth. There s a longing for what s lost in shrines, engraved into a frieze. What s held inside a myth. My sibling knew defiance...

...Thom Dancer This essay reflects on the recent debates about the value (or lack of value) of symptomatic, deep, and critical reading in the context of the decline of the political doctrine of secularism. It aims to frame the literary critical questions about surface and depth, subjectivity...

...Madigan Haley The novel has become a crucial interpretive site for global literary studies owing to its status as arguably the first, and most persistent, world genre. This essay marks a critical turn that coalesces around the problem of how to imagine the novel at the world scale. Recent...

...Lisa Fluet Fluet’s essay develops a survey of the argumentative claims of the area of affect studies devoted specifically to the assessment, and critique, of “happiness.” The central focus is a review of Sara Ahmed’s study The Promise of Happiness (2010), which Fluet places within the context...

...Iris van der Tuin This short essay reads diffractively key texts by British novelist and writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and French psychotherapist and philosopher Félix Guattari (1930–1992). The diffractive reading methodology was first proposed by Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. Experimenting...

...Sophia A. McClennen This essay focuses on the role of the Left—as idea, as subject, as method, and as political praxis—in Latin American cultural studies. It briefly traces some of the key connections between Latin American cultural studies and Left politics to give readers less familiar...

...Imre Szeman Does it make sense to speak of a global cultural studies? This review essay examines the apparent critical aversion to such a category by exploring the approaches taken by two books that consider the state of cultural studies in the global era. Ackbar Abbas and John Nguyet Erni's...

...Andrew Cole This essay is a critique of actor-network theory (ANT), vitalism, and object-oriented ontology (OOO, or “speculative realism”), as advanced by Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and Graham Harman and his colleagues. It focuses on the contradiction within these newer philosophies. Each holds...

... being hallucination and the other being paranoia. Based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s argumentation, this essay studies four sorts of paranoiac characters in Mo Yan’s novels: innocent fools, tricksters, rogues, and cranks. It is through these masked fools that Mo Yan is able to apply “hallucinatory realism...

...Gabriele Dürbeck This essay discusses the value of the Anthropocene concept for the environmental humanities and in particular for the analysis of contemporary environmentally themed literature. The first part of the essay considers the culturally relevant consequences of the originally geographic...

...Phillip E. Wegner This essay takes up the challenge, issued by Fredric Jameson in a 1976 minnesota review essay, to become attentive to the “presence of some Utopian content even within the most degraded and degrading type of commercial product.” It does so through a reading of the Adam Sandler...

...Joshua Schuster This essay rereads Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster as a guide for the age of the Anthropocene. I consolidate a series of theses from the book that brings out the systemic ecological thought implicit in Blanchot. The essay discusses both the terms of disaster...

...Morgan Adamson This essay analyzes the aesthetics and politics of resistance in the work of Chilean artist Francisco Tapia (aka Papas Fritas) who burned $500 million worth of student debt promissory notes and presented them to the student movement as a work of art in May 2014. Analyzing the art...

...Christa Noel Robbins This essay describes how two works by the Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera articulate the conditions of participation within both the political and aesthetic fields. That articulation unfolds in Bruguera's specifying her performances' structures of address in order...

...Philip Armstrong Taking its point of departure from the etymological relation between precarity and prayer as well as from Jean-Luc Nancy's writings on “prayer demythified,” the essay seeks to reconfigure problems of dependency, vulnerability, and abandonment in the discourse of precarity...

...Rita Raley This essay first considers global English in relation to the contemporary sociotechnological milieu. It examines machine translation applications, particularly Google Translate, and suggests that they globalize English in their de facto articulation of it as a normative default. Even...