Literary Studies
Black History Month in the Age of Trump: How We Remember Now
—Aida Levy-Hussen
Commemorating Black History Month with extemporized non-sequiturs, Trump’s rejoinder to African American appeals for remembrance and recognition is a turn away from the foundational social premises—good faith, the valuing of history, the idea of a public sphere—that make such desire speakable in the first place.
Tragedy and the Proper Name
So much of the way I think about tragedy as a genre and political category comes from the work of Raymond Williams’s Modern Tragedy, in which the critic labors to show how flawed the elitist linguistic divide separating tragedy as a high art (the tragedy of Comparative Literature, English, and Classics curriculums) versus tragedy’s everyday use as signifying a grave event, a calamitous lost.