If there’s any lesson that the decline of Christianity holds for the painful death of the English department, it’s that if you aspire to keep your faith alive even in a reduced, non-hegemonic form, you need more than attenuated belief and socially-useful applications. – The New York Times
Author: Douglas McLennan
Apocalypse Now: Literature Studies Are Going Away
The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it. Preliminary data suggest that hiring is at an all-time low. Entire subfields (modernism, Victorian poetry) have essentially ceased to exist. In some years, top-tier departments are failing to place a single student in a tenure-track job. Aspirants to the field have almost no professorial prospects; practitioners, especially those who advise graduate students, must face the uneasy possibility that their professional function has evaporated. – Chronicle of Higher Education
This Year’s Oscar Nominees – What The List Looks Like
Despite a plethora of diverse films competing for Oscar love this year, the Academy largely maintained its traditional point of view, handing out the most nominations to four very male, very white films. The best-picture category can have as many as 10 or as few as five nominees, depending on how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences spreads its support. This year there were nine. – The New York Times
The Intimate Photographs That Captured Merce Cunningham
“I imagine that Cunningham came to understand not only the value of this kind of in-depth documentation, but the independent strength of the photographs as well. The elemental vitality and spirit of these images will forever celebrate Merce Cunningham’s groundbreaking work, to which he devoted his heart, mind, and body.” – New York Review of Books
How “Little Women” Was Choreographed
“Whether Jo is tackling Amy for a most grievous sisterly infraction or the sisters are tumbling over each other to get ready for a party, Gerwig keeps the sisters in constant, surging motion. That energy explodes in the film’s dance scenes, which happen in sweaty, crowded beer halls, proper Paris ballrooms and even on a snow-covered porch. For the swirling dance sequences, Gerwig and her cast got a big choreographic hand from San Diego’s Flannery Gregg.” – Los Angeles Times
The Year Of The Pronoun
Pronouns, along with conjunctions and prepositions, are generally considered a “closed class” – a group of words whose number rarely grows and whose meanings rarely change. So when pronouns take center stage, especially a new use of “they” that expands the closed class, linguists can’t help but get excited. – The Conversation
America’s Textbooks: Same History, Different Stories
The books have the same publisher. They credit the same authors. But they are customized for students in different states, and their contents sometimes diverge in ways that reflect the nation’s deepest partisan divides. – The New York Times
LA Chamber Orchestra Names A New Executive Director
Ben Cadwallader has been executive director of Vermont Symphony since 2015. In 2016, he was one of nine arts administrators selected by the League of American Orchestras for its Emerging Leaders Program. An oboe player, he graduated from the Mannes College of Music at the New School in New York. – Los Angeles Times
Pharoah Sanders On Finding Your Own Sound
A lot of time I don’t know what I want to play. So I just start playing, and try to make it right, and make it join to some other kind of feeling in the music. Like, I play one note, maybe that one note might mean love. And then another note might mean something else. Keep on going like that until it develops into—maybe something beautiful. – The New Yorker
The Victor Klemperer Case – How Political Language Shapes What Happens
In Hitler’s Germany linguistic habits shaped attitude and culture, and eventually acquiescence to a system of segregation and dehumanization. The language of the Third Reich was corrosive, and contagious. Forced to repeat “the Jew Klemperer” enough times, one thinks of that person not as Victor Klemperer but as “The Jew.” The Jews were in effect deprived of their name, and in turn of their humanity. – The American Interest