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The Crisis of Narration

Review The crisis of literary studies as a critical practice and an academic profession animates season eight of the American Vandal podcast. A landmark survey of the institutional histories, proclivities and potential futures of literary criticism, the crisis is presented as one of method but also of labor. A crisis of method, as critics areContinue reading “The Crisis of Narration”

Con Games: Grifters in Hollywood

The text below relates to a Criterion Channel Collection that was available from around November 2023 – January 2024. Unlike the protagonists of the collection, my timings fail me consistently. The con artist has been cast as one of the leading figures in an age characterized by some as that of ‘grift capitalism’. At itsContinue reading “Con Games: Grifters in Hollywood”

Rough Notes on Outlaw Appropriation and Anchorage (2021)

In Mute Compulsion (2023), Soren Mau questions how capital has managed to ‘sustain its grip on social life’, how, despite its catastrophic volatility, it has been able to persist from the 15th century through to the present. Critics on the left have generally theorized capitalism’s continuity through a combination of violence and ideology – andContinue reading “Rough Notes on Outlaw Appropriation and Anchorage (2021)”

Update Autumn 2023

I haven’t made as much progress on the outlaw appropriation/money as novelist project as I would have liked over the past summer. In part this is because I remain undecided as to what genre of writing the project belongs to, whether it is a blog post, literary essay, or an academic article; but also whetherContinue reading “Update Autumn 2023”

Peripheralizing DeLillo – An Introduction

The below is a copy of a talk I gave at the Marxism in Culture seminar series on the 7th of July 2023. I would like to thank Antigoni Memou and Andy Murray for helping to organise the talk, David Cunningham for agreeing to act as a discussant, and Barry Dean and Toby Manning forContinue reading “Peripheralizing DeLillo – An Introduction”

Beamed in Ahead of Schedule: The Novel After Value

The below is an extended version of a talk I gave at the University of Warwick on the 7th of June 2023 as part of the Capitalism and Crisis seminar series organised by Will Berrington. I would like to thank Will for the invitation to present and participate in the series, and my co-panelist onContinue reading “Beamed in Ahead of Schedule: The Novel After Value”

Cracking Capitalism: Myth and Labour in Inventing Anna

My somewhat belated reflections on Inventing Anna (2022) were published last week on Tom Pazderka’s substack A Secret Plot. The article in part seeks to question what it is about contemporary con artists and hustlers that makes them historically distinct (assuming they are indeed historically distinct) from the mythic snake oil salesman that haunts theContinue reading “Cracking Capitalism: Myth and Labour in Inventing Anna”

Enzo Traverso’s Revolution: An Intellectual History

One of the questions raised by Frédéric Lordon’s Imperium relates to what a political body can do, what actions it is capable of, what projects it imagines are possible. Turning to Spinoza, Lordon argues that ‘what a body can do depends on the configuration of its ingenium’. As deployed by Lordon, ingenium seemingly denotes aContinue reading “Enzo Traverso’s Revolution: An Intellectual History”

Organising the Present – Part Two

Reflections on Political Formalism in Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk and Ricardo Piglia’s The Way Out In the Name of Conrad For Kim Minwoo, the way out of the infinite reconstitution of evermore intensive capitalist social relations is death: one he embarks on with others, who end their worlds together, a faint if unsettling vision ofContinue reading “Organising the Present – Part Two”