December 23, 2014
Ruefle, Redux (Part Three)
In her lecture “On Sentimentality” (collected in Madness, Rack, and Honey), Mary Ruefle provides the full text of Hart Crane’s “Chaplinesque” and then offers Crane’s own explication of the poem’s […]
September 7, 2014
Nostalgia, Sentimentality, and Robin Williams. Part 1
In my office the other day, prepping for an Intro Creative Writing course, I found myself ruffling through cabinets and drawers in search of a set of notes I made […]
April 21, 2013
Goodreads Review of Reality’s New Thriller, THE PRESSURE COOKERS
One way to understand the fundamental difference between nonfiction and fiction is to consider how what works in one doesn’t work in the other. There are elements of structure, pacing, […]
March 7, 2013
A Note on Sentimentality
One of the underdiscussed aspects of literary taste is the principle of exclusion: Not what is welcomed in a work, but what is disallowed. In the world of contemporary fiction, […]