The revival of the London plague in 1665 ‘alarmed us all again,’ said Daniel Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722): ‘and terrible apprehensions were among the people, especially the weather being now changed and growing warm, and the summer being at hand’. Uncomfortable words. Defoe’s book, like Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947), […]
In November 1983 a twenty-nine-year-old man named Bruce Burnett returned to his homeland, New Zealand/Aotearoa, from San Francisco. Bruce hadn’t been in San Francisco long: he had left New Zealand in 1982, and when he came home he had swollen lymph glands and a persistent intestinal infection.[1] Bruce thought he might have AIDS. For several […]
In the last chapter of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus misquotes a line from Thomas Nash’s “Litany in Time of Plague.” Nash wrote the poem during one of a series of bubonic plagues that beset London in the sixteenth century and the poem is fixated on death as […]
Corona virus has had a major impact on the functioning of our societies, health-care and economy. Many people have lost their lives or health, and even more have lost their jobs. The virus has severely disturbed education, travelling, sports and other aspects of our lives that we used to consider self-evident. In relation to this […]
The coronavirus has enormous revelatory power. All at once, it has disclosed issues of social justice and biopolitics, biodiversity and violence, scientific research and global economy. This power, however, involves a risk: focusing exclusively on the virus, people (and governments) might end up neglecting other key issues, first of all climate change. This is a […]
In 1923 two precocious and fury-filled Cambridge undergraduates – Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward – co-wrote some extraordinary, inventive, and obscene stories. Together they imagined a hidden obverse to the actual city that they inhabited, dominated as it was by ‘the poshocracy’ of well-connected young men and judgmental and tedious dons. Their fanatical projection they […]
I have been asking myself what wisdom or solace the Romantic poets might offer us during this time of death and fear and self-isolation. We won’t be climbing Mont Blanc or Mount Snowden anytime soon, or sailing off to Albania and Greece, or spending moonlit nights in the ruins of Rome. We won’t be meeting […]
Endless war. I caught onto this phrase several decades ago, already several decades into my work on the literature and history of the First World War. There, as the conflict wore on, the phrase gained its own embattled place. On or about the midpoint of war, the irrepressible energy of irony and satire generated a […]
The revival of the London plague in 1665 ‘alarmed us all again,’ said Daniel Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722): ‘and terrible apprehensions were among the people, especially the weather being now changed and growing warm, and the summer being at hand’. Uncomfortable words. Defoe’s book, like Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947), […]
In November 1983 a twenty-nine-year-old man named Bruce Burnett returned to his homeland, New Zealand/Aotearoa, from San Francisco. Bruce hadn’t been in San Francisco long: he had left New Zealand in 1982, and when he came home he had swollen lymph glands and a persistent intestinal infection.[1] Bruce thought he might have AIDS. For several […]
In the last chapter of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus misquotes a line from Thomas Nash’s “Litany in Time of Plague.” Nash wrote the poem during one of a series of bubonic plagues that beset London in the sixteenth century and the poem is fixated on death as […]
Corona virus has had a major impact on the functioning of our societies, health-care and economy. Many people have lost their lives or health, and even more have lost their jobs. The virus has severely disturbed education, travelling, sports and other aspects of our lives that we used to consider self-evident. In relation to this […]
The coronavirus has enormous revelatory power. All at once, it has disclosed issues of social justice and biopolitics, biodiversity and violence, scientific research and global economy. This power, however, involves a risk: focusing exclusively on the virus, people (and governments) might end up neglecting other key issues, first of all climate change. This is a […]
In 1923 two precocious and fury-filled Cambridge undergraduates – Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward – co-wrote some extraordinary, inventive, and obscene stories. Together they imagined a hidden obverse to the actual city that they inhabited, dominated as it was by ‘the poshocracy’ of well-connected young men and judgmental and tedious dons. Their fanatical projection they […]
I have been asking myself what wisdom or solace the Romantic poets might offer us during this time of death and fear and self-isolation. We won’t be climbing Mont Blanc or Mount Snowden anytime soon, or sailing off to Albania and Greece, or spending moonlit nights in the ruins of Rome. We won’t be meeting […]
Endless war. I caught onto this phrase several decades ago, already several decades into my work on the literature and history of the First World War. There, as the conflict wore on, the phrase gained its own embattled place. On or about the midpoint of war, the irrepressible energy of irony and satire generated a […]
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