Activity

What is rational cannot, if one takes rationality as a standard seriously, be just a tendentious synonym for what is good for her.

Ludo’s failure would seem to support the conclusion that the critics Caroline Marie and Christelle Reggiani reach about The Last Samurai. In a typology of how mathematics has been incorporated into contemporary literature, they suggest that DeWitt’s novel ultimately disavows Sibylla’s mathematicize…

We can now see the gap between DeWitt and formalism. DeWitt is not much concerned with art’s effect on the habituated consciousness of a hypothetical general reader, nor does she develop new artistic devices through which to render lost objects again visible. She is, in one sense, indifferent to th…

This definition of the purpose of art sounds familiar, resembling in some ways the Russian formalist description of art as an engine of defamiliarization. “Defamiliarization,” or ostranenie—alternately translated as “estrangement”—is a concept most associated with the founding father of formalism, …