Activity

These are lines from a lyric known as “Fragment 47” composed by the poet Sappho who lived in the late seventh century BC at Mytilene, the largest city on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea. In the poet Anne Carson’s translation, this is how it reads:

Eros shook my
mind like a mountain w…

It’s like a jungle sometimes . . . He is the savage. He is beastmode, paradoxically subliterate and over-articulate, overspeaking and overlaying official thinking and bien-pensant consideration, hyperfleshed and hypersexed, his self-flagellation and his private inferno conducted in public, like a h…

What can one learn from the expression of people who refuse to be commodities, but also once were commodities? What does history look like, or the present, or the future, from the point of view of those who refuse the norms produced by systems of violence, who consent not to be a single being? Thes…

In his criticism, Moten is especially attuned to a zone that Brent Edwards (a close friend and interlocuter) has called the “fringe of contact between music and language.” He’ll draw the reader’s attention to the “surplus lyricism of the muted, mutating horns of Tricky Sam Nanton or Cootie Williams…

A decisive turning point came when literary critic Barbara Johnson arrived from Yale to teach a course called Deconstruction, and he first read Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Ferdinand Saussure. At the time, in a class on James Joyce, he was also reading Ulysses. “It had a rhythm I was totally f…