see it as a variegated response to the experience of modernity

I was sold on the eroticism I found in Milan Kundera’s homiletically pornographic novels

Some moral concepts—theft, murder—act, for us, as moral primitives. They are our moral proprioception, orienting us in the ethical landscape, telling us up from down

phenomenology, in its urge to articulate the flux and the unruly hum of “real” experience, is invariably ossivorous

I like Rooney when she gloats and strives, when she is limned with the angry light of ambition

less innocuous than Rooney’s politically anodyne writing is her inflated reception