Masks

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Published: 04/26/2024

The mask is the classic disguise. But as alter ego, it reveals as much as it conceals. Why are masks so often creepy, even outside of horror movies? Can a mask change expression while you’re wearing it? How much of someone’s self can inhabit a mask? Why would anyone make a plaster cast of a[…]

Dancing with Philoctetes: Reflections on Pain and Remembrance

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Published: 12/15/2023

Abandoned by his community, doomed to a solitary existence with his voice as sole companion: can Sophocles’ Philoctetes still speak to us? What do his screams have to say? Dancing with Philoctetes: Reflections on Pain and Remembrance juxtaposes a new adaptation of Sophocles’ play with an essay describing the process of bringing it to life[…]

The Before and the After: Critical Asynchrony Now

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FORTHCOMING Winter 2024

Between 2020 and 2021, in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, the thirteen authors included in The Before and the After: Critical Asynchrony Now turned to reflections on the late work of Jacques Derrida in an attempt to think through the temporal disjunctions imposed by the global emergency. They found themselves thinking through ideas and[…]

Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis

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Published: 07/27/2023

Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression? The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic[…]