Interventions

Welcome to Interventions, an experimental space where authors rehearse new ideas, reframe questions, or play unbridled within Arcade’s field of the humanities in the world. These short posts embrace the incomplete, the imperfect, and the indeterminate, but they may become much more: for example, the record of a thinker’s turn toward a new paradigm or the rough draft of a chapter in a new book. Rapid publication and immediate responses permit Interventions to foster conversation. The tone of the posts may range from personal to political, while maintaining a critical edge. 

Published regularly, Interventions are often freestanding contributions to Arcade, but some may join our feature called Colloquies. Inquiries and submissions are received by the editor of Interventions.


 

Blog Pedagogy
Taking a cue from the Arcade project, I am testing out a new teaching strategy this term: a student-authored, public blog. In the early stage still, the blog seems to be generating sophisticated reflections on course threads and texts.
Thoughts on literary history I
I am teaching a graduate course this quarter on premodern Chinese literary history that begins with the so-called "Confucian Classics" (10th to 6th centuries BC) and ends sometime around the early eleventh century AD, with the emergence of the genre of ci  ("song-lyric").
Poetry and Shining Nakedness
I might be a specialist in twentieth-century American poetry, but in my spare time late at night I have been translating Russian verse.  Since neither the TV nor the cat care, this blog has provided a welcome outlet for sharing my discoveries.  My current fixation is the poet Afanasii Fet (1820-1892).
Canadians are never alone
Did you read the title of this post? That's one argument made in "Letter from Canada: The Return of the Native," Adam Gopnik's recent New Yorker profile about Canadian academic-cum-politician Michael Ignatieff.
Huddling Together, Nervously Loquacious
Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change (1935): “[Men] build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss" (272). What was behind the distinctive style of loquaciousness which was once so popular for actors — and most strikingly female ones — in the Hollywood comedies of the 1930s?