Like many of her contemporaries, Marianne Moore became fascinated by all things Chinese as a young adult and sought to incorporate Chinese imagery, ideals, and philosophy into her own work.

Xiamara Hohman on Mei Lanfang’s effect on Marianne Moore

[T]rue liberal education aims at a holistic understanding of truth, a universal knowledge in which, as Saint John Henry Newman puts it, all branches of learning connect.

Kate Whitaker on her liberal arts education

[Frost’s] theories of “sentence sounds” and “sound-posture” insisted that tone and spoken vocal inflection­–how words sound when we say them–should be the material of poetry, a poetic paradigm which was perfectly suited to performance.

Isabelle Stuart on the history of modern poetry recordings

There have been drastic changes in how poetry sounds to readers over the last hundred and fifty years, troubling the illusion that reading silently can offer us access to the poem as it sounded to the writer.

Isabelle Stuart on the history of modern poetry recordings

The absence of poetry from our daily discourse and our public life leaves a total vacuum because there is no substitute for it.

Samuel Hazo on the relevance of poetry for modern life

It is in the world of the incarnate word that we find our true selves, and it is the imagination that takes us there.

Samuel Hazo on the relevance of poetry for modern life

Most of what we do or make, for good or ill, originates in the imagination.

Samuel Hazo on the relevance of poetry for modern life

What I suggest is we have attributed intellectual deficiencies to Pollyanna as a character that she does not possess in Porter’s books because they align with our changing cultural paradigms about optimism.

LuElla D’Amico revisits an icon of childhood literature

Much ink has been spilled on whether Amrita Sher-Gil’s work was “modernist” or “realist,” Eastern or Western, modern or traditional.

Vaishnavi Patil offers a fresh reading of Amrita Sher-Gil

Ten years ago, when I was in college, it was fashionable to perform an ironic attitude toward the world. Millennials were dubbed the ironic generation.

Luke Foster responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

If David Foster Wallace stands athwart postmodernity yelling slow down, so too does Samuel Johnson stand athwart modernity, yelling at least define your terms.

Katy Carl responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

I surmise that Wallace knew that life could only be an infinite jest if it were either a divine comedy or a nihilist nightmare.

Daniel Zimmerman responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

The final episode of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast is live!

I’m fascinated by the grid’s role in casta paintings in part because grid systems are so closely identified with twentieth century art as to be the hallmark of the modern art movement.

Elise Lonich Ryan responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

What was once an instrument of colonial dominance has become, centuries later, a source of identity for a racial diaspora throughout Latin America and even a source of familial identity.

Nayeli Riano responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

Nevertheless, not all Christmas traditions are comfortable or joyful—sometimes they are painful.

Jacob Martin offers a holiday reading of Ibsen

Carlos Bulosan’s humanist vision of freedom was articulated through his deep attention to the material conditions of Filipino life.

Colton Bernasol’s retrieval of a giant of American letters

[Bulosan] locates the “who” of America on its margins, expanding the nation’s definition of itself to include those who have been excised from its democratic institutions and practices.

Colton Bernasol’s retrieval of a giant of American letters

Through the guise of hypotheticals and future realities, authors of the genre can critique current conditions and disseminate their ideas to a broad, sometimes international, audience.

Andrew Latham and Erica Paley on Chinese science fiction

Official efforts to promote science fiction in support of national rejuvenation have the perverse effect of encouraging a genre that is shot through with powerful anti-totalitarian tropes.

Andrew Latham and Erica Paley on Chinese science fiction