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Tore Rye Andersen (reviewing Stephen Burn’s Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism) is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Department of Contemporary Literature at Aarhus University (Denmark), and chief editor of the Danish literary journal Passage. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the work of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan [...]
Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism
Burn, Stephen. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. London: Continuum, 2008. Jonathan Franzen’s position in the contemporary American literary landscape is a curious one. His two latest novels – The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010) – have been more or less universally lauded by literary critics. Freedom was thus proclaimed a “masterpiece of American [...]
Out of the Blue: September 11 & the Novel
Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Three months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Don DeLillo wrote in an essay titled, “In the Ruins of the Future”: “The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon? [...]
The Post-Left at War & the Cultural Studies Approach to U.S. Foreign Policy & International Relations
Writing in the pages of Dissent in 2005, noted political scientist Andrei S. Markovits identifies a two-ply composite “litmus test” of left political identity in recent times: knee-jerk opposition to the United States and Israel. Since 1989/90, as Markovits observes, [a] new European (and American) commonality for all lefts—a new litmus test of progressive politics—seems [...]
Whose Left, Which War? A Comment from Jerusalem
When Gabriel Brahm suggested I write a review-essay concerning Michael Bérubé’s The Left at War, I was intrigued, both tempted and apprehensive. So I read it, and it made fascinating reading. After finishing, though, I realized that my hesitations were well founded. As I was working my way through the approximately three hundred pages of [...]
Operation New Dawn: The Iraq War Debate Seven Years Later
Seven years after the start of the war, and more than eight years since the beginning of the build-up for war, there is still, perhaps, no more controversial topic in American foreign policy than the decision to invade Iraq during the spring of 2003. American soldiers are still fighting and dying there and while it [...]
The (Heterodox) Left at Peace: Or, Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Don’t take your love away from me Don’t you leave my heart in misery If you go then I’ll be blue ‘Cause breaking up is hard to do “Breaking Up is Hard to Do,” by Neil Sedaka Michael Bérubé and Neil Sedaka share few commonalities. For one, unlike the aging crooner, the accomplished academician-cum-public intellectual [...]
Have French Jews Veered to the Right?