Carolyn Burdett on The Work (2017) I’ve been interested in psychoanalysis for a long time. Freudian psychoanalysis, like literature, is committed to words, supremely interested not only in what is said but also in how it gets said. For Freud, the bodily symptom that makes
Joseph Brooker on America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s at the Royal Academy of Arts The Royal Academy of Arts’ exhibition of American paintings only occupies three large rooms, and even looking closely at much of the work I saw it all in
Joseph Brooker on ‘Carol’, by Chuck Berry & Keith Richards Last month it was announced that Chuck Berry had died, aged 90. This was a passing I had often thought about in advance. I had thought about how someone as momentous, crucial and venerable as Berry was still
Dr Anna Hartnell on the Inauguration of Donald Trump Donald Trump’s inaugural address was always going to be ugly. His campaign speeches may have been successful at rallying crowds, but he is no great orator, and a bit of poison and malice is standard fare.
Dr Joseph Brooker on Jonathan Lethem, Amnesia Moon The US election this week has sent me back to Jonathan Lethem’s second novel, the science fiction picaresque Amnesia Moon (1995). The novel depicts a dystopian near future in which a catastrophe has fragmented America into a
Martin Eve on William Gaddis’s JR I am currently re-reading William Gaddis‘s monstrous 1975 novel, JR. While this is a book that defies easy plot summary, one of the central strands of the text concerns the eponymous eleven-year-old schoolboy, J. R. Vansant, and his adept manipulation