Fantômas Takes Sutton
‘I might boycott boy fictions like Fantômas. Already I have the appearance of a boy cusping the age of consent (from afar). I pass as a boy or a young man in Sutton. Only yesterday I accessorised my rolled up carrot-leg type of trousers with orange socks. I came in for suburban abuse (verbal, poof). Despite a recent resurgence or renaissance of all things butch, I am transgendered. I descend from a pretty genealogy.’
New fiction by Isabel Waidner.
Farewell to Pnin: The End of the Comp Lit Era
The chief aim of explicitly “democratizing” literary scholarship is often just the performance of the scholar’s own democratizing desire. How much good, though, does it do to study the “other” if you only ever talk about their otherness? How much good does it do to assume that our words are a politics when it’s so glaringly evident that they are not?
Jeanne-Marie Jackson explores what literary criticism has lost with the rise of faux-populist scholarship and the recession of “theory” and its alleged elitism.