I. The mansion in Hollywood had a vast ballroom that was empty except for a thick rope that hung from the thirty-foot-high ceiling to the floor. The owner was a director, famous in that famished an…
The role of literature as the key to personal freedom | Aeon Essays
Stripped of easy moralising, literature makes us relish the search for truth in an age when many believe truth to be dead
» Huge for the Holidays: Epic Interactive Fiction of the Millennial Period The Digital Antiquarian
After fighting the tendency for decades, I’ve finally learned to accept that I’m a bit of a conservative, if not a downright Luddite, when it comes to my interactive fiction — or my text adventures, as I still persist in calling them. Despite its name, parser-based interactive fiction doesn’t actually strike me as all that good at plot-heavy storytelling. What it does excel at is setting.
Director Interview: Rian Johnson
The writer/director of one of our favorite movies of the year talks about writing priests and conflict that feels true.
Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities
StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction
As AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space...
The 'Paperwork Flood': How I Drowned a Bureaucrat before dinner., Sightless Scribbles
A fabulously gay blind author.
The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles
A fabulously gay blind author.
Byung-Chul Han, the philosopher who lives life backwards: ‘We believe we’re free, but we’re the sexual organs of capital’
EL PAÍS met with the famous thinker in Berlin. Known for his short sentences, the author of ‘The Burnout Society’ works at night and sleeps during the day
Fiction vs Reality: My Texts with Michael Shellenberger
For several months earlier this year, I’d been chatting with Michael Shellenberger about the Twitter Files.
On Enchanted Flatland: Iain McGilchrist & the Problem of Romantic Liberalism
A follow-up to my contribution to Rosy Cross: Question of Right & Truth of Christianity
Take Your Place: Rhetorical Healing and Black Womanhood in Tyler Perry’s Films
The unparalleled commercial sucessess that gospel-playwright-turned-screenwriter Tyler Perry has attained through converting his stage plays into films that depict black women overcoming personal crises raises questions about the intent behind his seemingly feminist-inspired representations of black womanhood. Through an analysis of the rhetoric of healing in Perry’s first two films, this essay reveals one of the suppressive pedagogical functions of Perry’s representation of black womanhood. Rhetorics of healing are a series of persuasive messages, performances, and literacy acts that writers deploy in order to convince readers that redressing or preventing crises requires them to follow the curriculum for ideological, communicative, and behavioral transformation that the writer considers essential to wellness. In Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea’s Family Reunion, Perry’s representation of rhetorical healing constructs black Christian women as students who must learn prescribed attitudes and behaviors to achieve, or remain in, states of wellness, and these lessons reinforce conservative gender ideologies and reify patriarchal constructions of the family and home. Given black women’s historically tenuous relationships with representations of themselves and their families in mainstream film, and given the ways in which their labor in the home is simultaneously desired and exploited, the popularity of Perry’s films does not suggest that his representations of healing foster black women’s self-empowerment. Rather, his popularity points to a moment where black women’s pain is a commodity and their instructive journeys to wellness are an exploited site where writers can carry out their own agendas.
Twilight of the Spielberg Image
Steven Spielberg's career wrestles with the power and meaning of image-making, and his sci-fi "Disclosure Day" makes this its very subject.
