The Years of Lead – Book Out Now!

"Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
–Theodor Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society"

"Adorno does not wish to negate representation; on the contrary, he argues that the aesthetics of post-Holocaust poetry are of a particular 'barbaric' character... Adorno is attempting to describe a new form of poetry which is stylistically and thematically awkward. The language is…

MESMERISM AND THE END OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN

This one little stray title on a textbook lying discarded in Mamiya's room was what tied it all together for me. The Enlightenment was a 17th and 18th century philosophical movement that sought to understand the world through empiricism and rationality. Here, in 1997 when Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure was released, at the end of the 20th century, at the peak of the postmodern era, that search for truth and understanding is…

"Hey pretty girl, time to wake up."

There was a time not too long ago when if you asked me what my favorite movie was I might have told you Mulholland Drive. There's a lot going on in the film and I certainly won't claim to understand all of it (something I might have done when it was my "favorite movie"), but I do have a reading of it that seems to answer a lot of the questions it poses,…