Archive - Year - 2000

[1] Most critical treatments of Jazz take some account of jazz's role in the novel, yet pay only marginal attention to its running commentary on the blues. But Morrison's approach to what the blues and jazz mean in the larger cultural context of early twentieth-century African American urban culture is...

"The physical body symbolically reproduces the anxieties of the social body." -Mary Douglas [1] The tattooed seaman. The image is so deeply embedded in the collective American psyche that the men can hardly be separated from the ink. The habitual naturalization of this connection intrigues me. Today the linkage is...

[1] When I graduated from college I was barely twenty and unused to living on my own in the world. A foundation was willing to pay me to continue reading books, always a great pleasure for me, so I set off for graduate school at the University of Chicago, entering...

Editor's Note: This essay received the Florence Howe Prize, a national award given annually for the best essay in feminist theory and criticism. [1] In a famous passage in her unfinished autobiography "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf described her revulsion at seeing herself in a looking glass, and...