Explore the vast range of titles available.

Kelvin Dinkins, Jr., formerly the General Manager of Yale Repertory Theater, became A.R.T.s new Executive Director; and Dayron J. Miles was appointed as Associate Artistic Director, having led A.R.T.s community engagement initiatives and having piloted a program in arts organization management for BIPOC participants. The season opened with Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Anna Deavere Smiths collage of interviews taken in the wake of the uprising that followed the acquittal of four white police officers who were accused of violating Rodney King's civil rights. [...]it's just a chronicle of the short, sad life of a famous person, but when the sound and fury are as attractively mounted as they are in this Evita, they're hard to forget.

With a mixture of structural homage and ironic reference, Zadie Smith’s fragmentary, polyvocal novel NW (2012) cannily adapts the imperatives of the classic bildungsroman from a nineteenth-century national-industrial context to a contemporary global frame. Within NW ’s four main narratives of formation, education and individual ambition serve not to cultivate and fulfill, but to frustrate, fail, or fragment. As a counterpoint to its negative assessment of education and linear progression, however, NW ’s thorough manipulation of the logic of formation highlights the novel’s capacity to reorient readers’ modes of attention and empathy as conditioned by alterity, to use Dorothy Hale’s term. Drawing on Smith’s essays, I suggest that NW ’s experimental novelistic techniques present alternative forms of education for the reader: a range of indeterminate and uncertain “lessons,” dependent on singular encounters with the text.

This essay reads Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) as generating innovative and insightful conversations between literary criticism and dance studies. Smith's novel explores the onstage and offstage performative experiences and challenges of hybridized bodies and hyphenated identities in a transcontinental context. The novel sets up an interactive dancefloor for its leading characters—the unnamed female narrator and her childhood friend Tracey—both of whom are biracial and live in the working-class neighborhoods of Northwest London. Drawing from cultural studies and dance theories, this essay considers the narrator's and Tracey's practices and experiences of dance to discuss the swinging connections and disconnections between selves, bodies, and cultures carried through the protagonists' challenged expressions of agency and mobility in glocal and transnational contexts.

There is a buzzing insurgence of interest in medical humanities, narrative medicine, and related arts-based programming aimed at ameliorating some of the tragic failings of our contemporary medical complex and the capitalistic grip it struggles within. This paper examines popular questions posed at the intersections of medicine and arts/humanities* to reveal underlying relationships of power, economy, and malappropriated™ imaginative labor in medical education and clinical settings. To do so, the author presents responses to three exemplary FAQs in unabashedly subjective manifestations of language including sarcasm, lyric, lament, defiance, and poetic wit, then organizes this data into four separate categories: Reframing Retorts, Analogies, Stage Whispers, and Apologetics.This method was not informed by a desire to forge a common language (we can each keep our own TYVM), but rather to place meaning halfway between these systems of knowledge production as a temporary compromise both enterprises can learn from; a sort of consensual linguistic drag, if you will. The results of this probe and analysis are presented in easy-to-skim charts for those even marginally interested in uncovering what is at stake in these imperfect, albeit inspiring, unions.Finally, the author proposes a new form of validating instrument to collect further data and seeks to transmit generalizable knowledge that can deepen our relationships to those around us at these intersections and beyond. A question emerges: is the way humanists and artists are treated in medical institutions analogous to the ways the internal lives of physicians are treated?*Can one really conflate art = humanities? Are they really in the same boat? The author acknowledges this uneasy melding, and asserts that the balance of similarities vs. differences is \"context dependent.\" Read on.**Nota bene, the author is a poet and her biases towards, and knowledge of, poetics are disproportionately represented in her discussion of \"the humanities.\"

[...]Woolf's Twenty-First-Century Academia\" speaks to how we might put feminism into practice through our scholarly and pedagogical work. In \"Teaching CRT with the Dreadnought Hoax and Orlando,\" Rachel V. Trousdale takes a cue from Jane Marcus's Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race in order to teach Critical Race Theory in her sophomore-level literary theory class. Here she offers \"a recipe for classroom conversations\" (24) which simultaneously serve three vital purposes: \"introducing students to a major body of theory; teaching them how to use theory to analyze literature; and giving them tools to talk about issues of race and racism more broadly.\" (27) If we are to continue to teach modernism in the twenty-first century, we will have to try new methods of instruction that account for the ways in which contemporary students gather information from and experience the world. [...]by allowing our students more instrumentality in their education, and being willing to probe texts still considered 'unreliable' and 'non-academic' [...], we may yet be able to shape a new pedagogy [...] and reveal the relevance of the revolutionary modernist spirit for our current moment.

An interview with the author Mahsuda Snaith about representing homelessness, diversity in contemporary literature, and authorial responsibility.

This paper takes a new look at the relationship between Zadie Smith’s widely-discussed 2008 essay, “Two Paths for the Novel,” and her subsequent experimental novel, NW (2012), focusing on Smith’s critique of Tom McCarthy’s implicitly post-racial and masculinist avant-garde aesthetic. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s image of the well-worn path (to which her phrase “strange temporalities” is attached), as well as Tyler Bradway’s argument for narrative temporality as “a condition of possibility for queerness,” this paper examines the ways in which queer, feminine, and racialized bodies diverge from McCarthy’s path. As Smith puts it in her novel, whether they want to or not, “women come bearing time.” This essay examines the temporalities these bodies are caught up in, as they make use of the affordances of the lyrical realist novel, but with attention to its elisions, and by pushing on its limits.

In her article \"The Female Best-Friend Novel: Narration and the Reconsideration of the Political Act,\" Neta Stahl argues that twentieth-and twenty-first-century women novelists borrowed the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century best-friend narrative, reintroducing it for the purpose of challenging the very concept of the political act, namely, what modern, liberal society considers as a political action and what stands behind it. The article focuses on four novels written by novelists from four different countries: the American novelist Toni Morrison's Sula (1973); the Israeli novelist Ronit Matalon's Sarah, Sarah (2000); the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale: Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (Book 3 of The Neapolitan Novels: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 2013); and the British novelist Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016). It demonstrates that in these novels, the political act is reconsidered, against the gaze of the best-friend and against the role of a supposedly female 'prince charming'. Further, Stahl argues that the modern female best- friend novel is not a 'female counterpart' to the male best-friend novel, but rather a new take on a female literary tradition associated with a genre that is often dismissed by the intellectual elite as popular literature, thanks to its use of low-brow devices borrowed from the nineteenth-century novel.

This paper critically analyzes the ways of constructing textual space for the representation of the marginalized from the Third World whose presence has a tremendous impact on the mainstream British culture through Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane (2003). From a postcolonial perspective, the paper explores how the immigrant community is underrepresented in Britain and how it disrupts Pritain's monolithic national cultural identity. In Britain's ethnically pure and socially exclusive cultural environment, immigrants are pushed to the status of outsiders, characterized by poverty, ghettoisation, and various socio-cultural, ethnic, and economic problems and constraints. Ali unveils these issues through the novelistic representation of Bengali immigrant experiences. By using a counternarrative approach, the novel contests the stereotypical and negative representation of immigrants and celebrates a cross-cultural scenario in the host nation. Ali employs the strategy of counter-discursive representation to empathize with immigrant women characters in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, and culture. Far from the limited scope of semi-autobiographical narratives, Ali attempts to represent immigrant experiences of a particular marginalized group of Bengali women, especially through the protagonist Nazneen, who settles in Brick Lane, East London. Ali speaks for a working-class community from Bangladesh who is barely represented in literary works. Within a postcolonial theoretical context, Ali's representational strategy is pertinent as it has given a representative voice to the marginalized and the subaltern who attempt to assimilate, acculturate, and negotiate in multiethnic postcolonial Britain. The postcolonial theory of Helen Tiffin and Homi K. Bhabha is used in the paper.

The task for contemporary literature is to deal with the legacy of modernism. —Tom McCarthy (2010) A century separates us from an iconic moment of aesthetic metamorphosis: 1914 witnessed the appearance of James Joyce's Dubliners , Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons , Mina Loy's “Parturition,” and the vorticist journal Blast. It was the year Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver, aided by Ezra Pound, started the literary review the Egoist in London and Condé Nast and Frank Crowninshield launched Vanity Fair in New York. Arnold Schoenberg's atonal symphonic works assaulted classical sonorities; Wassily Kandinsky elevated the purity of geometric form above the functional work of visual representation. Most crucially, 1914 saw the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the subsequent outbreak of the First World War. Cutting a bloody, four-year swath across Europe, the war took almost forty million lives and rendered all subsequent formal innovation inseparable from cultural devastation: thus the intricate, ruptured literary architectures of The Waste Land (1922), Ulysses (1922), and To the Lighthouse (1927).