The haunts of my youth have vanished, in two senses — they rest under layers of mental debris, accumulated along life’s way, and under the lava that flowed from the flanks of Mount Helgafell, “Holy Mountain,” in Iceland’s Westman Islands in 1973. These facts evoke in me both pure curiosity and a poignant sense of loss. Where is my home? As have so many ot…
A poorly designed bottle sits atop a mantelpiece, contents slowly leaking into the surrounding environment. Not toxic, but affective, this bottle contains air collected from the Irish countryside—captured, commodified, and trans-ported across the globe to lonely “expats” separated from families amid the shuttering of global borders in response to the COVID-19 pandem…
In the past few decades, scholars have celebrated the end of history and pro-claimed its rebirth. Outside the walls of the academy, in the media, it is easy to find claims that readers and viewers are “witnessing” (or consuming) history, that certain events, from pie- eating contests to war catastrophes and natural phenomena, are “historical.” Govern…
How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various ‘theories’ and ‘methods’, but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general and largely unspoken norms shared by interp…