Photo Credit: dreamstime.com As I read and reread the collection of posts our Watershed team has contributed this semester (15 truly stellar pieces of writing in all), I was struck by their shared commitment to expanding theory’s reach beyond the computer screen and into the world. These texts are saturated with calls to action, reorienting readers toward the pursuit of praxis. Although I teach writing and consider myself mathematically challenged, there is one equation I con

On an evening between the old travel ban and the new one, more than forty days and forty nights after having bid farewell to the first African American, bi-racial president, Alexandre Da Costa continued the conversation on “Post-Racial Futures?” (emphasis on the question mark) with his lecture “Towards a Hemispheric Critique of the Post-Racial.” Public praise for the post-racial, Da Costa explained, is a rhetorical and conceptual smoke screen. It hinges on a strategy of obfus

Wes Anderson’s fictional worlds are outside of history. Or rather, they are mostly beside history. My personal favorite, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), shows 2001 dates in the frame several times, but the material world of the film can’t be historically identified. It’s obviously a New York City film, but unlike some film presentations of the city (say, the obsessively accurate period scenes of Madmen) it is not a historical Manhattan; rather, it is one made of second-hand impr

Everyone seems to agree that Alejandro Inarritu’s most recent film is beautiful. The expansive shots allow the Western mountains to rise and recede. Scenes unfold in the midst of open forests yet the whole depth of field is in precise focus. The sky is full, so that even when it is no more than the uniform grey of impending snow it rises to carry the viewer outside of the cinema to the actual sky overhead—to the inescapable cold of deep winter. What is less agreed upon is the

Whether you have revisions, resolutions, or revolutions in mind at the beginning of 2016, the Watershed collective offers some reading suggestions. Theory texts we read last year and recommend: Postcomposition by Sidney I. Dobrin (2011). This provocative text argues that the field of composition needs to undertake a fundamental shift away from its current interests in pedagogy, college writing, and administrative work, and instead move toward writing itself as the predominant

This summer, American culture was in love with Machines. Sometimes this was literal: the movie Ex-Machina is the most obvious example, and the most recent Terminator joined in, though there were plenty of other examples. Beyond film robots, autotune continued to increase the precision of the human voice and as even as gas prices fell, there were rumors of better batteries from Elon Musk. At the same time, a certain rejection of the Machine also grew. The “artisanal economy” c

On March 18, Adam Kotsko lectured on “The Prince of this World: The Devil and Political Theology” as the first of this semester’s Humanities on the Edge guests. Kotsko, who teaches at Shimer College, was the 19th invited speaker in the series. Drawing on his current book project, his lecture argued that the Devil, as a theological character and symbol, arose out of the specific political history of Jewish and early Christian communities. Kotsko, also known for his philosophic

A month ago, I argued that the sociopaths in Game of Thrones reflect the audience’s understanding that our current politics are fueled by deception. The interesting characters of the show seem to understand this. They kill without compunction, lie to the point of losing track of the truth, and are generically unfriendly. Over the course of four seasons one of the show’s first sympathetic characters, adolescent Aria Stark, has blossomed into a calculating sociopath herself. In

Game of Thrones is bristling with sociopaths. The most successful characters (measured in terms of episodes survived, or the power they achieve within the show) are both amoral and lacking in human emotional connections. As I detailed in my last post, sympathetic characters have a tendency to end up scattered across the scenery. While in the fourth season Prince Oberyn filled that ignoble role, in the first season it was Ned Stark—and the kindly, virtuous bodies hit the dirt

Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. In a world in which networks of transportation and communication operate globally, environmental thought needs to find more complex ways to engage a planetary scale. This is the core argument of Heise’s 2008 book, which helped further cement her position as a leading ecocritic. With measured contrarianism, Heise tries to find a concept that can balance th