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Murder at the Rijksmuseum

by James Hoff

Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2009) and Night­watch­ing (2007), directed by Peter Green­away Peter Green­away has always been a visually-oriented direc­tor. Orig­i­nally trained as a painter, Green­away metic­u­lously struc­tures the images in his films, reveal­ing a care and atten­tion to the mean­ing of visual com­po­si­tion that is almost unheard of in pop­u­lar cin­ema. Indeed the com­po­si­tions of many of his frames […]

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Teaching Writing Intensively (and Often)

by James Hoff

It hap­pens at the begin­ning of every semes­ter. Tucked into my tiny mail­box are a stack of about fifty blue and white stu­dent eval­u­a­tions. The scant­ron sec­tions of these eval­u­a­tions, where stu­dents “rate” their pro­fes­sors in sev­eral cat­e­gories on a scale of one to seven, never seem espe­cially help­ful to me. After all, it is inevitable that […]

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American Dreaming: The Surreal Imagination of George Saunders

by James Hoff

Book Review Works dis­cussed in this essay: The Brain­dead Mega­phone: Essays by George Saun­ders. River­head Books, 2007 In Per­sua­sion Nation: Short Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, River­head Books, 2006 George Saun­ders’ lat­est book, and his first col­lec­tion of essays, The Brain­dead Mega­phone, is a tes­ta­ment to both his san­ity and the depth of his empathic abil­i­ties as a writer. […]

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Revolutionary Practice & Practical Revolution

by James Hoff

Book Review Works dis­cussed in this essay: The Self Awak­ened: Prag­ma­tism Unbound by Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Har­vard Uni­ver­sity: Cam­bridge, 2007: 278 pages) Roberto Unger’s lat­est book The Self Awak­ened: Prag­ma­tism Unbound is no less than a call for a com­pletely revi­tal­ized, repoliti­cized, and – some would say para­dox­i­cally – rad­i­cal­ized form of philo­soph­i­cal prag­ma­tism. For Unger, prag­ma­tism has lost touch with its more […]

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