I increasingly think that Anna Kornbluh is one of our most important critics, and so I was overwhelmingly delighted to be able to bring her to Hartwick College to deliver the 2024–25 Babcock Lecture during the 2024 Oneonta Literary Festival. I was also extremely honored that she agreed to sit down with me the next day to discuss her work and career. That interview has now been published as “Art Is for Everybody: An Interview with Anna Kornbluh” in boundary 2 (vol. 53, no. 2; the link to the interivew should work for three months.)
Here’s an abstract of the interview:
This interview with literary critic Anna Kornbluh was conducted on October 18, 2024, in conjunction with her delivery of the 2024–25 Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College. With her most recent book, Immediacy; or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), Kornbluh has established herself as one of the most insightful and important critics of contemporary culture. In this conversation, she reflects on how she came to literary studies, the strangeness of realism, dialectical reading, and the role of style in literary criticism. Kornbluh also discusses political formalism and the value of institutions, the term neoliberalism, social media, the relationship between organizing and literary study, recent projects on climate counteraesthetics and middlebrow aesthetics, and the political realities of late 2024.
In further interview news, I have conducted and am currently transcribing and editing an interview with Paul A. Bové.
And for previous interviews: “An Interview with Jonathan Arac,” “Grateful and Generous Reading: An Interview with Robert T. Tally Jr.,” “Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” and “Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 