- “Think of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, whose big set piece is not a musical number or fantasy sequence but a speech by America Ferrara’s character about all the contradictory demands that make it “impossible to be a woman.” The lines are plausible in the mouth of the character, but there is an inescapable sense that they are above all channeling the voice of the film, providing a gloss or commentary on itself, modeling how we are to receive it. In other words, the pivotal scene in Barbie is a distilled and embodied version of a think piece about Barbie.”
- “More than the real slop, which can sometimes seem like random firings of hedonic sensation detached from meaning, and more than the stuff that announces itself as Art, with its aspirations to autonomy, mid media give us corporate art’s frankest account of what it is up to in our world. To want any more from it would probably be a mistake, but to ignore what it is so blatantly telling us would be an abdication of our responsibility as critics.”
- “What happens when literary scholars venture away from the work and fields we’re trained in and rove the land of pignoli cookies, oranges, diamonds, and champagne? And what happens when we treat that escape seriously? Not only then do we revel in the breaks necessary to make our work better, but we also surprise ourselves by learning how to mine a text intimately, to look for how it’s made, how it works, and why it works.”
Literary Whimsy 