Benjamin Kunkel Journalist Profile

Articles

Fredric Jameson, The Art of Criticism No. 5

Dec 16, 2024 | theparisreview.org | Benjamin Kunkel

Interviewed by Benjamin Kunkel The critic Fredric Jameson died at the age of ninety on September 22, 2024, a little more than a year after the first of the three conversations that form the basis of the text below. In spite of Jameson’s years, the news came as something of a shock, given the productivity he kept up into his tenth decade.
Paul Valéry Would Prefer Not To

Dec 9, 2024 | newyorker.com | Benjamin Kunkel

One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust recounts the arresting novelty of a telephone call or an airplane sighting. For T. S.
Benjamin Kunkel, Singularity - Sidecar

Sep 26, 2024 | newleftreview.org | Benjamin Kunkel

The great Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, who died on Sunday at 90, cast a cold eye on death. Death in our society derives its glamour and pathos from representing the extinction of an allegedly unique, not just solitary but singular individual, once upon a time ideal-typically a ‘genius’ or ‘hero’ and today more often a celebrity. And Jameson would have none of this. What I mean will take a moment to explain.
The Intractable Puzzle of Growth

Aug 26, 2024 | thenation.com | Benjamin Kunkel

The Nation WeeklyFridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You may unsubscribe or adjust your preferences at any time. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Even so, workshops and banking houses weren’t unique to Europe and therefore can’t account for the European economic takeoff on their own.
Having a Monday: What I Learned from Being a Mom about Nurturing Creativity in Other People

May 15, 2024 | jennyshank.substack.com | Jenny Shank |Benjamin Kunkel

I recently taught a class at Lighthouse Writers Workshop about conveying emotion in writing, and I suggested to my students that they could achieve authenticity by showing their characters experiencing more than one emotion at the same time. Emotions so often arrive in bundles of contradictions. My example: my daughter graduates from high school this week, and I’m so proud of her, but also wistful as I contemplate her heading off to college.
A Conversation with Melinda Cooper | Benjamin Kunkel

May 13, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Benjamin Kunkel

“I gotta use words when I talk to you,” T.S. Eliot had a character in one of his plays complain, not unreasonably. The chronic problem becomes acute in the case of economic history, where the available words seem at once too technical and too vague. The problem word for the period stretching roughly from 1948 to 1973 is Keynesianism.
How an Enthusiast of Soviet Socialism Fell Afoul of the Authorities

Mar 11, 2024 | newyorker.com | Benjamin Kunkel

The Roman god Janus was possessed of two faces, one pointing toward the future and one looking backward into the past, and it is tempting to imagine that these faces must also have worn contrasting expressions, one brighter and hopeful, the other rueful or even aghast. Supposing you knew such a person, how would you go about introducing him? Which of the two faces—enthusiastic or downcast—should be presented first?
Poet of the People: The Partisan World of Pablo Neruda

Sep 6, 2023 | dailyasianage.com | Benjamin Kunkel

Poet Pablo Neruda was born in 1920 at the age of 16. It was in October of that year, anyway, that a young man whose unsuspecting parents had baptized him Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto first signed with the name Neruda the poems that he felt he existed in order to write.
Who Will Build the Ark?

Jun 27, 2023 | versobooks.com | Benjamin Kunkel |Lola Seaton |Mike Davis

Blog post "Since most of history’s giant trees have already been cut down, a new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias." Mike Davis27 June 2023 What follows is rather like the famous courtroom scene in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947).In that noir allegory of proletarian virtue in the embrace of ruling-class decadence, Welles...
Who Will Build the Ark?

Jun 27, 2023 | versobooks.com | Benjamin Kunkel

Edited by Benjamin Kunkel andLola Seaton 15% off 40% off In Who Will Build the Ark?, leading radical thinkers debate left alternatives to runaway global heating, capitalist crisis and wider environmental breakdown, clarifying the stakes in today's key disputes between Green New Deal supporters and proponents of 'degrowth'.