Nicholas Dames

New York

Freelance Contributor at Freelance

Professor @EnglishColumbia, on forms in/of the novel • co-EIC @PublicBooks • writer elsewhere • THE CHAPTER out now from @PrincetonUPress

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Articles

Tired as a Mother | Nicholas Dames

Dec 16, 2024 | nplusonemag.com | Nicholas Dames

Every cultural moment has its favorite, iconic reader types, its fantasies that become part of the self-awareness of the actual reader — of you, reading. The lineage is a long one, and you can usually file every new caricature under an old category: Pensive-Thoughtful; Furtive-Masturbatory; Intent (with scholarly and religious subvarieties); Eager-Youthful-Radical. In my own reading over the past year, a new category has seemed to open up: the Exhausted.
2024 Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards Shortlist

Sep 26, 2024 | pbk.org | Nicholas Dames |Mark Edmundson |Gregg Hecimovich |Sara Marcus

The ΦΒΚ Book Awards are administered in the following three, non-fiction categories: The Christian Gauss Award: Celebrates outstanding books in the field of literary scholarship or criticism. The Phi Beta Kappa Award for Science: Recognizes superior books by scientists written to illuminate aspects of science for a broad readership. The Ralph Waldo Emerson Award: Honors scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.
‘Parade’ Is Rachel Cusk’s Lonely Experiment

Jun 13, 2024 | theatlantic.com | Nicholas Dames

Start, as one tends to do in Rachel Cusk’s writing, with a house. It is not yours, but instead a farmhouse on the island property to which you have come as a renting vacationer. It has no obvious front door, and how you enter it, or whether you are welcome to do so, isn’t clear. You are, after all, only a visitor. Built out in haphazard fashion, the house seems both neglected and fussed over, and as a result slightly mad. A small door, once located, opens to reveal two rooms.
Interpret or Judge?: John Guillory on the Future of Literary Criticism

May 2, 2024 | publicbooks.org | Nicholas Dames |John Plotz

John Guillory is an award-winning teacher and scholar. His varied and influential work includes Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (Columbia University Press, 1983) and the field-transforming Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (University of Chicago Press, 1993).
These Faculty Books Will Make Terrific Holiday Gifts

Dec 12, 2023 | news.columbia.edu | Ryan Carr |Nicholas Dames |Brent Edwards

Fiction, nonfiction, memoir, art history, astronomy, neuroscience—we’ve got you covered with this diverse list of books.
The Forgotten History of the Chapter

Nov 27, 2023 | themillions.com | Nicholas Dames

It is hard to see chapters, such is their banal inevitability. The chapter possesses the trick of vanishing while in the act of serving its various purposes. In 1919, writing in the Nouvelle revue française, Marcel Proust famously insisted that the most beautiful moment in Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education was not a phrase but a blanc, or white space: a terrific, yawning fermata, one “sans l’ombre de transition,” without, so to speak, the hint of a transition.
The Forgotten History of the Chapter

Nov 26, 2023 | everand.com | Nicholas Dames

It is hard to chapters, such is their banal inevitability. The chapter possesses the trick of vanishing while in the act of serving its various purposes. In 1919, writing in the , famously insisted that the most beautiful moment in ’s was not a phrase but a , or white space: a terrific, yawning fermata, one “sans l’ombre de transition,” without, so to speak, the hint of a transition.
Outside the Museum of Literature | Nicholas Dames

May 2, 2023 | nplusonemag.com | Nicholas Dames

It’s one of the great refusals of sentimentality in the history of fiction: Gustave Flaubert writing to Louise Colet in 1853, in a funk of operatic proportions in the early months of the kitschy new empire of Napoleon III. He declared himself an aristocrat, a misanthrope, anything you want, as long as it’s objectionable and as such unburdened by collective pieties or fellow feeling.
Outside the Museum of Literature | Nicholas Dames

Apr 24, 2023 | tinyurl.com | Nicholas Dames |Gabriel Winant |Jessica Kariisa |Caleb Crain

Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid. Translated by Sean Cotter. Deep Vellum, 2022. It’s one of the great refusals of sentimentality in the history of fiction: Gustave Flaubert writing to Louise Colet in 1853, in a funk of operatic proportions in the early months of the kitschy new empire of Napoleon III. He declared himself an aristocrat, a misanthrope, anything you want, as long as it’s objectionable and as such unburdened by collective pieties or fellow feeling.
Is This the End of Literary Studies?

Feb 18, 2023 | thenation.com | John E. Guillory |Nicholas Dames |Joan Walsh |James Baldwin

This article appears in the March 6/13, 2023 issue. The scene: a graduate seminar in literature sometime in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an aspirant to an academic job, the future seemed poised to break in one of two directions—either the long-promised wave of retirements and a deluge of open positions, or a decisive sign that the hiring trend line was never going to reverse its downward course.