Robots Reading Vogue analyzes the dataset of the magazine Vogue from its beginning in 1892 through 2013. Speaking of robots, is Vogue self-aware? The n-gram search on “Vogue” and “vogue” (using the case-sensitive option of course) suggests that metacognition in the popular magazine has not been in vogue of late. The two terms trend together, …

Somehow reacting to a blog post feels more like handling a rattlesnake than responding to an article, book, or poem published by an institution. I don’t expect to attract attention in either case, but a blog lives and breathes. The Internet is a fluid medium in a way that print has never been. That seems …

I noticed three types of women in Duffy’s collection The World’s Wife. First, the preexisting heroines given a new voice, like “Little Red-Cap,” “Thetis,” “Pilate’s Wife” (Matthew 27:17-19) and others. Second, the apocryphal wives of famous male characters, as in “Mrs Midas” or “Mrs Quasimodo.” The third category is most intriguing to me: the original …

It’s almost like Carol Ann Duffy doesn’t want us to read her poems. From the beginning, they’re obscure and discomforting. Open the book, provocatively titled Standing Female Nude, and you first encounter Pakistan. You may not know that, of course. I didn’t at first. The first two poems allude often to Islam, which doesn’t narrow …

So I had one haunting question as I read Franco Moretti’s essay, which proposes “a transformation in the study of literature…a shift from the close reading of individual texts to the construction of abstract models.” He makes a compelling case for the fusion of literary studies with data visualization, and for what it’s worth, I …

Image: Clarke, Harry. “The dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet.” The Masque of the Red Death, 1919. Wikipedia.org. The dark climax of the book comes on the heels of one of its happiest reversals. Septimus, the ex-soldier struggling with “shell shock,” wakes up from a world of delusions for a golden minute of normalcy with his …

Image: Godward, John William. The Jewel Casket. 1900. WikiArt.org. Clarissa, Mrs. Richard Dalloway, is not like other heroes from classical Greece. For starters, she’s not Greek but English, and she lives in 1923. Still, her life follows a common pattern of that tradition. The first scene opens in medias res, dumping us on the street …