Faculty Writing: On the Late Style of Hélène Cixous and Writers Writing on Video Gaming
In her review in The Nation, Rebecca Ariel Porte reads Hélène Cixous’s Well-Kept Ruins as elegy—as “a poet meditating on the practice of three arts: losing (cities, people, the intangible legacies of memory), escaping (oppression, danger, the weight of history, life itself), and saving (whatever you can along the way).” For Porte, Cixous’s late-career work attends to history without succumbing to nostalgia, wherein “it memorializes; it comes to terms; it mulls the worth of pacing old ground and leaves the breaking of new ground to others.”
And, in the New York Times, Joseph Earl Thomas’s review of the new anthology Critical Hits charts the breadth of themes one encounters—misogyny, intimacy, love—when writers write about video gaming. Critical Hits, in Thomas’s view, “emerges as a fresh deviation from stale debates about ludology, or the status of games as art” and instead offers “an array of arguments for how games structure our behavior and perception of the world around us.”