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Scott Esposito

Scott Esposito is the co-author of The End of Oulipo? (with Lauren Elkin; Zero Books, 2013). His writing has appeared recently in Music & Literature, Drunken Boat, and The Point. His criticism appears frequently in the Times Literary Supplement, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post.



Articles Available Online


The Last Redoubt

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November 2014

Scott Esposito

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November 2014

As they say of politics, I have found essay-writing to be the art of the possible. Certain work can only be done in those...

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February 2014

Another Way of Thinking

Scott Esposito

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February 2014

I. There is no substitute for that moment when a book places into our mind thoughts we recognise as our...

This issue of The White Review – which marks the tenth anniversary of its foundation – takes up questions that have driven the magazine throughout its history: the relationship between literature and the visual arts, the possibilities of form, the question, as Lydia Davis puts it in an interview here, of ‘how one tells a story’ Several of the pieces that follow seek to subvert or expand received notions of narrative and history, asking how we interpret texts and images from the past, and what might be at stake in the stories, places and relationships we choose to remember and forget In a detailed interview, the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola describes how she sets out ‘to question the stories we tell ourselves’ and explore ‘the messy human element of history’ Her work – shown on this issue’s cover, and in a series inside – creates a rich interplay between reality and imagined worlds, and dissects the way myths and dominant narratives are shaped by power   In his essay on the photographic work of Rabih Mroué – in particular his images of gunmen in Syria, drawn from the cameraphones of protesters or civilians in their sightlines – Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa argues that seeing is a ‘necessarily social practice’ Discussing the responsibilities incumbent on the spectators of images of catastrophe, Wolukau-Wanambwa suggests that a close attention to the way images act, and a sensitivity to their possibilities and ambiguities, may ‘sunder the linear division of sequential time by making pasts happen again and again in new and evolving presents’ Taking up this proposal, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s essay ‘All the Stain is Tender’, which layers personal experience over a history of anti-Asian legislation in Australia, examines the corrosive effect of generational trauma, and the way languages and ‘official’ histories have long been co-opted as means of oppression Through archival research into discrimination against immigrants and the buried history of the West Melbourne Swamp, Yu makes a case for ‘racial grief’ as a way to understand the insidious, unquantifiable way that ‘the past embeds itself in your body’, writing against the colonial narratives that

Contributor

August 2014

Scott Esposito

Contributor

August 2014

Scott Esposito is the co-author of The End of Oulipo? (with Lauren Elkin; Zero Books, 2013). His writing has...

Negation: A Response to Lars Iyer's 'Nude in Your Hot Tub'

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September 2012

Scott Esposito

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September 2012

I do not know whether I have anything to say, I know that I am saying nothing; I do not know if what I...
Art's Fading Sway: Russian Ark by Aleksandr Sokurov

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May 2012

Scott Esposito

Art

May 2012

I have often fallen asleep in small theatres. It is an embarrassing thing to have happen during one-man shows, and I am certain that...

READ NEXT

fiction

April 2013

How to be an Astronaut

J. D. A. Winslow

fiction

April 2013

I am standing in front of a room full of people reading out a story. The room is dark....

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July 2015

Talk Into My Bullet Hole

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for...

Interview

February 2014

Interview with Lisa Dwan

Rosie Clarke

Interview

February 2014

In a city where even the night sky is a dull, starless grey, immersion in absolute darkness is a...

 

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