Literature, politics, movies, psychology, teaching, writing—the line of thought on this blog will be digressive but will return often to concerns about publics, the public, and the public interest.
This blog was started as an accompaniment to a university course on public intellectuals. The concept of an interest is one that I first considered when a good friend recommended one of Sianne Ngai’s observations: that the concept of interesting is also “modern, emerging in tandem with or against the development of markets, the rise of civil society, economic competition, and an increasingly specialized division of labor” (952). Because of these connotations, I try (at least in my writing) to prefer the terms fascinating and curious, though curious does refer to commodities such as curios, and fascinating is just too engaged for a lot of my interests.
Works Cited
This blog was started as an accompaniment to a university course on public intellectuals. The concept of an interest is one that I first considered when a good friend recommended one of Sianne Ngai’s observations: that the concept of interesting is also “modern, emerging in tandem with or against the development of markets, the rise of civil society, economic competition, and an increasingly specialized division of labor” (952). Because of these connotations, I try (at least in my writing) to prefer the terms fascinating and curious, though curious does refer to commodities such as curios, and fascinating is just too engaged for a lot of my interests.
Works Cited
- Ngai, Sianne. "Our Aesthetic Categories." PMLA, vol. 125, no. 4, 2010, pp. 948-958.