Friday, July 1, 2022

Identity Politics Comes to the Table of Contents of the Paris Review

issue #1 the Paris Review

It’s no surprise that identity politics has made its way to a once august bastion of expression. The former editor, Lorin Stein, who was significantly a translator of Michel Houellebecq’s controversial Submission, was #MeToo'd. Now the current editor Emily Stokes has abolished denotations of genre in the journal's table of contents. the Paris Review no longer differentiates between fiction and non-fiction, plays or short stories. All of these use one bathroom denoted  “prose.” Are there differences between short stories and plays? What is the purpose of lumping all these once distinct genres together? Does placing non-fiction works with fiction imply there's no difference? New Historians like Stephen Greenblatt will undoubtedly applaud the decision to lump these once distinct categories together—under the theory that beauty not being necessarily truth should just be appreciated for what it is. Picasso’s famous “art is a lie that makes us realize truth” would fit neatly into this argument. Anyway if you don’t like "all for one" and "one for all" when it comes to literature, you might prefer the table of contents in the venerable old New Yorker where the lines are more sharply drawn and every piece fits into a distinct category.

read "Is F*ucking Losing Its Meaning" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Super Freak" by Rick James


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