This essay addresses the recent reception of Frank O’Hara's poem “Having a Coke with You” to examine the much-maligned concept of relatability as a potentially useful aesthetic category. If the reactions to it on Twitter and YouTube are any indication, O’Hara's Coke poem has become his most famous piece, immensely popular both online and, in a strikingly different way, in the work of contemporary queer theorists. Whatever the context—queer utopian criticism, an anarchist journal, a wedding ceremony, or even an official Coca-Cola public-relations campaign—readers tend to respond to the poem's general mood rather than to its specific content. This reception speaks to the fact that O’Hara pursues what I would label a poetics of relatability: “Having a Coke with You,” like many other O’Hara poems, models ways of valuing art by relating it to other things and people. O’Hara explores this relational aesthetic by constantly negotiating between modes of reception that are self-reflective and modes that are social and intersubjective.

Ecocritical thought presents serious challenges for political readings of crime fiction and noir, notably in French and American cultural contexts, and these challenges merit a broad examination. How does the Anthropocene change our relation to the frames of intelligibility and the definitions of violence found in crime fictions? The scalar problems introduced by the cosmological perspectives of ecological awareness suggest the need to redraw the frontiers of noir, to imagine new green-black readings that transform our understanding of what counts in and as a noir novel.

Thomas Hardy strategically exposes what he calls the “groundwork” of his fictional worlds in scenes depicting blizzards or total darkness that scrub away all points of orientation. When Hardy reveals the empty field—”forms without features”—within which the details of the novel take shape, he aims to investigate the ontological, rather than epistemological or aesthetic, questions raised by novelistic realism. By tracing Hardy's groundwork through several novels, primarily Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), the essay shows that Hardy's vexed relation to the realist tradition arises out of the metaphysical paradoxes endemic to novelistic mimesis.

Reading Percival Everett's novel Erasure through the musical techniques of 1940s bebop jazz shows how experimental and improvisational musical performances structure and animate this literary work. By mixing genres, and by creating a sensibility of what I call disharmonious harmony—a dissonance that deconstructs notions of paradigmatic identities—Erasure destabilizes the idea of literary category and prompts critical inquiry into the legitimacy of racial representation, provoking the reader to confront the racial discourse that supplements processes of reading and interpretation. Everett's bebop sensibility is a device of radical blackness because it incites the reader to question the viability of categorization in all its forms, but particularly in the groupings through which the racial episteme of the modern period makes legible the idea of African American identity and experience.

This article identifies a body of work—films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic—that can help us reopen the question of what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness. The article begins by focusing on early-twentieth-century proletarian modernism, in particular in the cinematic work of Sergey Eisenstein and in British literary works that repurposed Woolfian and Joycean styles during the later interwar years. Proletarian modernism, I argue, highlights an alternative route taken by modernist literature and art: unlike the late modernists feted in much recent scholarship, proletarian modernists aimed to retool modernism, opening up new and global political futures for it rather than anticipating its end. The article concludes by showing that the cultural genealogy of proletarian modernism mapped out here doubles as a prehistory of contemporary aesthetic theory: it enables us to recognize the significant political and theoretical erasures that structure recent accounts of art's democratic potential.

Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market” has long been recognized as an interpretive enigma. Simultaneously conducting its own surface reading and inviting us to interrogate its buried meanings, the poem adapts the Tractarian doctrine of reserve to set up a hermeneutic paradox rooted in Victorian exegetical thought. Variously a standard for reticent poetic style, an apologia for divine mystery, and a prescription for limiting complex theological knowledge, reserve also served Victorian thinkers as a hermeneutic strategy. Rossetti plays reserve against itself by dramatizing its dueling imperatives—inciting and containing curiosity. Laura's epilogue forecloses interpretation for “illiterate” spiritual children—those who might misconstrue mysterious meanings; simultaneously, the epilogue mobilizes a competing dimension of reserve, juxtaposing its interpretive gatekeeping against its hermeneutic potential. Anticipating recent reading debates, Rossetti's reserve generates a temporally recursive hermeneutic, within which competing interpretations and interpretive modes can be imagined to coexist.

In 1958 Marcel Duchamp and a friend gained access to the modernist poet Mina Loy's apartment on stanton street near the Bowery in New York, so that they could display the art she was storing there in a one-woman show of her assemblage artwork (Burke, Becoming 433–34). The show, which Loy herself couldn't attend since she was unwell and living with family in Aspen, Colorado, was known as the Bodley Gallery Exhibition and generated considerable interest, even drawing the increasingly reclusive Djuna Barnes to its lively opening (434). The show was described by Stuart Preston in a New York Times review as a boxing match between the popular art of the time and “Mina Loy's shocking and macabre big collages, composed most graphically of refuse, and inspired by scenes near the Bowery” (qtd. in Burke, Becoming 434). Loy's dadaist assemblages, Preston's review made clear, were a formidable opponent not only of mainstream art but also of the larger politics of art at the time: the “alliance” they reflected “between Dada and social comment,” he wrote, was “downright sinister,” and they contained a slightly apocalyptic undercurrent of social critique. Loy's artwork incorporated discarded objects, such as bottles and pieces of cardboard, from New York City's liminal spaces—especially the Bowery's alleys and abandoned buildings, places where the homeless and unemployed gathered in desperate conditions. Transporting the gutter to the gallery, this body of work depended on her close relationship to the city's so-called refuse, the homeless people she befriended who helped her collect the objects she recycled as art. It has been almost impossible to know what Loy's body of assemblage artwork—carefully dusted off and hung up by Duchamp—looked like at the Bodley Gallery show. But one fellow Bowery artist, the American photographer Berenice Abbott, had photographed Loy's assemblages. Abbott and Loy had been friends since the 1920s, when they frequented the same art scene in Paris, where Abbott was Man Ray's assistant. Abbott photographed Loy's children, and the two artists are pictured together, along with Tristan Tzara, Jane Heap, and Margaret Anderson, in a famous photograph taken at a party in Constantin Brancusi's studio in 1920.1 In this image, Loy and Abbott fill the center of the frame; Abbott's eyes confront the camera, as if to say, “I know what you're up to,” her confident head emerging over Loy's right shoulder—Loy looking as ethereal as she does glamorous. Their friendship picked up again in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, where it was defined by Abbott's interest in Loy's success and well-being.

In July 1947, the Cuban Author Alejo Carpentier traveled from his home in caracas to the sparsely inhabited interior of venezuela, visiting the country's tropical forests and its great plains. At the time, Carpentier was known principally as a music critic and newspaper columnist for El Nacional in Venezuela and Carteles in Cuba; he had yet to publish El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World; 1949), which would launch his career as a novelist and earn him international renown. Carpentier later wrote a novel about a trip much like the one he took in 1947. In the now-canonical Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps; 1953), a failed composer finds inspiration by traveling from a cosmopolitan city to the tropical forests of South America. Carpentier's creativity was similarly sparked by his trip to the Venezuelan wilderness, as his travel diary Notas del viaje a la Gran Sabana (Notes on the Trip to the Great Savannah) makes clear. Notas is the only contemporary account of the journey written by Carpentier, who later made contradictory statements about the details and even the number of trips he took. Beyond its documentary value, the travel diary reveals that Carpentier's experience was deeply enmeshed with his readings, a characteristic that also marks the narrator-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos. Moreover, Notas is of broad ecocritical and historical significance because it makes clear the extent to which the forests and plains of South America were changing during Venezuela's boom in oil drilling and gold mining in the 1940s. Inspired by what he witnessed in Venezuela, Carpentier created the central drama of Los pasos perdidos out of his protagonist's desire to inhabit what the author called the “mundo del Genesis” (“world of Genesis”) at a time when extractive industries were rapidly transforming the economies, ecologies, and societies of the region (“La Gran Sabana” 32).

The facts on the ground: That is where investigation starts, and that is what the court will have to deal with during the trial. And beyond: if the case goes up to an appellate court, those facts will be retold in an effort to judge whether the law has been correctly applied to them—whether the facts were appropriately formalized, one might say. So the statement of facts is a genre within a genre, one that doesn't much interest legal scholars since it is supposed to be neutral, factual indeed—it's there so the more interesting legal work can go forward. But surely this genre within a genre is interesting in itself.

In Crippled America: How to make America great again (2015), Donald J. Trump writes, “The most important lesson is this—Stand behind your word, and make sure your word stands up'” His next paragraph begins, “I don't make promises I can't keep.” Trump seems to align his word with his promises here, but he immediately follows “I don't make promises I can't keep” with “I don't make threats without following through. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking you can bully me. My business partners and employees know that my word is as good as any contract—and that better go for the other side's word as well” (138). The “word” that “stands up” and “behind” which Trump stands is a weapon of defense against bullying. It is a threat by “me” (Trump) against “you” should your word turn out not to be, like Trump's word, “as good as any contract.” Even if Trump does not explicitly invoke the slang usage of “contract” (i.e., hiring an assassin to kill someone), he “follow[s] through” on his threats against “the other side,” whose word had “better” be as good as his.

The facts of history have long been thought of as Contingent:Not determined by unchanging laws of nature or by divine will but instead produced by human beings, who are limited by circumstances yet capable of agency. The belief in the contingency of historical facts is an invitation to speculate about what might have happened instead, and the thought experiments we call counterfactual history accept that invitation by imagining alternative historical events. Before the scientific revolution, contingency was thought to be a characteristic of facts in general: the word fact was used mainly to describe the time-bound and particular deeds of humankind as opposed to the eternal and general truths of nature. The scientific revolution marked the beginning of a long process in which modern thinkers gradually developed the concept of the fact to mean any observable, freestanding, particular occurrence in history or nature. The idea that there were natural, as well as historical, facts became acceptable, whereas earlier it would have seemed self-contradictory (Shapiro).

If the poetics of fact had a dictionary, it would need to contain a long entry on the reality effect. The concept originates with Roland Barthes, whose 1968 essay by that name addresses literary details that can't be assimilated to character, atmosphere, or narrative function. Such “futile” or “useless” details (141, 142) — Barthes's examples are a barometer in Gustave Flaubert's novella A Simple Heart and a little prison-cell door in Jules Michelet's History of the French Revolution—seem to fall outside any symbolic function and refer directly to concrete reality. In the essay's key move, however, Barthes claims that such insignificant details possess a second-order significance in certifying the existence of a world “out there,” irreducible to narrative function. Far from denoting the real, Flaubert's barometer and Michelet's little door connote reality; they “finally say nothing but this: we are the real” (148). The reality effect achieved by this implied speech act is ideological, Barthes adds, in the way it consecrates the separation and opposition between what exists and what has meaning. This ideology, in turn, has been indispensable to a roughly coemergent set of modes, disciplines, and institutions “based on the incessant need to authenticate the 'real,'” from literary realism, photography, and reportage to “objective” history and its manifestations in museums and tourism sites (146).

Temporal concerns are baked into the matter of facts. From an etymological point of view, facts are moments of making and doing that are no longer alive and kicking. Coming into English and other modern Western languages by means of both the past participle of the Latin word facere (“to make or to do”) and the Latin noun factum, whose senses include the “result of doing” and “something done,” fact denotes an action that has happened and is now preserved like a fossil in the accumulated sediments of history (“Fact”). Etymologically speaking, facts are safely removed from the vicissitudes of the present and the whims of our leaders. So it makes sense that there should be some hand-wringing over facts that have become so thoroughly destabilized that they no longer seem to be based on anything. The defining moment in this distressing development occurred when the Trump administration, not content merely to put a spin on facts, dismissed quantifiable facts by summoning “alternative facts” to deny that the low attendance at the 2017 presidential inauguration was real. A dictionary, not the renowned one from Oxford but Urban Dictionary, offers the following definition of alternative facts: “an attempt to gaslight the population in an effort to control the media and create propaganda” (Mozzy-o). If only we could take refuge in etymology and remind ourselves and anyone else who will listen that facts are veritable faits accomplis, over and done with, past participles that stand as linguistic monuments to a bygone event beyond alteration.

How postmodern is populism? Is there a hidden legacy of the 1968 manifestos in today's right-wing protest culture? In recent years, questions like these have often been posed in a more or less polemical manner. They should be reconsidered in a more sober, nuanced way. In academia, they are of far more than merely historical interest since unlike the hairstyles, clothing fashions, body culture, and living spaces from the late 1960s, many of the theories from that period are still regarded as contemporary. Above all, this applies to poststructuralism as a collective name for the impulses of what is often called French theory, which have set the tone in the humanities for two generations. However, the problem with the continuing topicality of poststructuralist and postmodern ways of thinking is that many of their elements are becoming virulent under completely changed political circumstances.

In this essay, i contend that our current crisis of truth, however distressing, is a replay of an earlier one that saw a far-reaching, devastating destruction of truth. The simultaneous recrudescence of right-wing populism and dawn of the post-truth age recall the way totalitarian movements in the twentieth century exposed the masses to organized lying. Today, the plague of so-called alternative facts and fake news, while incubated and spread by digital technology, can, like totalitarianism's organized lies, be traced back to the erosion of democratic institutions and the loss of faith in democracy's foundational narratives. To understand how our contemporary politics could be going down the dark lane of history again, I turn to the political philosophy of Claude Lefort, Anthony Giddens, and Hannah Arendt, who have written perspicaciously on what happens to truth when the citizenry collectively disinvests from common knowledge and disbelieves in the common good.