There’s a long, almost devotional cultural history of revering the tragic. We’ve long associated suffering with seriousness, and seriousness with truth. Thinkers in pain are taken more seriously than those who glow. Nietzsche with his migraines, his solitude, his universe of dread and will and collapse. Kafka, whispering from his tubercular... See more

A new set of possibilities can unsettle the poetic order, as it the social order—as when a poem doesn't look like a poem, which most often results in it not being published. Most poets struggle with this split between the True Self urge, as poet Sylvia Plath describes in a notebook, to "grow ingrown, queer, simply from indwelling and playing true

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For the sake of post-nutshell clarity, assertions like literature is inherently more serious than games boil down to two anxieties, one material and one aesthetic:

1) The underfunding of the humanities. As college deans and corporate executives shred venues dedicated to reading, writing, and the instruction of reading and writing, many of... See more