In his recent essays on art, philosophy, and the concept of intention in criticism, Walter Benn Michaels suggests that the opacity of a photograph with regard to the photographer’s intention, and photography’s taking up intention and chance as central animating problems, account for the medium’s increasing art-historical importance over the last…[Read more]

The argument in this essay is that Dickinson’s poetics of inner life makes us see anew the long-standing philosophical problem of expression. Dickinson’s poetry invests itself in an understanding of subjectivity that rearranges the anchors we often turn to in thinking about how lives and identities take on shape in expressive forms. Poetry for…[Read more]