2022. Written for a City Novels class taught by Leah Nieboer. This is a pretty straight up-and-down literary analysis of both the artistic manifesto form and what this specific artistic manifesto is doing with its active resentment and gleeful destruction of all other artistic manifestos. You can tell I love the Vorticists and their wonderful conception of the world from how much I praise their audacity, and while I definitely would be a little bit more critical had I written this today, I think that studying the Vortex movement definitely informed my general orientation towards art and writing. I like it when people stop looking out anxiously at the audience and start making shit like they mean it, and writing this piece was a part of developing that position.

2022. Written for a City Novels class taught by Leah Nieboer. This was the final, which required me to marry a literary and theoretical text from the class. I smashed together the velvet-draped self-loathing of Good Morning, Midnight with the transcendental sashay of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments to analyze the city as a site of identity annihilation, and identity annihilation as an aspiration so liberatory as to be utopian- In the next world, you can be anyone you want to be. I reread this one expecting to cringe at the prose, but honestly I think the amount of mustard I put on it reads pretty well. I'm the most talented writer of my or any generation, actually.

2022. Written for a Theories of Writing class. This is a review and analysis of an academic article about accessibility, intellectual hygiene, and the dependence of academia on exclusion. I definitely start in a register that feels a little saccharine (I came into college assuming you had to at least perform agreement with a class's required texts) during the overview, but I think that being able to expand on the work's critique with my own opinions and experiences was a productive critical exercise that began to teach me the process of struggling with a text. 

2023. Written for a Marxist Poetics class taught by George Kovalenko. Marxist Poetics was a class that mattered a lot to me- It taught me both about the concrete mathematics of the Marxist position and also about the dreams housed within its great body. It made me feel oriented in history, and like I could engage with the world with intention to change it, and it also gave me the analytical tools to access poetry, which contributed more than one would assume- Only by dreaming can you begin to think. This essay is about the value of art and aesthetic in the world as it is, but it's also about me trying to justify the barbaric act of writing to myself, to the world. I don't think I'll ever stop trying to justify it. I think that's the point. 

2023. Written for a Jewish American Literature class. This one was an attempt to do a poetic analysis, which isn't something I do often, and also an attempt to focus myself while writing something academic and keep the purple stuff to a minimum. Something always seeps in no matter how hard I screw the lid on, but I think that the leanness works to the analysis' favor, and I do think my thesis in interpreting In The Golden Land as a piece of hauntology has some genuine legs and isn't just pointing out the obvious in academic register, which is something that single-subject literary analyses can sometimes slide into.

2023. Written for a Landmarks in Rhetorical Theory class. A comparison of the rhetoric used in two political speeches about homelessness, one delivered by current Denver mayor Mike Johnston and the second delivered by presidential candidate Donald Trump. Uses New Rhetoric as a lens to analyze what can be meant by a single word. A little less splashy than the other things on this list, but the needlepoint analysis of word choice integrated with a specific application of theory was something I very much enjoyed doing- it's the kind of literary analysis that feels like it matters and contributes to your ability to understand the world critically as you conduct it.

2024. Written for a Literature of Dissent in Early America class. Partially a literary analysis and partially revenge on professor Clark Davis for getting me obsessed with Calvinism. We read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God mid-quarter, and despite the fact that I think the project of the text and Edwards' neo-Calvinism-with-a-Locke-twist materially is deeply evil, something about the absolute spite for human existence and the assumption that every breath a person takes is an unforgivably audacious crime against decency struck a chord in me. Let's not dwell on what that says about me as a person. The anthropessimism in the sermon fascinated me, and I decided to try and decode Edwards' theory of humanity in my final essay. There is something incensing about the idea that all human goodness is an act of impossible defiance, and that defiance is what a moral person should chase.