David Banash

About David Banash

David Banash is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University.  He teaches courses in contemporary literature, film, and popular culture. 

Features

It’s All Too Beautiful

By David Banash

A suspicion of beauty is vital if one hopes to have any relation to it that isn't completely compromised; as Walter Benjamin said, beauty is the other side of the coin of injustice. [29 July 2009]

Collection Obsession: William Davies King’s “Collections of Nothing”

By David Banash

Wrestling with objects, saving and ordering them, is a way to cope with flux, doubt, and the twin gods of sex and death. Banash deconstructs the human urge to collect all manner of stuff. [15 August 2008]

The Teenage Prayers [New York]

By David Banash

Bucking the "nostalgia band" trend by being authentically nostalgic, the Teenage Prayers cause you to give blessings to that raw, purely enthusiastic adolescent music fan in all of us. [7 February 2008]

Reviews

Ferus by Roberta Bernstein & Kirk Varnedoe

By David Banash

Instead of the kind of comprehensive curatorial essay contextualizing and explaining the work it reproduces, this assumes a list of unadorned, unexplained names tells a story. [17 August 2009]

The Grid Book by Hannah G. Higgins

By David Banash

This is a meditation on media, representation and technology, and makes for a deeply textured and luxurious reading experience. [16 April 2009]

Ryan Seacrest Is Famous by Dave Housley

By David Banash

Housely uses Kerouac to describe what has happened to America with the rise of ubiquitous media that endlessly praises the corporate injunction to masturbatory self-improvement as consumption. [15 February 2009]