Why Boccaccio’s ‘The Decameron’ Can Help Guide Us Through COVID-19
Rather than write about death and the world unfolding in the throes of the Black Plague, Giovanni Boccaccio instead wrote about the utopian potential of storytelling.
Ryan Poll
Ryan Poll is an associate professor in the English Department at Northeastern Illinois University where his research focuses on the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and ecology. His first book, Main Street and Empire: The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization (Rutgers UP), examines how the fictional small town is used to frame and stage normative US narratives throughout the 19th-, 20th- and into the 21st century. His second book, Aquaman and the War on Oceans: Comics Activism in the Anthropocene (U Nebraska Press) argues that Aquaman is an important figure of ecological justice whose long and storied history helps us chart how global capitalism is destroying the Global Ocean. Other publications include essays on Get Out, neoliberalism, and the theater of genocide. His current project is on modern formations of the sacred in global capitalism. Feel free to contact him via e-mail at r-poll@neiu.edu.
‘Gloria Bell’: Silent Suffering and Disco Dancing in Late Capitalism
Gloria Bell painfully conveys that this economic system thrives on our isolation.
Make America Bleed Again: The Violent Geography of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ’Oklahoma!’
Originally produced as fascism spread throughout Europe and nativism spread in the US, Oklahoma!'s exploration of belonging was a conspicuously political one.
Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ Postmodernism and Free-Floating Racism
Before terrifying us, Jordan Peele overwhelms with cultural signifiers untethered from their referents in his latest, Us.
Disclosure, Dasein, and the Divine in Terrence Malick’s ‘The Tree of Life’
For Terrence Malick, “challenge” is a progressive verb. Tree of Life is a prayer that challenges us to see and think beyond all normative paradigms.
Social Media and Identity Formation in Bo Burnham’s Film, ‘Eighth Grade’
Rather than moralize, critique, or make grandiose statements about "digital natives", writer-director-wunderkind Bo Burnham brilliantly visualizes what it means to live in a world in which social media is omnipresent.
The Limits of Hospitality in Fred Rogers Documentary, ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?’
Our work on this Earth, Rogers insists, is Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). So why does Morgan Neville shut down the possibility of queerness in his documentary?
Is a Feminist Revolution Unfolding TV Shows ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘Twin Peaks’?
Game of Thrones and Twin Peaks share cultural DNA in their pervasive and structural violence against women, yet both seem to be transforming into unlikely forms of feminism on television.
‘Puffin Rock’ Opens Up a World of Ecological Imagination for Children
What differentiates Puffin Rock from its peers in the crowded market space of children’s educational programming is its commitment to place and how it imagines authority.
‘Zombies, Migrants, and Queers’ Make for a Monstrous Economy
One of the intellectual strengths of Fojas’ book is how she consistently surprises in historicizing and theorizing neoliberalism.