Emily Ogden (@ENOgden) is assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (University of Chicago Press, 2018). She has written for The New York Times, Critical Inquiry, Lapham's Quarterly Online, American Literature, J19, Public Books, and Early American Literature. See www.emilyogden.net for most publications and radio appearances. Email: eno6k [at] virginia.edu
by Emily Ogden When Donald Trump was elected, I was pregnant with twins. My sons were born after the 2017 inauguration, under what I cannot help but feel is an ill star—though in themselves they are privileged and want for nothing. Nothing, that is, except a planet whose future is secure and a nation that…
by Emily Ogden Fans are the people who know the quotes, the dates of publication, the batting averages, the bassist on this album, the team that general manager coached before. I am not a fan. Don’t get me wrong. I’m full of enthusiasms. But I can’t match you statistic for statistic. I haven’t read the…
by Emily Ogden Because I wanted to write about something I believe in, my topic today is irony. The alert reader is already asking, can you believe in irony? The ironist is widely supposed to be a person who doesn’t really believe in anything. Disavowing her attachments as soon as she forms them, holding nothing…
by Emily Ogden The author learns to like it loud. A friend of mine has an expression he uses when he isn’t wild about a book, or a show, or an artist. For people who like this sort of thing, he’ll say, this is the sort of thing they like. He’s giving his irony-tinged blessing:…
by Emily Ogden Blossom Dearie: incredibly, it was her legal name. The pianist and jazz singer was born Margrethe Blossom Dearie in 1924; all she had to do to get her stage name was to drop the Margrethe. The name perhaps overdetermines the voice. But you’ve got to hear the voice. Light and slim, with…
by Emily Ogden So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. —Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush,” 1900 The year and the century are dying;…
by Emily Ogden Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick What are the forms of unknowing? Ambivalence. Diffidence. The open mind. The broken mind. The mind faced with the sacred. Deprivation of an education. Naiveté—or is it just youth? Objectivity. Credulity. Amateurism. Anti-intellectualism. Forgetting. Willful forgetting. Receipt of mercy, as…