Anna Kornbluh
Biographic Data
| ID | 283607 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anna Kornbluh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anna |
| FAMILY NAME | Kornbluh |
| SIGNATURE | KORNBLUH A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Chicago |
| ORCID | 0009-0008-7810-4447 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Falling Heists, Rising Grift
Periodizing the historical heyday of the heist film at the turn of the twenty-first century and marking its supplanting by the grifter series inthe 2020s, this essay argues that circulation-forward, too-late capitalism can be mapped in the logistics-centric genre of the heist and the charisma-centric genre of the grift docudrama. While parallel in their allegorical function, these competing genres are unequal in their ideological operations, and …
Big Fiction
Prospective criticism
Waxing about the futures of criticism endogenously clangs hollow in the midst of exogenous omnicrisis. Instead of worrying about the next big thing in literary studies, this essay suggests, we should be asking if there are particular tools that criticism offers that may allow us to transform the conditions of criticism’s demise. This essay offers two possible answers: ‘objectivity’, defined as a form of thought and knowledge particular to both cr…
Imagined Communities 2.0
A solicited response for a forum on Matthew Flisfeder's Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, organized by Yahya Madra, this brief essay considers the book's thesis that social media functions as a new symbolic order for digital society, one that both ideologically interpellates individuals and provides a metaphor for social totality that might galvanize social transformation. The essay concludes that this thesis …
Solidarity Words
This essay argues that a specifically psychoanalytic theory of solidarity underscores its symbolic dimension. While other traditions conceive solidarity as primarily action or affect, psychoanalytic emphases on free association, punctuation, and construction opens onto a theory of solidarity as a practice of the signifier. Words are the mediators that incite subjects to collaborate. The embrace of this mediating capacity poses a corrective to the…
Objectively Curious Commitments
In these times of ours, whither art? What is the use of the defamiliarizing and the sublime amidst cataclysmic conflicts over identity and belonging, resources and institutions, climate and extinction? Understandably, many defenders of art have lately come to frame their defenses in terms of messaging : artists make art to convey messages otherwise excluded from official discourse (ideology, policy, history, social science), to testify and self-e…
Extinct Critique
What is the connection between the discourse of postcritique and the material conditions in which it has taken hold? How do privatization, the destruction of the university, and ecocide bend the trajectory of theory and critique in the present? In posing and exploring these questions, this essay endeavors to perform the traditional function of critique: inquiry into the relations around ideas, embedding ideas in their environments, in order to pr…
The Order of Forms
Totality
“Totality” offers itself for reading under the rubric of “defamiliarization” less on the basis of our overfamiliarity with it than on account of our already estranged relationship to it. Not only literary critics but also cultural theorists, art historians, and philosophers bid “totality” adieu in the 1990s through the influence of Jean-François Lyotard's forging of a causal link between thought under the sign of totality and action under the sig…
Forms
An invigorating inversion propels Caroline Levine's wonderful book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network: While “formalism” in literary studies, in law, in math, in religion generally means “str
Present Tense Futures of the Past
Present Tense Futures of the Past Anna Kornbluh (bio) Look at a map of greater London, on which the town proper shows as a dark, irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness of suburban districts. . . . The streets have a smell of newness, of dampness; the bricks retain their complexion, the stucco has not rotted more than one expects in a year or two; poverty tries to hide itself with venetian blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of …
Realizing Capital
During a tumultuous period when financial speculation began rapidly to outpace industrial production and consumption, Victorian financial journalists commonly explained the instability of finance by criticizing its inherent artifice drawing persistent attention to what they called “fictitious capital.” In a shift that naturalized this artifice, this critique of fictitious capital virtually disappeared by the 1860s, being replaced by notions of fi…
The fictional Christopher Nolan
Economic Woman
For the Love of Money
Anna Kornbluh For the Love of Money The intersection of San Vicente and Wilshire Boule- vards in Los Angeles is one of innumerable corners where the homeless reside. Even the most hurried commuters register the signs: ‘Vietnam Vet Needs Help’; ‘Will Work For Food’; ‘God Bless’. The other night I saw a gentleman holding a sign with a slightly modi ed message – ‘Homeless Vet Appreciates Any Help At All, Even Just Saying “Hi” ’. It does not take a L…
Extinct Critique
What is the connection between the discourse of postcritique and the material conditions in which it has taken hold? How do privatization, the destruction of the university, and ecocide bend the trajectory of theory and critique in the present? In posing and exploring these questions, this essay endeavors to perform the traditional function of critique: inquiry into the relations around ideas, embedding ideas in their environments, in order to pr…
Imagined Communities 2.0
A solicited response for a forum on Matthew Flisfeder's Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, organized by Yahya Madra, this brief essay considers the book's thesis that social media functions as a new symbolic order for digital society, one that both ideologically interpellates individuals and provides a metaphor for social totality that might galvanize social transformation. The essay concludes that this thesis …
Solidarity Words
This essay argues that a specifically psychoanalytic theory of solidarity underscores its symbolic dimension. While other traditions conceive solidarity as primarily action or affect, psychoanalytic emphases on free association, punctuation, and construction opens onto a theory of solidarity as a practice of the signifier. Words are the mediators that incite subjects to collaborate. The embrace of this mediating capacity poses a corrective to the…
For the Love of Money
Anna Kornbluh For the Love of Money The intersection of San Vicente and Wilshire Boule- vards in Los Angeles is one of innumerable corners where the homeless reside. Even the most hurried commuters register the signs: ‘Vietnam Vet Needs Help’; ‘Will Work For Food’; ‘God Bless’. The other night I saw a gentleman holding a sign with a slightly modi ed message – ‘Homeless Vet Appreciates Any Help At All, Even Just Saying “Hi” ’. It does not take a L…
Realizing Capital
During a tumultuous period when financial speculation began rapidly to outpace industrial production and consumption, Victorian financial journalists commonly explained the instability of finance by criticizing its inherent artifice drawing persistent attention to what they called “fictitious capital.” In a shift that naturalized this artifice, this critique of fictitious capital virtually disappeared by the 1860s, being replaced by notions of fi…
The fictional Christopher Nolan
Economic Woman
Forms
An invigorating inversion propels Caroline Levine's wonderful book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network: While “formalism” in literary studies, in law, in math, in religion generally means “str
Present Tense Futures of the Past
Present Tense Futures of the Past Anna Kornbluh (bio) Look at a map of greater London, on which the town proper shows as a dark, irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness of suburban districts. . . . The streets have a smell of newness, of dampness; the bricks retain their complexion, the stucco has not rotted more than one expects in a year or two; poverty tries to hide itself with venetian blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of …
The Order of Forms
Totality
“Totality” offers itself for reading under the rubric of “defamiliarization” less on the basis of our overfamiliarity with it than on account of our already estranged relationship to it. Not only literary critics but also cultural theorists, art historians, and philosophers bid “totality” adieu in the 1990s through the influence of Jean-François Lyotard's forging of a causal link between thought under the sign of totality and action under the sig…
Objectively Curious Commitments
In these times of ours, whither art? What is the use of the defamiliarizing and the sublime amidst cataclysmic conflicts over identity and belonging, resources and institutions, climate and extinction? Understandably, many defenders of art have lately come to frame their defenses in terms of messaging : artists make art to convey messages otherwise excluded from official discourse (ideology, policy, history, social science), to testify and self-e…
Extinct Critique
What is the connection between the discourse of postcritique and the material conditions in which it has taken hold? How do privatization, the destruction of the university, and ecocide bend the trajectory of theory and critique in the present? In posing and exploring these questions, this essay endeavors to perform the traditional function of critique: inquiry into the relations around ideas, embedding ideas in their environments, in order to pr…
Imagined Communities 2.0
A solicited response for a forum on Matthew Flisfeder's Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, organized by Yahya Madra, this brief essay considers the book's thesis that social media functions as a new symbolic order for digital society, one that both ideologically interpellates individuals and provides a metaphor for social totality that might galvanize social transformation. The essay concludes that this thesis …
Solidarity Words
This essay argues that a specifically psychoanalytic theory of solidarity underscores its symbolic dimension. While other traditions conceive solidarity as primarily action or affect, psychoanalytic emphases on free association, punctuation, and construction opens onto a theory of solidarity as a practice of the signifier. Words are the mediators that incite subjects to collaborate. The embrace of this mediating capacity poses a corrective to the…
Prospective criticism
Waxing about the futures of criticism endogenously clangs hollow in the midst of exogenous omnicrisis. Instead of worrying about the next big thing in literary studies, this essay suggests, we should be asking if there are particular tools that criticism offers that may allow us to transform the conditions of criticism’s demise. This essay offers two possible answers: ‘objectivity’, defined as a form of thought and knowledge particular to both cr…
Falling Heists, Rising Grift
Periodizing the historical heyday of the heist film at the turn of the twenty-first century and marking its supplanting by the grifter series inthe 2020s, this essay argues that circulation-forward, too-late capitalism can be mapped in the logistics-centric genre of the heist and the charisma-centric genre of the grift docudrama. While parallel in their allegorical function, these competing genres are unequal in their ideological operations, and …
Big Fiction
Sociology (11 works) · Art (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · History (5 works) · Law (5 works)