CONTENT STINKS!: THE FORMS, MATERIALS, AND INSTITUTIONS OF AMERICAN PERIODICALS   A one day symposium of the Network of American Periodical Studies University of Nottingham – Friday 21st September 2018   “Context stinks! It’s a way of stopping the description when you are too tired or lazy to go on,” Bruno Latour declares in Reassembling the Social (2005), a consciously polemical effort to counter the fixity of prevailing socio-political models of interpretation with the processual fluidity enabled by actor-network theory. Taken up as a mantra by various literary critics concerned with overturning the tendency to critique texts as ideological objects, the idea that “context stinks” particularly underpins a constellation of recent approaches to literature that take “description” as their guide, whether through a renewed attention to aesthetics, close reading, or genre.   Although primarily concerned to date with the traditional literary foci of novels, poems and plays, the rejection of […]