Contemporaries at Post45

Contemporaries - Post45 Post45 seeks to reinvigorate the erstwhile convention of academic critics not only describing past traditions but also actively intervening in current tastes. It provides a forum for writers to conver...

New cluster!! post45.org/contemporari... ❣️ 📺 ⌨️ 🥰 Edited by @dfmorgan.bsky.social ! "My So-Called Life at 30" features essays on intimacy, literacy, fan studies, mobility, migration, dance, beauty culture, teen dramas, Winnie Holzman, diaspora and fandom, narratology, over-analysis, & more!

Hi Bluesky! The Post45 Data Collective is officially here.

We publish open datasets on literary prizes, fellowships, books in translation, feminist magazines, NYT bestsellers, and more. data.post45.org

Follow us for updates—we’ve got a busy summer ahead!

Our intrepid Pod45 editor & producer, @michaeldocherty.bsky.social, did a magnificent job with the episode!

It’s true: Pod45 is back after a brief hiatus! Here we have an episode based on our Samuel Delany cluster, ed. @blakestricklin.bsky.social . The podcast ft. Stricklin in conversation w @franciscondine.bsky.social, Y Howard, Christopher Breu, Rebekah Sheldon, & @kirinwgrene.bsky.social !

Episode 21: Samuel Delany Pod45 · Episode

Today’s morning listen (and read!) is the Post45 Contemporaries @atpost45.bsky.social podcast + cluster, “Samuel Delany’s Improbable Communities”

open.spotify.com/episode/1ZFm...

Kick off Pride by reading @uncannydazzler.bsky.social’s great essay about Rickie and Delia’s Haddaway dance in @atpost45.bsky.social’s latest issue on My So-Called Life 🪩

My So-Called Teen Dramas - Post45 I came into adolescence in the age of the supernatural teen drama. Spanning across novels, television, and film from the mid-aughts through the 2010s, the likes of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, The CW’s...

i am so proud & honored to have gotten to write about My So-Called Life and the genre of the teen drama (& to put all of the hours of my life burned away watching teen TV to use) for the @atpost45.bsky.social cluster on MSCL, edited by the brilliant @dfmorgan.bsky.social! post45.org/2025/05/my-s...

Check this out! What a blast to read, write, edit, and think about My So-Called Life 30 years after it went off the air too soon.

This essay was a blast to write! Thanks to @wendyallisonlee.bsky.social for recommending me as a contributor, to @dfmorgan.bsky.social for being a fabulous editor, and to @carlospescador.bsky.social for his expert feedback.

It's, like, a feast.

My So-Called Life at 30! Edited by the amazing @dfmorgan.bsky.social and with an essay by one of my favorite practitioners of the art of overanalysis @cmceleney.bsky.social

That’s right! Come thru at post45.org/contemporaries to see this magnificent cluster, edited by @dfmorgan.bsky.social !

Contemporaries - Post45 Post45 seeks to reinvigorate the erstwhile convention of academic critics not only describing past traditions but also actively intervening in current tastes. It provides a forum for writers to conver...

Happy reading, from all of us at post45.org/contemporaries !

Surreal butterflies and alternative kinship futures: revisiting dreams and histories of home through My So-Called Life - Post45 Parents! Racontez vos rêves á vos enfants! (Parents! Tell your children your dreams!) - Papillons surréalistes (Surreal butterflies), December 1924((Katia Sowels, Le Surréalisme d'abord et toujours, T...

Completing the cluster is @mythrijega.bsky.social , who reflects on how depictions of “the messiness of parental dreams and responsibilities” in MSCL resonate for her. MSCL provided “an uncanny accompaniment” that helped shape an understanding of a complex diasporic life. post45.org/2025/05/surr...

The Voice of Winnie Holzman - Post45 My So-Called Life is full of Angela Chase’s voice. As the protagonist, the young teen’s thoughts — unfiltered, emotional, hilarious, self-involved — are threaded in voice-over throughout the series. T...

For @ehl.bsky.social, the voice of MSCL's creator, Winnie Holzman (who would go on to write the musical and film adaptation of Wicked), stands out. Holzman’s style has had an enormous & largely unrecognized effect on popular culture, especially on depictions of girlhood. post45.org/2025/05/the-...

A Lover’s Discord: Angela’s Overanalyzing - Post45 “But what above love?” asks Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, as part of her attempt to reconsider the role that “passionate attachments” play in academic criticism.((Rita Felski, The Limits of C...

MSCL’s main character, Angela Chase, is both loved and abhorred for her over-analyzing. Her fraught monologues have been read as both the center of the show’s relatability & as whining and entitled. @cmceleney.bsky.social probes this ambivalence in "A Lover’s Discord" post45.org/2025/05/a-lo...

My So-Called Teen Dramas - Post45 I came into adolescence in the age of the supernatural teen drama. Spanning across novels, television, and film from the mid-aughts through the 2010s, the likes of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, The CW’s...

“I came into adolescence in the age of the supernatural teen drama,” writes @oliviastowell.bsky.social, before embarking on an exploration of MSCL's dogged realism. What is lost—socially and aesthetically—when the real texture of teen life is not represented on television? post45.org/2025/05/my-s...

Why Jordan Doesn’t Have “Dyslexia”: Refusing the Romance of Literacy in My-So Called Life - Post45 In Episode 7 of My So-Called Life, “Why Jordan Can’t Read,” the show’s central character Angela Chase learns that her crush Jordan Catalano has a learning disability and tries to explain it to him. Wh...

Situating My So-Called Life in the history of the dyslexia diagnosis in the 90s and 2000s, @elishacohn.bsky.social examines how the episode “Why Jordan Can’t Read” epitomizes the show’s ambivalent attitude toward development & speaks back to prevailing ableist attitudes. post45.org/2025/05/refu...

Jordan Catalano, the Female Gaze, and the Importance of Being Beautiful in My So-Called Life - Post45 In seventh grade I started talking less and leaning more. It was 1994-95, the year of My So-Called Life’s only season, and the girls in my school were enthralled with Jordan Catalano. Jordan was beaut...

In “Jordan Catalano, the Female Gaze, and the Importance of Being Beautiful in My So-Called Life,” Steven T. Gravatt probes the objectification of Jordan Catalano as a voiceless sex object, investigating the effects of turning the tables on the male gaze in MSCL. post45.org/2025/05/the-...

Liberation on the Dance Floor: Rickie Vasquez and the Affective Politics of Brownness in My So-Called Life - Post45 The eleventh episode of My So-Called Life (1994-1995) includes a brief but influential scene that I have returned to repeatedly over the years since it first aired: Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz), a que...

Focusing on a single dance scene in My So-Called Life, @uncannydazzler.bsky.social examines the series’ groundbreaking representation of Rickie. Miller shows how Rickie’s dance functions as “a beacon of resistance” even as racial hierarchies inevitably reassert themselves. post45.org/2025/05/libe...

Introduction - Post45 It was the summer of 2006 and I'd just met a guy and couldn’t stop daydreaming about him. He was good looking with piercing blue eyes and dark hair. He was quiet and cool. Beyond those details, I didn...

“Sometimes someone says something really small, and it just fits right into this empty place in your heart." For @dfmorgan.bsky.social, this encapsulates MSCL for many viewers: “a single perfect season — that was foundational in our understanding of self.” post45.org/2025/05/intr...

Contemporaries - Post45 Post45 seeks to reinvigorate the erstwhile convention of academic critics not only describing past traditions but also actively intervening in current tastes. It provides a forum for writers to conver...

New cluster!! post45.org/contemporari... ❣️ 📺 ⌨️ 🥰 Edited by @dfmorgan.bsky.social ! "My So-Called Life at 30" features essays on intimacy, literacy, fan studies, mobility, migration, dance, beauty culture, teen dramas, Winnie Holzman, diaspora and fandom, narratology, over-analysis, & more!

portrait of young people distorted through a watercolor filter

Check out post45.org/contemporaries on Thursday, May 29, for the Post45: Contemporaries *My So-Called Life* cluster! 🛎️ 🗓️ 🫧 ✍️ 🎈

portrait of young people distorted through a watercolor filter

🗣️ *My So-Called Life* turned 30 (1994-1995) this year! We've got a cluster for you, stay tuned—

Ed. by @dfmorgan.bsky.social, & ft. @uncannydazzler.bsky.social, Steven T. Gravatt, @cmceleney.bsky.social, @elishacohn.bsky.social, @mythrijega.bsky.social, @ehl.bsky.social, @oliviastowell.bsky.social

Close Reading Is For Everyone | Defector In Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend, a famous writer kills himself. Not long before, he complains to the narrator about readers: “People talking about a book as if it were just another thing, like...

In my pursuit of descriptive games writing over prescriptive, I love reading this.
Also this is a beautiful way to frame the act of analyzing a work:
"Close reading requires someone you want to persuade... whose judgment you care about, and for whom you want your ideas about art and life to matter"

🚌🚉♨️ stop by Post45.org/contemporaries for our latest cluster! “Mobilizing Literature: A Response”

I read the Lawrence essay in ms for ELH, so it’s even more exciting to see it elicit such a stellar set of commentaries.

Moving Beyond Institutionalism - Post45 As a graduate student, and later as a junior scholar specializing in the literatures of the Americas, I sought out many books, articles, and reviews by members of the Post45 group. I consider one of t...

To close out the cluster, @jefflawcdm.bsky.social generously responds to everyone's responses, prodding us to not just *say* we're cognizant of social movements, but to *cite* the scholars of social movements beyond literary criticism.

post45.org/2025/03/movi...

Institutional Recalcitrance, Institutional Refractions - Post45 Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” argues that Jamesonian cultural materialism and McGurlian institutionalism “have set the agenda for critical debate” among scholars of post-1945 US literatur...

Then, @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social suggests that perhaps we cannot turn away from institutions too suddenly or quickly, especially given the dialectical nature of social movements and institutions.

post45.org/2025/03/inst...

Social Movements, Institutions, and Multiethnic Literatures of the US - Post45 Jeffrey’s Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” inspired an immediate and excited response, especially from scholars who ensconce themselves thoroughly in the often-forgotten literary histories of social...

For @franciscondine.bsky.social, Lawrence's essay is an opportunity to think about the historical whiteness of Post45, and to perhaps think very carefully about how to establish and elaborate institutions of literary criticism.

post45.org/2025/03/soci...