One might say that "Torch Song" is, in part, about the urgency of the effort to pin things down and what wild dart throwing that desire leads to.

- Laura Mullen

The failure of protection, the importance of recognizing the ways in which we influence (and infect) each other - the fact that being an "individual"…

- Laura Mullen

And Complicated Grief is a text that announces, from the start, in its citation of influence, dense intertextuality and hybridity, a failure of some …

- Laura Mullen

Given our examination of the behavior of our police forces at this moment the question of protection has an extra resonance, yes?

- Laura Mullen

If we take seriously the idea that the stories we want to hear shape the stories we can (and want to, and are allowed to) tell, then the canon emerge…

- Laura Mullen

Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in …

- Laura Mullen

Wherever something is "pinned down" there's a little hole - at least one - more likely many.

- Laura Mullen

"Influence" is itself influenced, coming from an Italian word for the outbreak of a disease (influenza, outbreak). Influence is that which flows acro…

- Laura Mullen

Helen Vendler calls this kind of interrogation of a work "roads not taken," suggesting that it's useful, when writing critically, to consider what di…

- Laura Mullen