The AK Collection
To get you through to the publication of Immediacy: or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism
EDITOR’S NOTE: On the occasion of AK being named the 9th “most influential person in art” and also “heir to Fredric Jameson’s thinking” by ArtReview, I’m updating the collection to include her more recent appearances.
Anna Kornbluh has made more appearances on The American Vandal Podcast than any other guest. She is also among the most popular. Before the most recent season began, Kornbluh had appeared on the three most-downloaded episodes in the show’s back catalog.
As I put it during an MLA panel earlier this year, it isn’t just Anna’s deep engagement and increasing influence over fields the podcast frequently covers, it’s also her idiosyncratic delivery, the high-octane arpeggiated lists, the infectious energy and the notes of hope she sounds even while unfurling incisive structural analyses and dire warnings about the future of the profession, the political-economic system, and the planet.
“Too Late Capitalism” entered my critical lexicon the instant I read an early draft of what would eventually become one of the chapters in Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Kornbluh’s forthcoming book from Verso, just one example of how she has shaped my critical lexicon.
Immediacy recently became available for preorder, but it won’t be published until January, and frankly, people are jonesing.
So, here’s your one-stop spot for AK’s many Vandal appearances.
Bootstrapping Across Dystopia: Autofiction, Autotheory, Autoeverything
The World’s Work, Episode #3
The most obvious primer for Immediacy, Kornbluh, Merve Emre, and I discuss some works-in-progress, including selections from the forthcoming book, in an effort to diagnose the personal narrative turn in both fiction and criticism.
Ministry For The Future
2022 Worldwide Climate Teach-In Special Episode
Discussion of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel and the broader genre of Climate Fiction which has become an increasing focus of Kornbluh’s recent work with Sheri-Marie Harrison and Min Hyoung Song.
Ponzi Austerity In The Age of Cultural Abundance
Criticism LTD, Episode #3
Kornbluh appears in several episodes of Criticism LTD, but most extensively here, alongside Christopher Newfield and Jed Esty, trying to delineate connections between the methods of criticism and the crisis of the neoliberal university.
2024
The Corporate Allegory Binge, Episode #4
Recorded the day after the publication of Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Verso. Many allusions to the book, as well as analysis of media for the coming year with Kornbluh and J. D. Connor.
Working Conditions (#MLA2023)
Special 50th Episode
A discussion of the working conditions of literary studies scholars with Kornbluh and then MLA President, Christopher Newfield, in the days before the 2023 MLA Convention organized around that topic.
Always Historicize?
A Tale of Today, Episode #4
Kornbluh and many others weigh in on what Fredric Jameson made by his famous imperative to “Always historicize.”
Showtime’s Billions & COVID Form
Vandalizing The Chair, Episode #4
Kornbluh and I share a resilient fandom for Showtime’s sensationalist BDSM pornocopia of libertarian hedge-bros and establishment Dems. Here we survey the fifth season, produced during the pandemic, with Devin William Daniels.
Robinhood, r/WallStreetBets, Who’s Yellen Now, & The GameStop-ification of Finance
Season 2, Episode #2
Kornbluh’s first Vandal appearance features four critical finance scholars (also Michelle Chihara and Leigh Claire La Berge) reveling in the political-economic absurdity and pop culture hilarity of the 2021 GameStop short squeeze.
Fredric Jameson R.I.P.
In the Summer of 2024, Matt Seybold asked Anna Kornbluh what Fredric Jameson meant to literary criticism. On the occasion of his passing in September of that year, we shared her answer.