Hrag Vartanian

A blog of art, culture, photography, writing and ideas.

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Entries Tagged as 'literary criticism'

The Birth of Armenian American Literature

July 23rd, 2007 · 9 Comments

I conducted an email interview with David Kherdian, the editor of a new anthology of first-generation Armenian American literature entitled, Forgotten Bread (Available at Amazon), which is slated to appear in bookstores this fall–coincidentally, I contributed a short chapter on writer Peter Sourian.
We chatted about a project that many hope will revitalize a little [...]

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Tags: American · Armenian · diaspora · literary · literary criticism

YouTube = New Global Folk Art

June 24th, 2007 · No Comments

There was a time when graffiti was a global folk art, it was the eighties and early nineties when street artists didn’t dominate the scene and scribbling on the wall wasn’t automatically labeled “gang graffiti.”
Now YouTube has supplanted graffiti as the global folk art. The audience is bigger and posted videos can be seen simultaneously [...]

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Tags: art criticism · literary criticism · pop culture

Don’t Tread on My Email

April 10th, 2007 · No Comments

Some of us love the informality of email and prefer that it resist institutionalization. Now the New Yorker reports, that two text-based professional (David Shipley, the Op-Ed editor of the Times, and Will Schwalbe, the editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books) have conjured up an email style guide.
Two years back, Slate.com suggested that the American and European [...]

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Tags: American · New York · literary · literary criticism · pop culture

Wiki-novels?

April 10th, 2007 · No Comments

Penguin Books, in collaboration with students at De Montfort University in Leicester (UK), created the world’s first Wiki-novel.
Nearly 1,500 people contributed to the one month project of A Million Penguins. Over 11,000 edits were made, 75,000 people visited the site, and more than 280,000 page views were recorded.
Perhaps it is a little lame to cite [...]

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Tags: literary · literary criticism · writing

Mourning Taniel Varoujan

April 5th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Friday, March 30, Marc Nichanian spoke at a HyeQ-sponsored event on the Armenian Turkish poet Taniel Varoujan. Even if it was a little difficult to follow at times it illuminated a main theme in the writer’s works.
Varoujan is one of those key artistic figures of the pre-1915 Genocide. He was deeply impacted by the culture [...]

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Tags: Armenian · diaspora · literary · literary criticism