Introduction: The Time of the Semipublic Intellectual

LILI LOOFBOUROW is finishing her dis­sertation, “Excremental Virtue: Eating and Reading in the Age of Milton,” at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has appeared in venues including the New York Times Magazine, the Guard­ian, Salon, the New Republic, The Awl, The Hairpin, and The New Inquiry.

PHILLIP MACIAK is assistant professor of En­glish and film and media arts at Loui­siana State University, Baton Rouge. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Adaptation, J19, Film Quarterly, Slate, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is at work on a book about secularism and American visual culture in the silent era to be entitled The Disappearing Christ.

This article was first published in the March 2015 issue of PMLA.

[gview file=”https://scholcomm.mla.hcommons.org/files/2015/10/pmla.2015.130.2.439.pdf”]