BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you've read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We'll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there's no pressure to be an expert—bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.
Two short, very different essays this week—pair them how you like.
What does it mean to grow up fluent in irony?
Wallace's essay argues that television trained a generation of American writers and readers to be endlessly self-aware, endlessly knowing, allergic to sincerity. He's writing as a novelist worried about his own toolkit—if irony is the only mode television has taught us to value, what happens to fiction that wants to mean something? Long and funny in places, sharp and a little anxious throughout, it's an early and still-relevant diagnosis of a problem many people now just call "being online."
Why should we have to fully understand someone to respect them?
Glissant pushes back on the idea that real connection requires total transparency—that we must fully grasp another person or culture in order to value them. He argues for a right to opacity instead: people and cultures can remain partly illegible to each other and still relate, still build solidarity, without one side having to dissolve into something fully knowable by the other. Short, poetic, and quietly radical—a useful counterpoint to Wallace, and to any framework that treats "understanding" as the only path to respect.