Camille Bordas: The Material

The Material opens at a morning English department meeting in Chicago’s Loop, where colleagues from Victorian Literature, Rhetoric, Theory, Medieval Studies, and Stand-Up—yes, Stand-Up—assemble. The department chair Sword, teacher of epiphany and quoter of Baudelaire, has an announcement. “I will keep this brief,” he says, spurring comedy professor Kruger to start a note: “I’ll be brief: Part One, Section A, Subsection 1.”