I'm sorry but if you are unreliable, I do NOT think you should be a narrator. Conveying trustworthy information is LITERALLY your job. If you are tragically lacking in self-knowledge or blinded by your own unwitting biases, maybe you are not the right person to tell the story
Can anyone recommend some new music? For context I mostly like music that is familiar and comforting and was meaningful to me at an earlier stage of my life
How do I connect with gen z students? I speak their language. I call literary theorists "theorycels". Formalist arguments are formpilled and historicising is contextmaxxing. If I talk about genre, i say "it's giving". The more they say "Please stop" the more I know it's working
Is there a doctor on the flight? Specifically a PhD in English literature? A passenger is angry about an evil character and we need someone to explain how fiction works
Me: I would like to see a list of everyone who works in the English department please
University website: our easy to use faculty directory is organised by shoe size and hobby
They should invent a profession where half the time you study texts in monastic solitude and half the time you talk animatedly to a room full of young people
Oh, you don't read fiction? How do you expect to be constituted as a bourgeois subject whose deep interiority replaces hereditary rank as a form of class distinction?
Asking my students to decide which Emily Dickinson line they would get as a tattoo and then holding a vote to choose the best one may not be the most pedagogically robust class exercise but I can recommend it as an icebreaker
Ohhh my god are you using dashes to indicate dialogue instead of inverted commas? Should we call the Paris Review? Should we throw a party? Should we invite James Joyce
Thank you for your email. My conception of time is qualitative rather than quantitative and cannot be reduced to a spatialised series of instants. It is hard to say when I will respond
Writers, and I cannot emphasise this enough, FINISH THE DRAFT. It is only when you have a complete draft that it can later be posthumously published by your friend and literary executor, possibly in direct contravention of your own express wishes
"Paranoid reading" refers to the suspicion that Google books knows exactly which pages you most need to access and deliberately omits them from the preview
One of the great things about academia is that good scholarship is more important than fancy connections. I vividly remember the night my friend and mentor Jacques Derrida told me this
Nice genre you got there, be a shame if someone revealed its historically contingent emergence as an unstable hybrid of multiple pre-existing discourses
And by "rizz", of course, I mean the process of "letteraturizzazione", or literaturisation, that befell the rhetorical tradition during the Hellenistic period
Overrated classic: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
- Trite juxtaposition of romance and reality
- Cliché ridden
- Product of its time
Read instead: Pierre Menard, Don Quixote
- Endlessly ambiguous
- Philosophically bold
- Thrillingly anachronistic
A renovation show called Buildingsroman in which contestants compete to outgrow their youthful romantic impulses and construct a respectable bourgeois dwelling
I am so tired of communicating clear boundaries to my deconstructionist friends only for them to limn them, drawing attention to the ambiguous slippage between inside and outside that all such attempts at containment conceal
Meet your students where they are. Lecture at the bus stop. Give feedback at the eras tour. Spring a pop quiz at a frozen yoghurt shop. Emerge from the ocean in full scuba gear clutching a list of supplementary readings
Sure, sex is great, but have you ever read a novel whose narrator has a more limited understanding of their own circumstances than what we, as readers, can infer?
Wow, ok, unfollowing now. I was a big fan of the Telemachus episode, did not know that later episodes mount a ludic assault on the very foundations of literary mimesis