Jed Esty @jde2022 Twitter profile

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

In a sea of great books about the political economy of US or UK decline, offers a brief comparative analysis. Culture matters: myths & beliefs are the hard news story. Optimism after MAGA: the US can still avoid UK-style superpower nostalgia.

The Future of Decline - Jed Esty

As the US becomes a second-place nation, can it shed the superpower nostalgia that still haunts the UK? The debate over the US's fading hegemony has raged and sputtered for 50 years, glutting the...

www.sup.org

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Teaching a course on great novellas Spring 23. Melville, Mann, Tolstoy, RLS, Kafka, Mansfield, Morrison, Kanafani, Ozick, O. Butler, CM Machado, Lu Xun, H. DeWitt. @mervatim says N Ginzburg. Who else should I include/consider? (Critical takes on the novella also welcome)

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

11 months

I want to teach a class on "Critical Debate." Why do (good) arguments about cultural objects matter? How do positions evolve/deepen, once staked? Units on crisp, consequential, classic debates over a single poem, novel, song/symphony, film, painting, tv show. Suggestions? Tnx

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Everything I wanted my students to know about Holden Caulfield they learned from reading Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case.” 50 years earlier, 230 pages shorter, subtler, and more devastating.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

"By Other Means: The Cold War and U.S. Empire in Asia" This symposium organized by @YoonSunLee2 and Kent Puckett, with talks from @paulnadal_ , Kelly Rich, Karl Britto, Penny Fielding, and others, will be open for zoom participants via this link.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

After the West: Conrad and Nabokov in Long-Wave Literary History I tried these ideas out on a panel with Colleen Lye, Monica Popescu, and @OtherwiseMiami in 2012 (!). Thanks to them and the dozens of other colleagues who helped me hone this over 10 yrs!

After the West: Conrad and Nabokov in Long-Wave Literary History | PMLA | Cambridge Core

After the West: Conrad and Nabokov in Long-Wave Literary History - Volume 137 Issue 5

www.cambridge.org

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

Kent Puckett and @YoonSunLee2 set out a far-reaching cultural history of Proxy Wars in this issue of @rep_journal . Karl Britto, @PenFielding , Kelly Rich, @paulnadal_ , and @VaughnRasberry respond with fascinating cases. Delighted to be included.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

10 months

The alarming consequence of a right-wing and woke-phobic counteroffensive on higher ed. It’s Desantisism on a national scale. It makes cravenly opportunistic use of anti-anti-semitism to wage an unnecessary culture war.

AAUP–Penn

@aaup_penn

10 months

Threats to academic freedom at Penn reached alarming new heights today. Unelected trustees with no academic expertise are attempting a hostile takeover of the core academic functions of the University of Pennsylvania. 🧵 Philly Inquirer has the story:

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

If you or someone you know likes audiobooks, brevity, and the idea that mainstream media talk about US decline is crazily contradictory, DM me for a free copy of *The Future of Decline,* just released on Audible. I have a bunch of promo codes!

The Future of Decline

Check out this great listen on Audible.com. The debate over the US's fading hegemony has raged and sputtered for 50 years, glutting the market with prophecies about American decline. Media experts...

www.audible.com

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

PHL colleagues and friends, please come join us Thursday afternoon and evening for refreshments and for a lively discussion of new books, of art and the everyday, of culture in times of crisis and decline

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

11 months

I should have made clear that this teaching idea came directly from listening to @MEASeybold talk to G Graff about not letting literary studies become ornamental arts within higher Ed; fight the deskilling of our students and ourselves in the classroom too

The Empire of Criticism (Part One)

The tripartite finale of "Criticism LTD" begins with a the feud between Matthew Arnold and Mark Twain, followed by "Bed Glee" [14:00], "Outing Criticism" [40:00

podcasts.apple.com

Jed Esty

@jde2022

11 months

I want to teach a class on "Critical Debate." Why do (good) arguments about cultural objects matter? How do positions evolve/deepen, once staked? Units on crisp, consequential, classic debates over a single poem, novel, song/symphony, film, painting, tv show. Suggestions? Tnx

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

11 months

Couldn’t wait for tomorrow’s drive to listen to this far-reaching concluding trilogy. Grateful to @MEASeybold @becimay @BruceRobbins6 for taking my framing of decline seriously. But also just wowed by the way…

Matt Seybold

@MEASeybold

11 months

This is the end, my friends.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

10 months

Was once happy that I managed to say what’s wrong with mainstream and academic accounts of American Decline in under 30k words. This is better. Thanks @hujane

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Debt matters. So do novels. So does sharp, searching work like this, showing us that novels reflect and reimagine real social problems. I see my students of all kinds now experiencing what once only the most vulnerable did: futurelessness gnawing at their future.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

11 months

The final arc in Matt Seybold’s densely woven and very timely look at the current state and future prospects of literary criticism!

Matt Seybold

@MEASeybold

11 months

Gerald Graff’s stories from The Bad Old Days of High Theory & The Good Ole Days of Public Ed, @jde2022 defends historicism, I ask Arnold & Twain to make nice, @_ryanruby_ becomes a critic for the healthcare, & Wash U’s Ctr For The Literary Arts w/ Danielle Dutton & @ProfInfante .

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

This terrific essay moves quickly and strikes sharply at a whole set of questions about the kinds of novels that academic critics want to digest, and the kinds they don't. Plus a provocative thesis about why we like to store postmodernism safely in the history bin. Check it out!

Sarah Wasserman

@SarahLWasserman

2 years

So many people helped me with this essay that took, ahem, several years to publish: Emily Hyde, Jim English, @jde2022 , @kinohin , Gordon Hutner, and especially Reader 2 who really hated it 🙃

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

John Merrick's review captures what was best about Eagleton way back in the days of *Exiles and Emigres* and shows us Eagleton returning to a key point 50 years later... 1/

The Baffler

@thebafflermag

2 years

The five literary critics surveyed in Terry Eagleton’s “Critical Revolutionaries” were united by their shared sense of a degraded culture. But only Raymond Williams identified capitalism as the culprit.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

Seconding this rec. of the episode featuring @hinesaj and his book — listening back now has me still thinking about what’s the salvage ratio for close reading (and/vs. New Crit), ie what is its democratic/socially critical potential in classrooms now

Outside Literary Studies

A timely reconsideration of the history of the profession, Outside Literary Studies investigates how midcentury Black writers built a critical practice tuned to the struggle against racism and...

press.uchicago.edu

Sarah Brouillette

@brouillettese

1 year

just listened to @hinesaj here can recommend🔥

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

@MEASeybold connects dots very skillfully in this series; "ponzi austerity" gains conceptual depth from @yanisvaroufakis while @V21collective and @cnewf convincingly link context (deskilling/defunding of humanities work) to the content of so many recent critical/method debates.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

9 months

Fascinating if rough indicator of declining faith in the future of the west. Probably tracks the material facts of economic dynamism shifting out of its historical western core. Even more suggestive is to pair this analysis with another recent Burn-Murdoch chart....1/2

John Burn-Murdoch

@jburnmurdoch

9 months

NEW: analysis of millions of books published over the centuries suggests western society is shifting away from a culture of progress, and towards one of caution, worry and risk-aversion. I think this is one of the most important challenges facing us today.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

Thanks, @fewstein ! And thanks to Kim Adams for a great exchange. The format of @HighTheoryPodc1 really worked to distill this to a crisp 18 minutes.

Faith Wilson Stein

@fewstein

1 year

With a plug for THE FUTURE OF DECLINE, from @stanfordpress : "It’s a cool short book with an x-ray spaceman on the cover. You should read it." Yes. Yes, you should.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

You can also join us via zoom if you are not in the PHL area; see link/QR below. @OUPAcademic @stanfordpress @ericawetter @fewstein @V21collective

Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

PHL colleagues and friends, please come join us Thursday afternoon and evening for refreshments and for a lively discussion of new books, of art and the everyday, of culture in times of crisis and decline

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

This piece is aimed against declinism in the UK/US, which tells uneasy voters that American or British global supremacy were birthright & destiny, that to accept the rise of other powers is a failure of national mettle. @dbessner @EdwardGLuce @martadassu

Jed Esty: Liz Truss’ stormy reign has lessons for the US on how not to be an aging superpower

The rapid meltdown of former British Prime Minster Liz Truss, who resigned after only 44 days in office and is being succeeded by former Boris Johnson Treasury chief Rishi Sunak, should alarm Ameri…

www.chicagotribune.com

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

Great review of a weirdly compelling novel and this line about spectrality is so right; the thin description of Alex cuts against sumptuous interiority, suburban realism (Cheever, Updike) and trauma math but it’s 1/

Sheila Liming

@seeshespeak

1 year

@hujane @bookforum “This kind of aggressively spectral heroine—thin in more ways than one—seems increasingly a mainstay of contemporary Anglophone fiction.” BAM.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

9 months

@alexandermillen is indeed smart & stylish; it's a brilliant historical reading of Gissing's style. Check it out! (V. proud to be associated w/ Alex, along w/ @EmilySteinlight and Paul Saint-Amour -- thanks, Dan!) Another up-and-coming close reader for you and @johannawinant !

Dan Sinykin

@dan_sinykin

9 months

A smart, stylish essay on the politics of style from @alexandermillen in the latest MLQ. Jamesonian, Esty-ian—a Penn grad, I'll eat my shoe if he's not a student of @jde2022

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

11 months

2/ …that Matt brings his own frames — ponzi austerity, new crit, para-acad crit, new media/platforms for crit, method wars, Chicago fight— all together w/a fierce address to the pedagogy of cruelty. Puts the humane back into the humanities, calls bs on Ed tech neolib austerity.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

@marshallkmarsh @V21collective Great summer project! Recommend Claire Keegan.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

More excellent reflections on T.S. Eliot @becimay : "...the availability of *The Waste Land* as a model has made it possible for poets ever since 1922 to demand more of their readers than they would have dreamt of doing before." @QuigleyMM

Beci Carver

@becimay

2 years

Me, Robert Crawford, Jahan Ramazani & David Barnes talking about The Waste Land! I’d love to know what you think 💭

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Declinism's Hot Summer. As usual, but even more than usual, many in the UK and the US have been talking about national decline. What are they saying, exactly? Highlights to come over the next week. @dbessner @DEHEdgerton @fstockman @RonBrownstein @davies_will @JeanneMorefiel1

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

Yes and just the beginning of Kelly’s work on this subject.

Paul Nadal

@paulnadal_

1 year

Kelly M. Rich's essay, on transnational Korean adoption, in "Proxy Wars" special issue of REPRESENTATIONS is moving, powerful, necessary.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

The family business melodrama, from Dynasty & Dallas to Succession, Empire, and Yellowstone. The long arc from primetime to streaming, Reaganomics to What Reaganomics has wrought. All expertly analyzed by Michael Szalay @ProfGirl @MEASeybold

Puzzles of Collective Intention, Corporate Authorship, Family Business Insurrection, & HBO’s...

Our sixth season – “HBO, From Pulp to Prestige” – kicks off with a discussion of conglomeration, collective intention, and corporate authorship through HBO’s original …

marktwainstudies.com

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

My PS: the neolib scrapping of higher ed rages in the UK and US, the two nations whose political culture of lost greatness is most entrenched. It takes shape as toxic nostalgia for "free" markets, ignoring a worthy history of state investment in research and other public goods

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Thanks for the boost, Ben — recorded before the Trussonomic meltdown, but perhaps gaining relevance on both sides of the Atlantic this week.

Ben Railton

@AmericanStudier

2 years

@NewBooksNetwork episode on another important new book, @jde2022 ’s The Future of American Decline:

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

10 months

@AmyClukey Morpho Eugenia by A S Byatt (Angels & Insects)

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

Yes. What a laser like piece by Szalay on Succession. "Succession and prestige TV generally portray reactionary politics in idiosyncratically personal and ultimately humanizing registers as a function of their commitment to treating families that way."

A S Hamrah

@hamrahrama

1 year

Excellent excerpt from new Michael Szalay book on quality TV breaks down shows’ insidious family dynamics.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

This Janen Ganesh piece is great. But I would say that it precisely is imperial nostalgia that London elites over-identify with US destiny (that's how the baton pass was managed at Bretton Woods). Likewise US elites over-identify with British icons of crown and empire.

Howard French

@hofrench

2 years

This is sharp and devastating. "Truss learns the hard way that Britain isn’t America."

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

44-day Truss means PM passes quickly from young Boomer Bojo to elder Millennial Sunak. If King Charles and Joe Biden were to yield in the next couple of years, their titles too could go right to Millennials Prince William and Pete Buttigieg (both b. 1982). Gen X Leapfrog!

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

Great reflections from @pjmaciak on Justified; on how the new version does/n’t work as rust belt odyssey to the old Bible Belt Iliad. “The drama of Justified was never about Givens as a fish out of water; it was about drowning in your own past.”

Phillip Maciak

@pjmaciak

1 year

Original recipe JUSTIFIED isn't experimenting with form or inventing new prestige categories. It's just executing nearly note-perfect genre television. I hope its (fine!) reboot — and my essay here — will encourage people to go back and watch.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

The whole episode and the line of inquiry set by @MEASeybold reminds of why I always go back to Raymond Williams salvaging by dialectical reversal the romantic anticapitalisms of C19 conservatives in *Culture and Society* @V21collective @cnewf @isanchezprado

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@DrDuncanBell Tenants of elite institutions who view their societies or apex civilizations as collapsing often start thinking big. They have the most to lose. Big History (Jared Diamond) and macrosociology (Arrighi) in the US looking back. Longtermism in the UK looking forward.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

@DrDuncanBell Great book by Doug Mao on utopian writing; stretches toward the fantasy category/genre at times:

Inventions of Nemesis

A wide-ranging reevaluation of utopian literature and philosophy, from Plato to Chang-Rae Lee

press.princeton.edu

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Not sure if this is paywalled in the UK, but I am building on the work of @hannahrosewoods @DEHEdgerton @KojoKoram @fotoole @AnthonyBarnett @chakrabortty and many others in thinking about declinism and nostalgia as they carom between UK and US, and pull votes to the right

Chicago Tribune Opinion

@chitribopinions

2 years

If the American political mainstream does not pull out of its nostalgic tailspin soon, we will fall prey to the same affliction that has bedeviled the United Kingdom, a professor writes.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Declinism's Hot Summer. Starting point: facing pages of the NY Times op-ed on August 7th. @fstockman on the fall of US prestige in Africa; R Seymour on the crash of UK hope after Bojo's exit; @willmacaskill on the necessity to save civilization. How do these 3 relate? 1/

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

What the UK and the US have in common despite all the differences: ex-superpowers who have used the rhetoric of decline and the nostalgia for greatness as a running smokescreen / anti-Keynesian pretext to pour wealth and income growth into the upper 10%

Jeff Stein

@JStein_WaPo

2 years

New CBO report: The poorest *half* of America -- ~150 million people -- hold only *2 percent* of the country's total wealth Wealth of top 10 percent has grown markedly since 1989 That tiny little line at the bottom of this chart is half the country

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Charles III was born – like so many recent US leaders (Biden, Trump, Bush) – in the 1940s. Their worldviews are all forged in old ideas of Anglo-American power. What if he joins Biden in voluntary self-retirement in 2023 to inspire generational change? @EdwardGLuce @AyoCaesar

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@SimonDuring @JimEnglishPenn has really interesting reflections on audio book delivery of novels, having taught a couple of experimental seminars with and about audio books. @dan_sinykin

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Great essay about an indelible show (and its potential disappearance in the current corporate streaming climate). 100% agree that Patel and Lawler deserve Emmys.

Phillip Maciak

@pjmaciak

2 years

For @slate ’s year in review, I wrote about STATION ELEVEN, the best show I saw this year. Possibly the best show I’ve ever seen. Watch it with the people you love right now.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Yes. MAGA decline rhetoric is fully weaponized at this point. One key to disarming this story about America ("failing nation") is for mainstream moderates and liberals to unplug their own under-recognized, deeply-rooted nostalgia for American greatness in the old postWWII sense

Jennifer Taub

@jentaub

2 years

This is our future unless we vote for Democrats. Full on fascism. With bad music piped in.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@sarahebull Not sure if this was already mentioned :

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Yes. True for US supremacy, too: “...'decline' is not a neutral characterization of economic and geopolitical changes. It implies something avoidable and regrettable, whereas these developments have been inevitable — and, in the case of the end of the British Empire, desirable"

madebyhistory

@madebyhistory

2 years

"Of course, the U.K. no longer commands the raw power of a century ago. But “decline” is not a neutral characterization of economic and geopolitical changes. It implies something avoidable..." Guy Ortolano on the "tired cliche" of Britain's decline.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

11 months

@kittfreeman @QuigleyMM Yes! People disagreeing about Eliot’s writing could fill half the syllabus and this case study @QuigleyMM would be a great one

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

So spectral that it pops the novel into a gimmick zone that I wondered a) if we were headed for a Sixth Sense stunt and b) if Cline lost the chance to do more with labors evanescence invisibility per @anniemcclanahan ‘s question. Anyway great stuff @hujane !

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

1/ For great reads and threads on the meaning of monarchy see @PriyaSatia @James11Vernon @johnpmerrick @leninology @DEHEdgerton @AnthonyBarnett ....

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@RebeccaSpang @DavidAvromBell Yes ! —the hospitals with academic units barnacled to their hulls. On which point, see this excellent recent piece. @hinesaj

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@DrDuncanBell Climate, covid, and authoritarianism at global scale all push the mind to think of historical experience in epic, geological, or even cosmic terms. But this has happened before: H.G. Wells’s *Outline of History* after its author witnessed the cataclysms of WWI, e.g.

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@jde2022

2 years

6/ In this summer of swirling rhetoric about declinism in the UK and US, Merrick's point, via Eagleton, via Raymond Williams, is crucial: "Culture is important, for Williams and Eagleton alike, because in its best moments, it helps prefigure the new world to be built."

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

@pamthur @marshallkmarsh @MandatoryOptio1 @pariscot75011 @DavidKurnick Wow great lineup! And you will set the real/cool bar.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

Strongly agree!

Chris Fan 范致忠

@sea_fan

1 year

This is a tremendously important article, grounded in meticulous archival research, that will change how we use the terms "human capital," "neoliberalism," and the "model minority," which are more often bandied about than historically situated.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Here's why Americans need to pay attention to UK events/history. Toxic nostalgia for greatness blocks the modernization of national identity and underwrites ancient policy (on regulation, climate, defense). Let's leave the 80s mantra -- Look Backward and Deregulate! -- behind.

David Edgerton

@DEHEdgerton

2 years

Yup, pretending to be best is the enemy of doing better.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

Clear take on US future as leading not dominant power. US thinkers need to tell a new story: the end of unipolarity is a real chance to make US more functional, prosperous & democratic. Generational project for those born after 1975. @QuincyInst @stephenwertheim

Sarang Shidore

@globalsarang

1 year

In today's @nytimes I argue - even if BRICS didn't do much more than expand, it would challenge US primacy in significant ways by undercutting three tools Washington uses for global domination. But this is not a bad thing - it's an opportunity for America!

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

9 months

3 "...insisting that the question is open whilst refusing the blackmail of American exceptionalism would itself be a step in the right direction." Yes!

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

The spirit of NLR — not its content — would reinvigorate US intellectual life at the current dead zone where culture meets politics. Not far-fetched for left-center elites to insist on a humane, inclusive, and democratic version of US history.

Gavin Jacobson

@GavJacobson

2 years

"the suggestion that a curriculum drawn from 1970s cultural studies and back issues of the New Left Review can offer an antidote to Maga ideology is far-fetched". @adam_tooze on Esty's 'The Future of Decline'

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

10 months

@jmakr

Perry Anderson · Dégringolade: The Fall of France

www.lrb.co.uk

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@Mrmosman66 @mervatim Thinking about it. Have maybe burned out on it.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@scriblerian Seconding Calendly

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@ecourtem Lost Kate bush album cover art

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@ecourtem Great observations about a book that is even weirder than it was

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Guy Ortolano get this just right: "rather than offering a worldly understanding of worldly events, declinists fixate on a single country’s supposed errors." @DEHEdgerton @chakrabortty I argue the same about US declinists in a chapter "Against Declinism"

The Future of Decline - Jed Esty

As the US becomes a second-place nation, can it shed the superpower nostalgia that still haunts the UK? The debate over the US's fading hegemony has raged and sputtered for 50 years, glutting the...

www.sup.org

Washington Post Opinions

@PostOpinions

2 years

Headlines claim Britain is declining. They aren’t new — but are wrong, Guy Ortolano writes in @MadeByHistory .

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

11 months

@foxxphelan Perfect. A short classic text and a consequential debate with clear lines of demarcation. I can't wait to get into this with students. Thanks, Jim.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@ecourtem Me too— surely no coincidence that so many of us who learned from Mark are teaching and reading along the trail we joined with him

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

@DallawayJulia

Overlooking Damage: Art, Display, and Loss in Times of Crisis - Jonah Siegel

What does it mean to look? How does looking relate to damage? These are the fundamental questions addressed in Overlooking Damage. From the Roman triumph to the iconoclasm of ISIS and the Taliban to...

www.sup.org

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

If this royal crest to the wave of North Atlantic political nostalgia has you thinking about the Future of the Aging Superpowers, @OwenBennettJone and I tried to figure it out @stanfordpress @laurenspieller @jentaub

The Future of American Decline: A Conversation with Jed Esty

The UK spent decades in its the post imperial phase trying to work out how it should think of itself and align itself in the world - a debate that Brexit showed

podcasts.apple.com

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@aktange Mac is the best! (son just graduated)

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@HeerJeet @mervatim Great ! Thanks for this -- much needed for the syllabus. Coetzee also has interesting thoughts about the novella.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

9/ But conservatives often, confusingly, paint their opponents as "declinists" who have forsaken greatness, accepted mediocrity, embraced shrinkage. Kwasi Karteng in today's Financial Times: “We do not have to appease the voices of decline.”

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@LAHeffernan So well deserved! Congratulations to you and @rbuurma

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Grateful for this sharply framed review from @adam_tooze . Lots to debate , esp. the underlying reasons that US elites can't relinquish the language of great power rivalry fueling economic war with China. It is not inevitable that the US conduct itself as eternal solo hegemon.

The New Statesman

@NewStatesman

2 years

The US is addicted to greatness – and haunted by its loss, writes @adam_tooze .

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@DavidKurnick @categorymistake @mervatim Spark is also always amazing in the classroom (like Chekhov and O'Connor. the icy ironies etc)

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

8/ Declinism is fundamentally conservative. It believes that the UK and the US were once more truly themselves at some point in the past (1870? 1950?) than they are now.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Yes -- a fascinating way to bring form and debt together! Everyone should read. And thanks, Jenn, for the apt ref. *Unseasonable Youth*. @JenLouiseWilson @OUPAcademic

Claire Dederer

@ClaireDederer

2 years

This is _fantastic_. "What makes student loan borrowers in recent fiction unique, and uniquely literary, is that they often complain of having been betrayed by narrative itself."

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

@pjmaciak Since 2002, Walt Goggins is the electric ascetic criminal Jesus of villains, magnetic resolver of red state / lost cause historical spectral value - converted to blue state spectator value, transvaluing drugs guns racism and money from LA to Harlan

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

5/ Decline is an actual, material process -- largely economic. Cultural and social factors feed into it, military and political consequences follow from it. It is mostly beyond the will of citizens, states, policy makers, media analysts, intellectuals.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

Alarmism over national decline in the U.S. is corrosive. But so is blithe optimism about endless U.S. supremacy. Mainstream writers on American decline split the reading public between panic and complacency; neither makes historical sense.

Lauren Frayer

@lfrayer

1 year

"The crisis of the American mind these days is looking at a Chinese future and a British past, and feeling a sort of moral panic," @Penn 's Jed Esty tells the @FT 's @jemimajoanna .

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

3/ How does the analysis of declinism in the UK compare to its analysis in the US? Are the right and left speaking in parallel or divergent ways about national decline (as a matter of fact) and declinism (as rhetoric or belief)? @fotoole @chakrabortty

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

8 months

@pourfairelevide Here’s an excellent essay on the long legs of postmodernism into the present/into contemporary fiction. A great read @SarahLWasserman @HamiltonCain

Critical Darlings, Critical Dogs: Joseph O’Neill and What Contemporary Criticism Doesn’t Want

Abstract. This essay argues that the drive within literary studies to name new paradigms obscures key historical continuities in contemporary fiction. To e

academic.oup.com

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

Declinism's Hot Summer, Part II. from Boris Johnson to Truss, Mar-A-Lago to the Dobbs decision, Taiwan to Ukraine, Top Gun redux to empire redux (why Kojo Koram is right). @KojoKoram @chakrabortty @DouthatNYT @daniel_dsj2110

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

9 months

...in which Burn-Murdoch notes how much lower partisan trust is in the US than the UK. US media gives daily contradictory signals about western progress, blaring alarms of lost dynamism while preening about US supremacy. No wonder trust is low!

John Burn-Murdoch

@jburnmurdoch

9 months

It always blows my mind how much wider the partisan trust gap is for US media compared to the UK 🤯 Most British media is trusted (or distrusted) about equally by supporters of both major parties. That’s true of virtually no US media org. Deeply corrosive for US society.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@samhaselby Yes social experience + econ conditions. But these don't exclude culture. What you see as neoliberal elite culture skirmishes (as the welfare state dies) are also ways of fighting back vs. the very real (economic) effects of rightwing narratives that weaponize identity/belonging

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@J30607610 @mervatim maybe "Godliness" from the latter. I think it's a great Weberian "work ethic" fiction and good for thinking about hypercapitalism's (religious, settler colonial) history

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@jdconnor @MEASeybold I think this is the right answer -- he's just a young Gen X

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

1/ It is a superb essay, worth reading. Tooze argues that younger Americans defecting from exceptionalism. Wish I was as confident as Tooze that Gen Z has learned to ignore the stale yet mesmerizing idea that America is somehow not itself without absolute global supremacy!

New Left EViews

@NewLeftEViews

2 years

Superb essay by @adam_tooze on the different modes of Anglo-American decline, touching on the failures of the British left and the hubris of the American policy elite. Remember: decline is relative; domestic- and external decline are not always linked.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

11 months

@fewstein Yes and would like to teach Chekhov in every class if possible.

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

@paulnadal_ A really good one!

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@dan_sinykin @SimonDuring @JimEnglishPenn Ha ha true!

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@LKonstan I think *Bras Cubas* is a proto-modernist novel. Here is Roberto Schwarz: “The volubility undoes the rule of the clock, of conventionally sequential chains of events, of the ordering that is indispensable to active existence, but it does so in vain, for...

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

1 year

@DouthatNYT works hard to bring Tolkien and Fleming into view via classic anti-secular cultural criticism but it's hard to hold the moral linchpins (good ol conservatism, clown-villain progressivism) in place when the former now keeps dissolving into 1/

Ross Douthat

@DouthatNYT

1 year

My Wednesday column is on the power of American cultural imperialism over His Majesty's Secret Service:

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@pamthur True I think. And that’s one of the subtler compounds Cather layers into her language of teen alienation. So ahead of postwar youth culture!

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

2/ ... @conor is proposing a clean abdication for KCIII -- and if Prince William and Pete Buttigieg (both born 1982) are in the line of succession, then there can be a clean leap over GenX. (But of course Liz Truss is GenX so uh...hurrah!) @hannahrosewoods @chakrabortty

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@isanchezprado @mervatim yes! I did have GGM on my list but here are many others to revisit or discover; thank you!

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Jed Esty

@jde2022

2 years

@mervatim Ha! that series comes up often when I try to get my students to come up with homemade answers to lit crit questions about horror, suspense, etc

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