Just explained the concept “cat lady” to my seven-year old. She cannot understand why that’s meant to be pejorative.

One of the most welcome developments in cussing over the past 15 years or so is the de-gendering of "asshole." Maybe not total, but definitely moving in that direction.

CBC’s Ideas has a lovely episode in a two-part series on Middlemarch. www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/...

Poststructuralism taught literary studies that language and reality are divided by a gap, and we should not trust the illusion of representation. But many theorists naively assume that demolishing hierarchies in language equals doing so in reality.

It's always interesting to elevate one's irritated scholarly intuitions to the level of a nameable pet peeve. For instance, I find myself balking against literary theorists' tendency to distinguish morality (bad) from ethics (good), as though the distinction somehow underwrites or corrects conduct.

I've been reading and rereading the introduction to Cavell's Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome for about five years now, and I keep finding more in it. The exhiliration I get from it reminds me of how it felt to have fields open up before me as an undergrad.

It's remarkable to see how beholden literary studies is to an ontological vision of the subject. So many CFPs keep recycle the same tired vocabulary: fluidity, porousness, hybridity, liminality . . . . Freedom = breaking barriers. Cultural libertarianism.

I envy the problems of the advocates of metafiction and reflexivity. Imagine having an audience of people so literate they need to be reminded it’s just fiction.

In "The Humanistic Case for AI Optimism," (Poetics Today 2024 45:2), So and Duerde argue for AI's potential benefits to literary studies. I find this article wrongheaded and sketch out why below.

Reading Foucault-inspired literary criticism from the '80s is strange. For all its conceptual elaboration, it rests on the naive belief that literary value is just a mask for epochal injustice. If you look for reasons why we should read and teach a novel or poem, you won't find it.

Is it possible to write a first book without the words “the Scylla and Charybdis”?

Fictional characters are moral agents. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

I hope that when it’s my time, I haven’t left hours and hours of video footage courting violence and mocking the suffering of others.

Korean has a saying, 수고했어, that can be used after someone has performed some burdensome activity (working, driving on a long trip, moving furniture, etc.). It is means roughly “you worked hard,” but it sounds kinder. It acknowledges someone’s effort. It’s a lovely thing to say and hear.

The Grapes of Irritation

We’re pleased to offer faculty a convenient new system for reimbursing research costs. Here are four 80 page PDFs that walk you through it. The system times out every 6 seconds. Due date for submissions is yesterday.

Best works in literary scholarship investigating human agency and the will? Something like Jennifer Fleissner’s Maladies of the Will and Yi-Ping Ong’s The Art of Being? Specifically accounts of agency that don’t reduce it to demographic coordinates or treat agency as political success?

Researching existentialism in literary studies is odd. Scholars who are opposed to progress narratives tend to regard the 20th century’s most influential intellectual movement as an adolescent misadventure, as though all those thinkers had to make do with it until poststructualism came along.

When I attended School of Criticism and Theory in 2019, Robert Brandom gave some lectures on Hegel. Most students didn't bother to show up, and I heard several scoffing at the very idea of taking Hegel seriously. At a Theory school.

Proud to announce my new book, The Liminal Interstice: Littoral Hybridity Across Heterotopic Borderland Palimpsests, a provocation to seeing the world in new ways that uses the exact same gesture as every other procative book of the past 40 years.

What are the best historical studies about the fate of American labor movements during World War I?

that moment of terror when you may have clicked on "contact me" and are waiting to see if your email app will come to life

Great site and good initiative.

In 2003, a senior professor and former upper administration told me that with the baby boomers retiring, a lot of academic jobs would open up. I wonder if they failed to understand the trends that were already underway in spite of having decades of administrative experience or because of it.

East Asian public transportation never ceases to amaze me. I live on the very edge of the Greater Seoul Area. There are fields and mountains out my window. Even so, I just walk 5 minutes to a bus stop and within 10 minutes, a bus will come. I’m in on express bus now that offer complimentary wifi.

"Consciousness implies the being of this table, of this packet of tobacco, of the lamp and, more generally, the being of the world." (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p29). It's a small delight to find writers slipping the environment of their writing into the text.

My new mission is to rescue the adjective "existential" from this sort of usage. All moments are existential.

When it comes to writing, I'm struck with hesitation at the idea that nobody will read what I'm writing. Sending out Bluesky tweets (or whatever) is actually great practice for that.

As an apostate of French theory, I am now convinced that antihumanism was a huge misadventure based on a debased view of "the human"--ontologically, historically, and ethically. The compulsion to evacuate the human from politics and ethics has been a series of own goals for the humanities.

Utilitarian in the streets; deontologist in the sheets.

Beauvoir on the narcissist. For her, it's the female narcissist, but this bit seems universal: The "narcissist refuses to accept she can be seen other than as she shows herself: [. . .] so busy contemplating herself, she totally fails to judge herself, and she falls so easily into ridiculousness."

Downsizing (2017) is one of the most misunderstood, underappreciated films of the last decade. It’s great and everyone should watch it multiple times.

The best classes I took as a student were either (a) a professor lecturing for over an hour on a topic in which they were experts, or (b) a collective close-reading of a difficult text.

Generative AI is the latest, strongest example of the existentialist principle that we primarily live in flight from ourselves. The fantasy of becoming absent from the world in the name of efficiency amounts to a refusal of existence.

When Stanley Cavell first started arguing for the philosophical value of Hollywood cinema, he was met with resistence from those who insisted they were mere entertainments. This led Cavell to coin some great phrases: "philistine intellectuality" was one (in Cities of Words p163).

“Liminality” has got to be one of the most overworked, unilluminating concepts in literary studies.

The Boomer-Gen Z harmonic.

Actually, every dog had EVERY day.

Just watched Edward Yang’s 一 一 (Yi Yi), and what a film. Knocked my hat off.

Western mattresses are not good for co-sleeping (they’re too soft), but a firm Korean or Chinese mattress is safe, and we all get better sleeps having our daughter right there. I don’t regret it at all.

There used to be a bar in Seoul (신촌) called The Doors, and when you entered you saw a painting of Jim Morrison. Except it was actually Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison.

Is there a more perfect image of James’s “one of the people on whom nothing is lost” than the tech-heavy student, striving to listen to a lecture, contribute to a discussion, answer their emails and DMs, and browsing Temu?

Are you worthy of this cocktail?

It’s starting to look like I’ll never get in public feud with a colleague.

Those urban legends about professors making an exam that simply says “Why?” or “What is courage?”and the student aces it by answering, “Why not?”or “This”—those stories take on a new plausibility as I go blind reading essay after essay at the end of the semester.

What are some trends in post-secondary pedgagy that were once considered essential, but have since been revealed to be fads?

Hanyoreh, one of South Korea's progressive publications, has a blistering indictment of former president Yoon Suk-Yeol in its election coverage. Worth a read. english.hani.co.kr/arti/english...

When I say “please” and swear in my prompts to reduce generative AI efficiency.

I’ll add that 90% of what passes for Digital Humanities is either (a) not particularly interesting or (b) not particularly humanities.

BREAKING NEWS - South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol REMOVED from office by the court's unanimous decision www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...