Proofs ✨✨✨

“No throne exists that has a right to exist, & no symbol of it, flying from any flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any device but the skull & crossbones of that kindred industry, piracy, which differs from royalty only as retail differs from wholesale.” - Mark Twain

‘That you cannot get in since the entrance is the obstacle itself is what it means for life to end at emptiness. Despite the space’ (Keston Sutherland)

‘That you cannot get in since the entrance is the obstacle itself is what it means for life to end at emptiness. Despite the space’ (Keston Sutherland)

Just got my copy of TP’s brilliant special issue on influence, with my essays on inimitability and Prynne side by side ❤️

new in Parapraxis online! Love's Work the romance boom, psychoanalysis, Emily Henry, and creative labor www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/lov...

Code for my book’s intro 😘😘😘 fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/...

Code for my book’s intro 😘😘😘 fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/...

Writing on loving drafts too much

Last seminar of the term: truth & exploded gum 🔥🤯✨

I’m chapter 30 in a forthcoming Oxford handbook of Santayana. My first philosophy gig! It’s mainly about Wallace Stevens ✨💕

Excited for our panel on modernism’s meanest: Laura Riding Hates You (And You, And You, And You, And You)

Speaking on the theme ‘Laura Riding Hates You’ at this year’s BAMS, alongside brilliant @kristingrogan.bsky.social & Christian Gelder 🖤✨🎉

My Aldington piece in the flesh in the #TLS

The #TLS let me vomit all over Richard Aldington 🤢 🤮 www.the-tls.com/literature-b...

It’s happened 🩷🩵

Lecturing on allusion today ✨

This Newsnight interview with Zack Polanski is really brilliant 🤩 m.youtube.com/watch?v=cpVO...

Happy Dydd Gwyl Dewi from my little ghost

“One possible criterion with which to evaluate the success of a close reading is how well it understands itself as being part of & beholden to a community, even as it tries to challenge that community's terms of engagement. Or, as Dan & Johanna phrase it, as a product of & an offering to community.”

Gave a paper on boobs at a drugs symposium today; this is the view from the floor

One of my students brought this heartbreaking poem to class today

Bit of Woolf that always makes me cry 💔

Stunning cast in the second of the three-part podcast miniseries on the symposium, Close Reading for the 21C: "Why is close reading best understood as a conversation? What are its evaluative standards? How does it extend the conversation beyond literary studies?" podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

New issue of CQ has landed! “Chaplinish”, edited brilliantly by @becimay.bsky.social

Reading is an irresistible invocation of all the breasts you’ve wanted more from 💕 🍸 🥛

My article on the last line has just been published over at Critical Quarterly. I’d ❤️ to know what you think 🤔 doi.org/10.1111/criq...

noBOdY cAReS ABoUt CRiTiciSM

hating Sexy Wuthering Heights will only make it stronger

It's here! I hosted a symposium on close reading at Emory in November. Matt Seybold recorded it for his podcast, American Vandal, and the first of three episodes is out today. Catch me, @johannawinant.bsky.social, @becimay.bsky.social, @bakaari.bsky.social + more podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

Don’t you wish this were a podcast? 😉

CALL FOR PITCHES @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not. Details below!

About to lecture about nits

So it looks as though you can access my new book already if you’re subscribed to OUP. Here’s the link :) 🎉✨ academic.oup.com/book/62228?s...

Really enjoyed this Q&A with @biblioracle.bsky.social, who pushed me to think about my work in terms of the somewhat amorphous, but not obsolescent principles of academic freedom.

Keats slamming his era’s riot police 👮🔥💪

Poetic rhythm vs AI 🔥

I got to write on Joyce below … doi.org/10.1111/criq...

Proofs of my essay on the last line ✨💕

Starting a new thread to collect critical perspectives on AI, as they are articulated dozens of times every day and appear repeatedly on my timeline. I can't read everything right away, but if, like me, you want to stay up to date, then this might help a bit:

"Now, a damning new study could put AI companies on the defensive. In it, Stanford and Yale researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying all that data, not “learning” from it." Ressourcenintensive Kopiermaschinen, die andere berauben. futurism.com/artificial-i...

I’ll be attacking the convention of critical sobriety at the even below, which is open to all. Come if you fancy it 😘

Am introducing the first years to what poems are tomorrow ✨💕

Oh wow, I feel so much safer knowing that some poor Vietnamese immigrant working in a nail bar is in detention.

Defoe’s Crusoe: ‘I had learned not to despair of anything’

I wrote about Serra’s Berlin Block & Chaplin’s secret double act with classical sculptures (in City Lights + The Great Dictator, but also early works His New Job, Work, Behind the Screen, &c.) This entire special issue—on “the Chaplinish”—is amazing! 🥾 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Chaplinish now exists in the world 🎩💛 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14678705...

closed out 2025 with my friend and comrade Emma Heaney's miraculous book, simply the Marxist feminist memoir and theory of gestation I've been waiting for: "What if it is this society that is mere and meager in the face of our projects to make each other?" @riislover667.bsky.social <3 <3 <3