This epistolary novel could have been an email

How to start conversations about fiction

I helped an escaped convict remove his shackles when I was a boy and now because of that act he is secretly paying for me to become a gentleman. Never stop grinding

Uhhhh actually the assumption that the trolley itself does not have agency is super problematic

You should be allowed to read an Isaac Chotiner article behind a paywall if your schadenfreude is pure enough

Actually Frankenstein is the name of the doctor. The monster is called "allegory for the emergent industrial working class as a reservoir of latent revolutionary violence"

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. What happened next will shock you

Me teaching: it is essential to plan your essay Me writing: the white hot flame of inspiration needs no outline

"No spoilers please" your enjoyment of a novel should be dependent on form alone. Grow up

Wow ok unfollowing now. I loved him as a loyal butler, did not know he was an unreliable narrator

Classic literature has no relevance to contemporary readers. Even novels published last month are full of outmoded conventions. Only fiction that is written literally right this instant can capture the zeitgeist of the present moment

Not many people know that the gen z slang "unc" is actually an allusion to Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, where the protagonist Guy Crouchback is humorously addressed as "uncle" by the younger members of his battalion

Why are you as a man using more than two sentences per novel

Many scholars have connected this text with other things. But the connection I am going to make in this paper will shock you

Instead of competing for limited resources, other humanities disciplines should accept that they are all essentially branches of literary criticism

Literary prizes are a cheap distraction from the true purpose of reading great books, which is making people who haven't read them feel bad about themselves

I can't keep silent any longer. Godot should NOT have kept them waiting like that

Sorry I'm late. I unconsciously don't want to be here

Writers are too precious about not repeating the same word in successive sentences. It is actually fine to employ identical terms in consecutive grammatical units

By having AI summarise the plots of Shakespeare's tragedies I can experience catharsis in a matter of minutes

Little did you know I have been playing 3 dimensional chess this whole time. That's why I have been making such bad decisions. I was distracted by this stupid game I'm playing

Good evening. It may surprise you to know that I am speaking "prose" right now. (Audience murmurs) in fact, you already know how to speak prose yourself! (Audience gasps) over the next hour, we will unlock the secrets of this mysterious medium together (audience applauds)

Academics are constantly overexplaining things. They excessively explicate every item of information

"Write what you know" uhhhh that's actually incredibly insensitive towards people who have had no life experiences

The essays in this collection have been carefully selected to provide a cohesive overview of the topic

(sitting down at a restaurant with the biggest copy of Infinite Jest you have ever seen) what wine pairs best with an epic postmodern masterpiece?

Readers have long been frustrated by Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken". Thanks to AI, it is now possible to explore BOTH of the paths described by the speaker

I would just like to push back slightly on your hypothesis that our recent date did not "go well"

Humanities academics tend to think that the best way of critiquing something is to provide a genealogy of it. To combat this phenomenon, we must understand its roots

So Austin-tatious.

Reading performatively (reading aloud in such a way that my utterances bring about the states of affairs they refer to)

For sale: innovative methodology. Never used

How it feels to write "my translation"

Nice try but that part of my argument is actually too obscure to understand. It's literally impossible for you to have detected the flaws you mention

Gen z students are losing the ability to exercise aesthetic judgment through the free play of the imagination and the understanding. They increasingly ask their parents which concept a work of art should be subsumed under

This is how I write my tweets btw

(Guy who has spent every waking minute of his 20s coding) AI art is just as good actually

Dude it's just a tool. Humans have always invented tools that don't work and make them stupider. Stop standing in the way of progress

Everyone is talking about my revolutionary 4-4-4-4 lifestyle hack. You hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner. The only catch is that first you have to overthrow capitalism

I study novels. I have lived thousands of lives. I have time travelled to every period (post-1700). I understand every type of narrator. Each time I read a work of fiction, my power grows

Being an English academic is hard because last night I had to correct someone who implied modernists shunned the mass market rather than being entangled with it in complex ways. Never off duty

Students hate that I base 50% of their grade on their "rich inner life" but this is the only way to be sure they are not using LLMs

Oh, does my argument have flaws? Or does it have *producing bouquet from my sleeve* flowers? (Audience applauds)

(Guy who does not enjoy the humanities) the problem with the humanities is no one enjoys them

Sorry but I'm not going to discuss literature with you in my leisure time. I do that all day at work. If you want to engage me in conversation about some book you're reading, feel free to enrol as a student in one of my courses

Discovered a brilliant book on the subject I'm researching

Having children dress as characters for book week teaches them to embrace naive mimesis. They should be encouraged to personify formal categories like omniscient naration, free indirect discourse, etc

Borrowing this from Freud for when I cite existing research: "This is a subject on which I find myself in the exceptional position of being able to acknowledge the value of a previous work."

Repressed my unconscious desires too completely and gave her the Ich

Accidentally signed a work email "yr humble servant" instead of "yr obedient servant", feel like throwing up