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

Just learned that some of my favourite literary characters are actually sock puppet accounts for an entity called "the author"

I don't like to brag but my dream journal read my submission with interest

Circa 1900 mass literacy and the standardisation of writing created modernism as a reaction against homogeneous instrumental language. LLMs will do the same. We stand on the verge of a modernist literary Renaissance and as a result we must urgently fund modernist studies research

Sorry about the mixed signals. Unfortunately all signs are marked with a fundamental indeterminacy which renders transparent communication impossible

War on Drugs in the Bunnings playlist. Not beating the dad rock allegations

Evidently, this is an effect of capitalism.^1^ 1. See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 1-1054.

The reason "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes is both so repulsive and so catchy is due to the ambiguity of our feelings about "home" (Heim) itself, which, as Freud teaches us, is at once familiar and "unheimlich" (uncanny)

It is widely believed that academic arguments should challenge accepted ideas. Yet this common perception is based on a fallacy

All five of these are lazy and three of them are essentially fraudulent

☠️

A tab as old as time

You better not be wearing the isolator when I get there Me:

Men will literally turn into a gigantic insect instead of going to therapy

This is what someone trained in the humanities sees every time you use language

Sorry but implying I'm wrong because I'm a primate is an ad hominid argument

Asking AI to rewrite Madame Bovary as a hero's journey

Reading David Copperfield and shaking my head to show that I know the first person narrator is not the true author of the story

My Achilles' foot is an inability to remember classical allusions

Hey man nice pleasure dome. Is it stately?

I prefer it if my students don't read the primary texts. It allows us to focus on what really matters, which is literary theory

Wow ok unfollowing now. Loved his refusal of servitude in heaven, did not know he was responsible for the fall of man