Look, Middlemarch is a great novel. It complexly mediates class conflict, the commodification of all life, emerging ideological structures in Victorian capitalism. I just personally think it’s more impressive when a novel does that through a story about a guy who hates a weird fish.

I do believe this guardian debacle is about me. I think they personally want to upset a bunch of Moby-Dick micro-influencers. They have no idea what’s coming do they @natewolff.bsky.social !!!

I'm sorry, no. "Transparency" is simply not an indefiniteness that shadows forth the heartless voids & immensities of the universe, stabbing us from behind with the thought of annihilation; a dumb blankness, full of meaning, from which we shrink.

We are so back 🐳🐳🐳

Canvas is down, ye say? Aye lad hearken to me and I'll tell thee of a time when a man might say canvas was down! When the leviathan booms his bulk upon ye an' thy splintered masts surrender their sails to the foaming, merciless drink!! then, lad, ye say might say with some authority that can (1/135)

if Poe wrote "Murders in the Rue Morgue" for kids

You can’t let @natewolff.bsky.social play Legos with your kids for TEN MINUTES without him making a bunch of angry fish!!!

Coming soon! I wrote the Foreword to the new edition of Lauren Berlant’s first book, The Anatomy of National Fantasy. Dig the killer new cover design, where Liberty is in a scaffold that looks a lot like a cage.

this joke doesn’t totally make sense but my first thought was “cabinet of dr. calamari”

I have to respect this excuse for missing a day in my video game theory class.

Jesus’s 3 days in the tomb and his resurrection was typologically prefigured by Jonah’s 3 days in and escape from the belly of a whale, so Easter is a great day to meditate on the inscrutable malice of a specific fish.

FYI today's a great day to start reading this novel. It begins on April 1st — and it's widely considered Melville's most accessible and fun work after Clarel!

Oh wow, verrrryyy interesting that no one told me best ever tooth novel McTeague was facing Mediocremarch in this Defector bracket. Vote suppression from the Big Eliot lobby. Sad!

Women are becoming estranged from their partners who respond selfishly to an avalanche. What's behind 'alpine divorce'?

Hey! Is the dream of the 90s (sustained ambitious attention to the fin de siècle American novel) alive? Yes! In this AzQ special issue @rafaelwalker.bsky.social and I co-edited with intro by us & afterword by Jennifer Fleissner 😎 Open access! @hopkinspress.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/issue/56582

Our special issue of Arizona Quarterly on the American novel at the turn of the 20th century is now out! In addition to an intro by @natewolff.bsky.social and me, it includes 6 original essays and a bracing afterword by Jennifer Fleissner (which, among other things, urges us back to Lears).

“Can we have class outside” no absolutely not. we are discussing The Yellow Wallpaper under sickly fluorescent lights and please do not open or look out the window.

Markwayne's real name is Samueltclemyns

literary+cultural studies friends working in grad programs! does your program offer a required introductory seminar for new students? teaching ours again, eager for suggestions of themes, readings +assignments for theory foundations+cohort-cohering. (some past versions in thread below in return)

everything reminds me of him (McTeague from MCTEAGUE [1899])

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...

that’s right sports fans it’s time to fire up my famous “game day” sous vide ribs! They will be ready in ~36h

Very moved by this nuanced and thoughtful review of WRITING AGAINST REFORM by @natewolff.bsky.social (free to read in English at: journals.openedition.org/transatlanti... ) "this critique (of sentimentalism) needed an extra dash of dialectics." 💙💙💙How can you not love this scholar?💙💙💙

My review of @zibrak.bsky.social 's WRITING AGAINST REFORM is up at Transatlantica (revue le plus chic! 🇫🇷)! An honor to think with a book this smart, which taught me a lot and pushed me to articulate some—I hope!—productive tensions or disagreements: journals.openedition.org/transatlanti...

it is always a damp, drizzly Month of Dick in my soul

My 2026 resolution is to take things more personally. I learned this by reading Moby-Dick.

I'm 30 pages from the end of MCTEAGUE and I've never been so stressed in my fucking life

As I said on the other app, so again here: Thank you, friend, for this encouraging blurb, and let us hope the book lives up to your high praise! #grateful

Honored to blurb @rafaelwalker.bsky.social ‘s brilliant and gorgeous new book — alongside the incomparable Jen Fleissner no less!

Really not looking forward to difficult convos with the family over Thanksgiving. Sorry grandpa, whales are fish!

The MA Antisemitism Commission has approved its final report conflating Judaism with Zionism. We respond: "The Commission has done more to fuel rising authoritarianism and antisemitism than to create the conditions that promote Jewish safety" www.concernedjewishfaculty.org/commission-s...

I do not have a riverboat license. Still. But this paper was really good.

In which I give @mattseybold.bsky.social a pop quiz for his river boat license AND deal with a rude heckler, my nemesis @jeffreyinsko.bsky.social, while talking about Twain's Puddn’head Wilson via Malm's Fossil Capital.

American Studies and a variety of other programs under under threat at the University of Nottingham. Lend your voice to the petition.

Help save American Studies at the University of Nottingham: c.org/Hk65TVQ7f5

me when I see your aurora borealis pics

hey nerds! Any recommended critical/theoretical reading on digression—its pleasures, frustrations, etc. Whether in literature (e.g. Tristram Shandy), film or tv, video games ("side quests"), etc.? Other fun examples welcome too. (My favs are "Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and whale facts obvs 🐳)

ummm it was actually Walt Whitman who first called a NYC ferry the friendship express

this is also the phrase I used to start my Émile Zola reading marathon

so happy for but also jealous of NYC right now! Sounds like the zohran election parties were LIT

This makes me happy to no end—not least because I've had the pleasure of explaining to my mom how I'm known among Whitman scholars.

bluesky introduces new “backhanded likes” and “pity likes” beta

Pleased to announce it was crotch comparison day in Whitman class. #pedagogy #crotch @genoways.bsky.social

I'm so excited Dan, Johanna, & Emory have made it possible for me to record the entirety of their book launch symposium next month as an arc in the "Vandal Live" series. Symposia are, in my opinion, the very best of academic programming, & everybody should have the good fortune of partaking.

Everybody's talking about the vaguely mystical masturbatory subculture where doomed young men find self-destructive community.

💯 build a cabin, build a chair, hoe beans, grow some beans, manufacture pencils, repair an axe handle, make a fishing rod, fish, philosophize about fishing, think about not fishing, get into a passive aggressive emotional standoff with a loon, wait I forgot what I was listing.

Also, New Zealand Tom was *right there*