Hot off the press! AMERICAN LITERATURE'S WAR ON CRIME: NOVELS & THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF MASS INCARCERATION, by Theodore Martin. Use the coupon code MLA and save 30%! tinyurl.com/482zmjsw @columbiaup.bsky.social
What would you say is the best Marxist/materialist writing on the short story as a specifically modern form? I have a few leads already, but I am finding the form to be somewhat undertheorized compared to, say, the novel.
Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.
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!
What a forecast.
"So sorry guys. We were *just about to* put your check in the mail, but we were sorta designated a 'Supply-Chain Risk to National Security' and, eh, went out of business!"
["Let Them Fight" Meme]
I have very fond memories of reading Hyperion.
Please do come to our ACLA session on Conspiracism. I'll be presenting on the comic book series, *The Department of Truth*, and revealing all about the secret history of U.S. Unless They get to me first.
🚨 If you're in Montreal for #ACLA, come see this outstanding seminar! On Saturday at 4:00, I'll be talking about the secondary school's fascination with dystopia in a paper called "The Individual vs. Society: Doublethinking High School English"!
Just wait till he starts his podcast.
Do you mean fiction in which the canon of Theory appears as a significant part of the story, e.g. The Marriage Plot? The Dames n+1 piece is good. Judith Ryan has a book The Novel after Theory, which has some examples, and to which the Dames piece is a response.
This time is gonna be different. You'll see.
If the AI ed-tech boom gives us the resources we need to permanently ban Canvas/ELMS, I'm all for it.
Nice! DoT is now a staple of most of my comics courses: bsky.app/profile/gipp...
Please do come to our ACLA session on Conspiracism. I'll be presenting on the comic book series, *The Department of Truth*, and revealing all about the secret history of U.S. Unless They get to me first.
"When the CIA Was the NEA" is one of my favorite headlines.
The cover of Jack and the Box, a kids comic by Art Spiegelman.
Part 4, “Comics History,” contextualizes Spiegelman’s work within cultural and political discourses. For instance: Cara Koehler places Spiegelman’s work within the history of immigration comics, and Konstantinou examines Spiegelman’s comics for kids. 10/10
The cover of “Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman” featuring the title cartoonist drinking ink with a straw.
“Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman” edited by Georgiana Banita and Lee Konstantinou won the edited book prize from the Comics Studies Society. It’s the first anthology to consider the breadth of Spiegelman’s multifaceted career as a cartoonist, historian, editor, and educator. 1/10
Our latest for @sequentialscholars.bsky.social spotlights @lkonstan.bsky.social and Georgiana Banita's anthology "Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman," published by @upmississippi.bsky.social! #ComicsStudies
Now they tell me!
I wonder, if added it all up, how many days of my life have been spent reflexively—and often unnecessarily—pressing Command+S as I type.
Should have remembered that since I helped organize the seminar! But my memory is Swiss cheese. 🤪
Super-excited to read it in book form! Do you have plans to discuss high-school dystopias, e.g. 1984, Brave New World, etc.? Reading your article made me think the mediation of the high-school classroom goes a long way to explaining why & how "genre turn" books reach for dystopia.
It's not mentioned in the article, but I wish I would have had this article handy to assign last time I taught *Salvage the Bones*, which is a quintessential Born-Curricular Novel, both in terms of its subject matter and its form.
Finished reading this & (to state the obvious) it's highly recommended. The discussion of theme is especially valuable. I also v. much enjoy the image of high school English as the separated fraternal twin of university literary studies.
Great review that makes me want to read J. Rosen‘s book
Happy to call literary sociology, to the degree all of these studies are about institutions, although it's perhaps more precisely a mix of sociology and history. This is true at level of method too: We'll interview people _and_ we'll look at archives!
As some of you may know, I’m writing a book on the history of high school English in the United States, and I’m excited to share a new article from that project—“High School English and the Making of American Readers”—out today in American Literary History! 🧵
academic.oup.com/alh/article/...
Just announce that you're writing all your future books in collaboration with OpenClaw...
