[This is straight up comedy jokes for 1600 words. Those who've read both authors and Dreiser should be more or less in stitches all the way through. Sinclair even gets a good joke off at Joyce’s expense. The review ran in New Masses in April 1930, and though I'm not sure if it's out of [...]
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“This kind of ‘reading’, however, no longer produces interpretations but merely _tests_ them: it’s not the beginning of the critical enterprise, but its appendix. And then, here you don’t really read the _text_ anymore, but rather through the text, looking for your unit of analysis. The task is constrained from the start; it’s a reading without freedom.”
– Franco Moretti talks about returning to the source novels after engaging in some distant reading. From his 2000 article “Conjectures on World Literature.”
I’m sitting in on a seminar this fall called “New Directions in the Study of American Culture.” It’s also the introductory seminar of the new Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. The class, being taught by Center Co-director Eric Slauter, has a clear premise: each week, we read a recently published book about [...]
We just finished the baseball unit in the course I’m teaching, “Male Fantasy Sports.” The course is a crosslisted English and Gender Studies with 14 students (syllabus | departmental description | photo of books at the bookstore). Most students major in the social sciences, but there are a pair of English majors, and three or [...]
Continue reading about Conclusions so far in “Male Fantasy Sports”