Back after the break, and my life isn’t really that hard these days. Nonetheless I and everyone around me seem exhausted. No one knows what to blame; it feels, over the days, most like a collection of small things: the … Continue reading
I’ll be giving a new talk, using some material from Becoming a Writer, at the University of Chicago in early February. Title: “Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do.” Event organized by the devastating Lauren Berlant. This will be my first … Continue reading
I’ll be giving two seminars at Yale later this month. The first, for the Theory & Media colloquium, is on On Literary Worlds (Thursday Jan 31, 4pm); the second, Friday at noon, is a discussion of scholarly writing. Students will be … Continue reading
Andrés Lomeña Cantos interviewed me (by email) about On Literary Worlds and the current state of comparative literature for Teknocultura. He’s also posted the interview on his blog, heterocosmicas. (In Spanish; he translated, though it’s fun to realize I can read … Continue reading
Siva Vaidhyanathan on MOOCs, just to keep the discussion going. If we support the MOOC experiment it would be foolish to do so without confronting the serious incentive problems MOOCs present to teachers, students, and institutions of higher education. These … Continue reading
This piece at Marginal Revolution draws our attention once again to the ways in which being rich benefits the rich twice–once in terms of a direct access to wealth, and once in terms of how it allows the wealthy to … Continue reading
Making sure everyone sees this. Source: Printculture
I’ll be speaking on Friday at 10:15 as part of a panel called “What Does Comparative Literature Do for, against, after Periodization?”; and then participating in a roundtable, “Parsing World Literature in the Twenty-First Century: Alternatives to Period, Region, and … Continue reading
Source: Printculture
If you have time this Sunday please read Walter Kirn’s review of Samson Graham-Muñoz’s new novel, The String Theory Quartet. The following quotations are from the novel: “The weather today was the weather of yesterday and tomorrow it would be the weather … Continue reading
One of the most amazing things about the digital age’s redistribution of the means of aesthetic production and distribution is that it reveals how much love and ambition remain connected to the work of making. Here you have, for free, … Continue reading
UCLA and USC in between trips to Las Vegas; first image is of a David Hockney painting. Both talks mainly on the new book. Slides below.
Bruce Clarke (Texas Tech; also an original member of Sha Na Na) and I keynoted the Southern Comparative Literature Association’s annual meeting in Las Vegas. Talk had some stuff on Jason Rohrer from the new book project, in the later slides … Continue reading
A collaborative blog on politics, culture, and academic life. Continue reading
