I just came back from Calvin University, where I had a great couple days visiting classes and discussing the curriculum with the faculty there. Like many programs in literature, they have been losing majors (the creative writing and linguistics majors … Continue reading
The fabulous-in-every-way Carla Nappi has interviewed me for the New Books Network. You can listen to the whole thing here.
I’m super excited to be the first director of the new Penn State Center for Humanities and Information. There are visiting fellowships, graduate student fellowships, and faculty fellowships, as well as a bunch of other cool stuff. And a new … Continue reading
Remarks I read (much too quickly) at the MLA roundtable organized by Jim English. Feed of Twitter response to the panel here. Some of this drawn from the scale piece, some from remarks on close reading in On Literary Worlds, and … Continue reading
I’m in Seoul for the annual conference of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea, for which I’m one of many interesting keynote speakers (including Ira Nadel, who I started reading in graduate school but had never met, so … Continue reading
Talk coming up to students at Jacobs University, Bremen, “Modernity and the Ends of Europe.” Designed more or less to convince a group of smart undergraduates, many thinking of majoring in a program called “global humanities,” to get excited about … Continue reading
A discussion group at Douban is talking about the Chinese version of The Hypothetical Mandarin, and sent along a few questions for me to answer. Responses here. Review/discussion of the book here.
Just a quick rundown of the various trips and visits: Bremen (Jacobs University), 23-24 October 2013 Seoul (EALLK Keynote), 5-10 November 2013 Mainz, 17 December 2013 MLA (Chicago), 9-12 January 2014 Hamburg, 15-16 January 2014 Göttingen, 17-20 February 2014 ACLA … Continue reading
Carla Nappi interviewed me a couple weeks ago about On Literary Worlds for New Books in Literary Studies. We actually did the interview twice; the first time, in March, sound problems made the audio unlistenable. Second time turned out better, Carla … Continue reading
For the LA Review of Books, a review of two recent collections of Claude Levi-Strauss’s thoughts on Japan: TIME MAKES US ALL ANACHRONISMS to ourselves. As we get older, we are all left behind by a history we had once … Continue reading
Two talks coming up at Penn: one, a second try at “Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do,” this time with, lesson learned, purely extemporized (from notes) entractes (on Thursday Feb 21), and, on Friday, a roundtable and talk … Continue reading
My first foray into tweener literary criticism has just been published by Public Books. I’ve also just accepted a request to write about Levi-Strauss for the LA Review of Books, due in early March. So the world has that to look forward … 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
