Today I defend my dissertation! Thank you to everyone on here who helped me get to this point!

If you’re in Chicago, come to Jimmy’s at some point after 5pm to celebrate!

Two important updates:

1) I’ve started The Rehearsal season two

2) I’ve finished my dissertation

Getting a PhD has prepared me for a job, but the problem is that job is nineteenth-century law clerk.

just now learning that my university has announced the end of the university

This week I used my favorite dissertation productivity tool: telling someone you’re going to meet a deadline they didn’t ask for and that might be impossible

Are there polls here yet

Rereading Moby-Dick for the first time in a few years, and it is so wild that anyone ever thought Middlemarch was better than this

These thoughts are all still fresh, so I'm not sure how much they bear out, but Uncle Tom's Cabin seemed a lot more disjointed this time around, so it's hard to say it's doing the thing (aesthetically, I think, but maybe politically too) that we often refer to in our account of her sentimentality.

So I guess the joke about being gaslit is that I think there is the account we've received of why Stowe is "bad" (politically, aesthetically, etc.), but there are many parts where she seems to do something quite different and maybe better (aesthetically if not politically) from those accounts.

Ah, I see what you mean. I guess what I mean by gaslighting is that there are parts that I find great and even difficult to wrestle with—especially St. Clare's speech, and in this reading, I was stuck on the Prue sequence—but those passages seem almost distinct form the rest of the novel.

I'm coming around to it! I'm auditing a course in which we just read it, and the discussion has been making me reconsider some opinions on Stowe. I think there are many parts that are truly extraordinary (especially in the final third) but a lot of it leaves much to be desired.

You’re correct, but if posting this is wrong, I don’t want to feel right

I share an office with a 18c novel scholar, and this means I don’t have to read Clarissa because just ask questions whenever it seems relevant.

The other dumbest part is I know that quakers are basically just like other people but they say “thee” and “thou”

Forever in awe of the work produced by my colleagues

Dumbest part of studying the nineteenth century is that I know how to spell “daguerreotype”

Can’t believe I am expected to sit here and write, the thing I have wanted to spend my life doing

👀

this is the last week you can make "2024 hours to go" jokes

A still from the TV show Freaks and Geeks in which Harold Weir (played by Joe Flaherty) sits at a dinner table and looks stern. The caption reads: "I know a baby who was born in a manger. You know what he’s doing now? He’s dead!"

Happy Holidays / RIP Jesus and Joe Flaherty

Posting an indefensible and niche take shortly before hitting my screentime limit on this app: we’re so back

Time to reread the second best novel of the twentieth century (Contending Forces)

Champion of two centuries

Contending Forces (1900)!

In the opening year of the century we had Sister Carrie and Marrow, and then after that nothing but decline

Rereading the greatest novel of the twentieth century (Marrow of Tradition)

Former Modern Language Association Presidents Call for BDS Vote In late October, the leadership of the Modern Language Association (MLA)—one of the largest and wealthiest US scholarly organizations in the humanities—refused to allow the organization’s Delegate …

BREAKING: 8 MLA past presidents--incl Judith Butler and Chris Newfield--publicly call on the MLA Executive Council NOT to block a vote on a BDS Resolution. Please read and share their letter today in LitHub. Members deserve to debate and VOTE. lithub.com/8-former-mod...

E Alex Jung always does such great work but wow what an awful set of things

The one-two punch of the Brian Jordan Alvarez piece and the Know Your Enemy courts under Trump 2.0 episode is doing bad things to my mental health

Moving from aesthetic judgment to interpretation is vital for scholars. But it is not vital for the critic. The move is a move because these activities are not the same kind of thing. The role of criticism is not that it interprets but that it alerts us to what we should be interpreting.
V J Adams