Please consider sending an abstract to my panel
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World Literature and the Global South: Frictions and New Horizons
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I'm also looking at other project opportunities outside of the CFP. Please repost if you can!
KESHED ONLINE LAUNCH REGISTRATION
Please email getkeshed@gmail.com with your full name, and the email address you'd like the joining link sending to. I'll acknowledge receipt of all emails but might not be the same day; @davidcollard.bsky.social will send event links out in Feb. Ta!
Pls RT 🙏
Excellent work - and prescient, as I’ve pulled that face one or twice today
If you are a supporter and reader of @contingent-mag.bsky.social one of the biggest things you can do to help us at the moment is get this CFP to the NTT folks in your life. The fracturing of social media has made it very difficult to get the word out esp. to adjuncts and VAPs.
The great Tony Harrison has died. With others such as Raymond Williams he represented a post-war breakthrough that the philistine assault on education threatens: the possibility of being working class while storming the heights of the most elite culture and transforming it
Image of 'The Empress' tarot card by Pamela Coleman Smith, depicting a figure with long hair, crown, and sceptre. Text: Weird Modernisms, BAMS/MSA 26, 1-4 July 2026, Loughborough University, UK.
We're delighted to share that the CFP for the joint @modernistudies.bsky.social and @moderniststudies.bsky.social 2026 conference, Weird Modernisms, is now live!
1-4 July, Loughborough University @lborouniversity.bsky.social
More info here: moderniststudies.org/conference/MSA2026/CFP/
"Vazquez has created a unique and enduring novel. Something hard and real and tangible glitters amid the vapour of text and image she describes." -Dustin Illingworth, @newleftreview.bsky.social
Excited about this new review of THE ENDLESS WEEK!
newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...
Finally, there’s a good interview with RB - titled, if you can believe it, “Interview: A Conversation with Roland Barthes” - that gives a good sense of some of the ideas at play. Funnily enough, the interview concludes with a reflection on the teaching of literature (if that’s not too meta)!
But he’s also problematising what we mean by reading and writing - and troubling the binary too. Volume 6(?) of @barthesstudies.bsky.social was a special issue on S/Z, if you’d like some more contemporary opinions. But Barbara Johnson’s essay, in The Critical Difference, is indispensable I think.
Oh blimey - different ways of approaching this, obviously. One can read it as part of the history of structuralism, of course. I suppose one of the things you have to contend with is that S/Z is both a reading of a text and a text in its own right: in other words, an act of reading AND writing…
Please help me share the CFP for this Literature Compass Special Issue dedicated to the work of Simon J James and covering key Victorian and Edwardian writers like H. G. Wells, George Gissing, Dickens, Wilde, George Du Maurier, and Conan-Doyle on behalf of Hadas Elber-Aviram.
Today I finished volume 2 of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. Others have articulated the merits of this poetic, philosophical, uncanny novel already, so I will simply say that I cannot stop thinking about it (nor do I want to). Balle has cast a spell and I, for one, am enchanted.
So driving through Dublin is fun eh
Time for a new mug, I feel
I know the feeling 🥲
Good evening
Saw Gary do a thing
“Did I ever sing?”
Safe from the lasers at least! Honestly tho, wtf
Finally, I'm able to look more closely at the work of my fellow contributors to Barthes Studies vol. 10, and felt I had to share this piece - 'Interrupting' - by Anfisa Doroshenko. Urgent, complex, stimulating. Do check it out: sites.cardiff.ac.uk/barthes/file...
As a former employee, it’s a strange day! Though not, sadly, an unexpected one - travel stores have been carrying WHS for some time now. Fond memories of trying to locate books with such descriptors as: well, I think it has a red cover.. I think. It was on the breakfast show this morning, you know..
An evening well spent. Good vibes, generous & articulate & thoughtful colleagues - and more exciting writing to look forward to!
Passed an evening with Andrew McMillan, in which we discussed my serving him during my time at WHSmith in Victoria Station, Manchester
A rotten week.
Then, late this morning, I look outside and see a neighbour opening birthday presents - still, gloriously, in their pyjamas.
Like magic, I begin to feel better.
C’est super
Just seen this - amazing! I want one!!