New issue of Mediations

mediationsjournal.org

Behind every inspired student is a dedicated educator. Contract academic staff teach up to 50% of undergrad courses in some faculties, shaping the future despite uncertain working conditions. Let’s value their contributions. #ANSUTstandswithCAS @dalfaculty.bsky.social @cupe3912.bsky.social

Line graph showing the number of academic staff association strikes and lockouts each year between 2014 and 2024.

On August 20, the Dalhousie University administration locked out its nearly 1,000 faculty, librarians, counsellors and instructors.

Learn more about academic staff association strikes and lockets over the last decade in the latest Bulletin: www.caut.ca/bulletin/aca...

New book tells the tale of David's ‘Death of Marat’ through the eyes of a lifelong admirer Art historian’s dissection of famous work is as much about the painting as his decades-long obsession with it

For @theartnewspaper.bsky.social, @tobiascarroll.bsky.social reviews Thomas Crow’s Murder in the Rue Marat: “In Crow’s hands, David’s painting and its legacy crystallise into something truly revelatory.”

single page syllabus on the dialectic

happy first day of school to semester colleagues please enjoy this jameson syllabus from January 1996

New course, let's go

Eighteenth Century Life cover with pale blue engraved ocean imagery and oval illustration of figures and ships at sea

Volume 50 of the journal Eighteenth-Century Life kicks off with "Marine Worlds of the Long Eighteenth-Century," a special issue edited by Killian Quigley, Kate Fullagar, & Kristie Patricia Flannery. buff.ly/9GFoGES

Although manufactured by the Australian Boot Company, Blundstones are, in fact, the official boot of Toronto

WTF Fourier!?

The Scale of China Podcast Episode · Ones and Tooze · 08/22/2025 · 56m

Episode #205: The Scale of China

@adamtooze.bsky.social recently spent a month traveling around China. He and Cameron Abadi discuss the vast scale of the country and how its size bears on China's economic, political, and historical role in the world: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST) in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto invites applications for a full-time tenure stream position in the area of Philosophy of Science and/or Technology.

Sedgwick had some thoughts about this, but by and large that essay still remains to be written...

Perhaps we should worry more about doing what we do well and innovating in our studies rather than endless polemics, but if we are going to point fingers, I continue to think that the crisis in criticism was not induced by Marxism + psychoanalysis but by the (Foucauldian-inflected) New Historicism.

To evoke an old bugbear, this new desire for something pre-critical doesn't seem any less out of synch with postmodernism than did cultural studies and identity politics and so it seems to me that no continuum is actually endangered by what's currently on offer in these new methodological debates

To risk a hypothesis, much of what is associated with so-called post-critique and the new disciplinary "conservatism" (is it fair to relate these ?) seems to desire not a "conservative" return to criticism but a movement away from it and the creation instead of a new kind of pre-critical receptivity

This last point seems to problematize J. North's association of Williams (and Jameson) with a new kind of historicizing and politicized criticism that interferes with students/readers' experience of works of literature as supple aesthetic objects.

As one may notice from the quoted phrases above much that is innovative in R. Williams (i.e., the now celebrated concept of "the structure of feeling") is actually an extension of Leavis's project (albeit married to different political commitments and more rigorously sociological).

One advantage in Leavis is that he makes perfectly transparent his criterion of aesthetic judgment, which far from being purely formal (as some of the new disciplinary "conservatives" seem to desire) is actually the attunement of form to new "modes of experience" or "ways of feeling."

Contemporary criticism had indeed avoided such kinds of aesthetic judgment (but usually hypocritically since invariably the critic makes these kinds of judgment anyway).

The only thing that seems out of step with Leavis vis-a-vis contemporary criticism is his strong sense that good poetry can and must be distinguished from bad poetry and that this is the job of the critic.

This does not actually seem that at odds with what the new disciplinary "conservatives" decry in contemporary criticism (i.e., that it's overly politicized, contextualizing, and moralizing).

(c) profoundly moralizing about what poetry does or doesn't represent (so not value neutral) -- the whole argument in New Bearing is a condemnation of poetry that rejects dealing with the modern world and chooses instead the fantasy world Leavis associates with the pre-Raphaelites.

(b) sociologizing and contextualizing (modern poetry cannot be understood without reference to changes in the fabric of modern life; Yeats can't be understood without considering the marginalized position of Ireland; etc., etc.)

(a) saturated in his personal politics, for which a kind of "Red Toryism" seems the best shorthand (so not at all apolitical);

It's much better than expected. But I can't help feeling that the new disciplinary conservatism (identified by During) is harkening after something that isn't actually embodied in this criticism to the degree that it supposes. Leavis's vision of poetry and criticism is:

Having completed Eagleton's recent book on "Cambridge" Criticism (Eliot, Richards, Empson, Leavis, Williams) and then followed it up with Simon During's latest on the new "conservative" turn in literary studies, I felt inspired to pick up Leavis himself and dive into New Bearings in English Poetry.

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace

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Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you.
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Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you.
One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
No explanations, no reviews, just covers.