An ideal living situation is one in which you can be private and work quietly all day while there are people who love you somewhere offstage, pottering around
When you read something as background and it changes your research question. (Curious to know what you make of this uneven, gemmed, overlong, unsurpassed book …)
Read this at a gallop, loving and hating it, heckling lots in the margin. Main query: don’t see why gen z students and the cultural forms they love (TikTok etc) wouldn’t have stuff to teach us about how to think. To assume we know best is pedagogically dumb. NB: ‘prisming’ is 🤢
1920s English lecturer Mansfield Forbes annually gave 8 lectures on Wordsworth’s ‘Surprised by Joy.’ If you could give 8 lectures on a single poem, what poem would you choose?
Raymond Williams describing close reading as an addiction: ‘it was incredibly exciting … I still find it exciting, and at times I have to positively restrain myself from it … It always tends to become too dominant a mode’
Interesting that ‘canon’ in the literary sense was coined in 1929 and ‘modernism’ in the sense we mean it in 1927 and that both had a theological prehistory
At Hardy’s birth the average life span in the UK was 40; by the time died it was 59. Dying at 87, he must have felt immortal. Ironic that a writer so preoccupied with death should have been, by his own’s time standards, so, well, hardy 🤔
About a year ago I was told on the basis of a rogue Covid symptom that I might be going blind; today I learnt that the haemorrhage had almost healed and that my eyes were healthy ❤️
Bumped into this lovely Montaigne quote tonight: ‘I want us to be doing things, prolonging life’s duties as much as we can. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.’
Reading TS Eliot on the use of education to maintain social hierarchy and struck by the fact that he wouldn’t have approved of me, as a former state school student, studying for a degree, let alone teaching at a university 🤔
Twitter, what are your favourite last lines?
(One I ❤️ is Henry James’s ‘We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped’)
Whenever I write or teach on Hamlet I remember Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, years ago, asking us to choose one word from the play and write a whole essay about it. Best task ever.
Reminded at this time of year of the insomniac Nabokov who, while celebrating thanksgiving with Edmund Wilson, went wandering in his home that night and wrote a crazy poem about Wilson’s refrigerator, which, as he puts it, was ‘awake’ too 🧊🎉
Cool that the earliest predecessor of the English lit course, the 17th-century ‘coffeehouse’ discussion, was open-ended, lecture-led, free of charge & accessible to everyone who wandered in from the street - even those who couldn’t read! (this is from Alexandria Lawrie’s book…)
Curious that we take the ‘literary’ in ‘literary criticism’ to refer just to our object of study. Were we to own it as our method too, the whole game wd change …
Barthes’s Marxist critique of Lacan: ‘Desire … doesn’t the word itself denote a ‘class notion’? … the ‘populace’ does not know Desire - only pleasures’
Barthes used to say he had a migraine whenever he had a headache because he liked the way the word sounded. Reminds me of how at school I told my French teacher my mum was a plumber because I liked saying that word in French, and how surprised they both were on parents’ evening
Excited because one of my students has linked Woolf’s lighthouse to Foucault’s Panopticon and is reading free indirect discourse as a mode of surveillance