Beci Carver
@becimay
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Lecturer, & author of Granular Modernism (OUP, 2014) and Modernism’s Whims (forthcoming from OUP, 2025). Email: b.carver2 @exeter .ac.uk.
Joined August 2015
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My tennis article! Dedicated to Penny Carver :)
🎾🎾🎾🎾🎾🎾🎾🎾
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Hypochondria is the application of literary analysis to one’s own body
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Have been thinking about this extraordinary paragraph all day
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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
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William James says a humanities subject is the study of anything + history. Been thinking about this all day …
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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 …)
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Was there ever a good mean-spirited poem? Am inclined to say no, though I’m no moralist (at least I don’t think of myself as one)
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No one has posted Geoffrey Hill’s beautiful ‘September Song’ today, so here it is
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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 🤢
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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?
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Have been writing about dedications today, and this is such a tender one (by Empson)
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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’
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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
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When you are galloping miles away from the word limit, the wind in your hair, knowing you will have to delete it all later
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Whoop, OUP have said YES: I’m officially writing a book on pleasure with Helen Small 😊
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Me, Robert Crawford, Jahan Ramazani & David Barnes talking about The Waste Land! I’d love to know what you think 💭
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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 🤔
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It’s official: OUP have said YES to publishing the book I’m co-writing with Steve Connor on ‘Pleasure’ 🥂💫🙏🍒❤️
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‘People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow’ (Stevens)
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In case you need an excuse, Roland Barthes used to nap after lunch every day …
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Sontag on Barthes: ‘He dares to conceive of writing as a kind of happiness’
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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 ❤️
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Made a list of the essays I’ve published since 2019. Well, Prynne’s almost out 💨😊
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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.’
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My essay on cameras has just been published in the brilliant looking book below, edited by my wonderful friend Adam Hammond 😊
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‘I gave Edith Sitwell a pocket air-raid siren & she lets it off when people ask her whether free verse is more truly poetic than rhymed’ (Waugh, 1949)
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Rip Lauren Berlant; here’s her beautiful segue into a festschrift for Sedgwick
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Very pleasing that Barthes wrote all his best stuff in his late fifties/early sixties 😍
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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 🤔
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Looking at 18th-century hounds’ names, as you do, and struck by the fact that ‘whimsey’ was a popular choice but only for bitches
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Janet Malcolm on why not knowing how to explain yourself could be a good thing
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Something nice: my article on TSE, banks, chocolate, and socialism has just been accepted by Textual Practice :)
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In my haste to join the MLA, have joined the Medical Library Association
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I submitted a book manuscript this year and published four essays - on Waugh, Ford, cameras & Prynne 😊
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Derrida defines the footnote as ‘the swollen foot of a text hindered in its step-by-step advance’ 🤩😍
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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’)
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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.
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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 🧊🎉
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Hbd John Ashbery, who’s reading his poems to O’Hara in another world
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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…)
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Just submitted my revised book manuscript 😊🎉 I owe some of you quite a lot of wham bars …
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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 …
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Barthes’s Marxist critique of Lacan: ‘Desire … doesn’t the word itself denote a ‘class notion’? … the ‘populace’ does not know Desire - only pleasures’
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Poems are aphasic in that they imagine a voice they can’t themselves make audible
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Proofs of my tennis essay on Nabokov and Wallace have just arrived 🎾🎾🎾 I’m dedicating this one to my gran (on the right)
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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
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I dare you to find a less erotic definition of sex than Lee Edelman’s
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Woohoo, Critical Quarterly has said yes to publishing the special issue on Chaplin I’m co-editing with brilliant George Potts 🎉🍭🥳🎉
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‘much of Proust reads like the work of a superb appreciative critic on a novel that has unfortunately not survived’ (Empson)
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Kafka: ‘I bring more anxiety to this than is necessary to make it a success’
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Taxi driver remembered me from my vaccine trip in May and nagged me to finish my book
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When you don’t have any specific thoughts to tweets but have had an amazing evening 😍
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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
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