In my day job #AmericanStudies I’m mostly engaged with #sociology #history #anthropology (in terms of old-school disciplines), so one of the joys of mastodon for me is following all the #litstud people. I have two undergrad lit degrees (in French and English) (well the french one isn’t official but I took all the coursework, a long bitter story of youth and pissy university bureaucrats). In my dotage, I still miss just reading creative works all the time.

If you write a long essay about how moral ambiguity in fictional characters enables dictatorships and is antithetical to European culture, I am suddenly significantly less interested in your fiction #litsci #LitStud

[…]to admire the brass knockers and their regularity; to observe butchers tendering joints and cooks receiving them; to reckon the incomes of the inhabitants and infer their consequent submission to the laws of God and man — one has only to go to Wimpole Street and drink deep of the peace breathed by authority in order to heave a sigh of thankfulness that, […] #Flush #novel #modernism #LitStud #book

I had the great good fortune to be a guest on the #medicalhumanities podcast hosted by @bschillace. We talked about #grief, #dementia, and a life devoted to #litstud. Here is the link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/33c51FYYhLmTtP9zoip5LZ

@ajenkins Johnson's writing is, in the original language, very idiosyncratic, to the point where his own publisher gave up on correcting some of it. I have no Polish so I can't judge Reymont but it strikes me as more straightforward, but also, Johnson interrogates history - between two dictatorships and the cruelty of contemporary Western politics. Reymont is valuable in part for depicting the polish peasantry *as is* - offering clarity as a mild form of political critique. #litstudies #LitStud

Cross-post from "The Bad Place", but -

#LitStud #literature peeps, has anyone read this? Part of my self-curated "long books" reading challenge, which so far has included Uwe Johnson's "Anniversaries" and (soon) Marguerite Young's "Miss Macintosh, My Darling".

Given so many are converting from another platform, this feels an appropriate first post: from the opening of Pierre Hadot's essay "Conversion" (from the Selected Writings). #LitStud #philosophy #Books

Will I ever have said all I can think of about Varro? Nope! But after my many meanderings, it’s giving me goosebumps that Varro’s Guide to being Roman hit the shelves 🤩 #VarroVerse #LitStud #histodons #litodons #AncWorld #classics uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5695.htm…