Blog Posts

(Crossposted at Arcade.) Mark Bauerlein–author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) and Literary Theory: An Autopsy–recently released a widely discussed study called "Literary Research: Cost and Impacts" for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. This short study concludes that … Continue reading How to Squeeze the Humanities 101: The Case of Mark Bauerlein

(Crossposted at Arcade.) In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Why We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading," Alan Jacobs argues that "’deep attention’ reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit." The inevitable minority status of deep reading "has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in … Continue reading Alan Jacobs and the Rise of the Reading Class

(Crossposted at Arcade.) January was apparently Andrew Ross month over at Dissent.  Two articles, Jeffrey J. Williams’s “How to be an Intellectual: The Cases of Richard Rorty and Andrew Ross” (in the Winter 2011 issue of the magazine) and Kevin Mattson’s “Cult Stud Mugged” (an online original), track Ross’s evolution from a so-called cult-stud into someone … Continue reading 13 Ways of Looking at “Pac-Man”

(Crossposted from Arcade.) I’d like to point my loyal readers to the amazing introduction Charlie Kaufman wrote for Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script, which is available over at The Rumpus. I would summarize the introduction and analyze it — I am almost unable to resist the temptation — but to do so would ruin the … Continue reading The Postironic Art of Charlie Kaufman

(Crossposted at Arcade.) I’d like to use my bloggy pulpit to draw your attention to a draft of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s essay, “Infinite Summer: Reading the Social Network,” which discusses the origin and signifiance of an online effort to read Infinite Jest the summer after David Foster Wallace’s suicide. This essay is destined to become part … Continue reading Infinite Summer and New Models of Online Scholarship