It’s hard to believe but another year is over, another decade, and in the case of academics and pedagogues in the increasingly shrinking humanities, the end of another semester.
Originally, I wanted to use this space as a sort of public-facing space where I could tease out ideas, and share the development of my current research project, and more broadly, my thinking.
This has proven to be extremely difficult. It’s hard to relay to people outside of academia just how much work we do, sometimes abstract, but often, menial and repetitive. This is not a complaint, merely a protest against those who deride academia as somehow beyond the reach of capital and labor.
So now that I have a little time I wanted to offer this ramble; to perhaps make a promise to myself that I will write more in this space.
I close this by mentioning an interesting interaction I had in my seminar on Literature and Exile. The students responded extremely well to Ocean Vuong’s new novel, which though not without its problems, is quite good, and teaches quite well.
Without giving too much away let me say that the novel is completely shorn of irony or any kind of postmodern playfulness. It is elegiac, searching; a work of deep mourning.
And we wondered: what does this refusal to engage in playfulness mean? Perhaps some kind of romantic revival, we concluded; it felt like something tragic and new; a book looking for aesthetic redemption.