Ground Truth by Mark L. Hineline
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
Summerwater by Sarah Moss
Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer
I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins
Running Out by Lucas Bessire
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti
My Work Is Not Yet Done by Thomas Ligotti
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Wayward by Dana Spiotta
The Summer 2021 MLA Newsletter opened with the following question: “Where Have All the Majors Gone?” A subsequent article noted that, from 2009 to 2019, “the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded across all subjects in the discipline fell by 29%.” The article provided plenty of additional data related to the above question, observing that declines in awarded English degrees is, “particularly troubling.” However, what departments might do to reverse this trend remains “unclear.” As the former chair of an English department that no longer exists and as a tenured faculty member in a program on borrowed time, I want to suggest that maybe there is no reversing this trend, that perhaps we need to consider a different question: “What now?”
Such a suggestion and consideration come from the experience and knowledge that the development of unique and in-demand courses, the diversification of teaching appointments, concerted efforts toward enrollment management, and an active and visible presence at every campus event did not prevent the dissolution of my department. And I worry that such actions are unlikely to stop the end of others. So, much as conversations about climate change have moved from prevention to adaptation, similar discussions are overdue in our field. In therefore drawing upon recent, relevant scholarship on the precarious position of English (broadly construed) within higher education, I hope to highlight and invite testaments of disciplinary survival and to identify the coffins to which we cling while facing our future.
The Midwest Survival Guide by Charlie Berens
Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh
The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
Leaving The Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
The City & the City by China Mieville
At the End of the World by Lawrence Millman
Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty by W.L. Rusho
Outside Lies Magic by John P. Stilgoe
After Cooling by Eric Dean Wilson
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
The Last by Hanna Jameson
Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang
Futureproof by Kevin Roose
Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
Exit Strategy by Martha Wells
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Wall by John Lanchester
The Complete Mushroom Hunter by Gary Lincoff
Fulfillment by Alec MacGillis
Inconspicuous Consumption by Tatiana Schlossberg
Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier
Stoner by John Williams
I'm annoyed with, frustrated by, and tired of the ridiculously unrealistic "critical" takes on The Chair. Below are some more positive and nuanced responses:
But as it unfolds, The Chair offers far deeper insight into the interpersonal and intergenerational dynamics of campus culture than any novel I’ve read. The show’s dramatic energies are focused on issues of free speech, the changing paradigms of scholarship and teaching, and the prejudice that women faculty and faculty of color face. Yet the subject that gets the most screen time is none of these, nor is it chairing. It’s parenting—although as the series rolls on, we slowly realize that, just possibly, chairing is parenting by other means.
Kevin Dettmar, What The Chair Gets Unexpectedly Right About the Ivory Tower
If we're watching The Chair as Ji-Yoon's story, the portrayal of activist students would exist to shed light on the pressure and complexity of the situation Ji-Yoon is facing as a woman of color in a position of authority, not, as some have interpreted it, as a commentary on activist students in general. That is, Ji-Yoon experiences student activism as high-stakes and unwieldy precisely because she respects their principled stances -- to the point that they intensify her suspicion that, despite her best efforts and intentions, she is not transforming the master's house from the inside (shout out to Audre Lorde).
To operate as if the portrayal of student protesters matters more than how the portrayal illuminates something about Ji-Yoon is to give these characters the primacy
Koritha Mitchell, Stop asking if The Chair is realistic
The show, co-created by Amanda Peet and Harvard Ph.D. Annie Wyman, feels like a real attempt to grapple with the problems of contemporary academia, and the humanities in particular, by someone who has felt invested in them.
Lidija Haas, The Chair Is an Elegy for the Life of the Mind
I don’t know anyone who has gone through the trouble of becoming a professor with the express goal of ending up as a department chair. The role draws on organizational skills that many academics have made a career out of avoiding; it also leeches away time that could be spent researching or teaching...The Chair thrives in scenes where manners and decorum get stripped away and Kim recognizes the futility of her situation. Her strange profession begins to seem relatable. Her face, usually so attentive and patient, evinces rage and disappointment. One complication of institutional diversity is that diverse faces can now lead institutions that are in free fall.
Hua Hsu, Sandra Oh's Masterly Performance of Empathy in The Chair
But as much as the characters are—wonderfully—never cynical about the study of literature, they are also exhausted by the situations they find themselves in, both personally and professionally, and especially where those two spheres collide. The current pandemic permanently damaged the academic careers of parents (mostly women) who had to abandon their (our) research to take care of their (our) children, and forced faculty to teach in windowless classrooms to hundreds of students without mask or vaccine requirements. None of that is in this show, yet even so, it depicts the study of literature as unsustainable. I wish it were clearer to the viewer that it’s unsustainable because it’s not supported.
Johannah Winant, Moby-Done
Description: University of Michigan-Flint assistant professor of English Dr. James Schirmer talks about using twitter in a college classroom and how twitter impacts the way we watch sports.
Transcript: Initially, it's a four-week assignment where students, I ask them to engage with each other and to communicate with each other and see if we can actually get any kind of worthwhile conversation happening in that tiny constrained space. Because we only have 140 characters to work with, so, it's always interesting to me to see what kinds of conversations students can get into, what kinds of conversations that I can have with them in this very kind of tiny space... I think a lot of them do get a good amount of, I think there are a variety of benefits that come with it. One thing I've noticed, just because I teach a lot of writing courses, is that they do, students tend to become more concise in their writing. They're a little bit clearer, they have a better awareness of who they're talking to, why they're talking to them, what they're trying to talk to them about. And, just on a day-to-day level, if students have any questions, I'm, there's a greater accessibility with them and with me, that they, they feel comfortable talking with me, they feel comfortable talking with each other. So, there's an element of transferability there, that they have this, some degree of comfort communicating with each other in this very specific way, specific medium, but that tends to translate to the class... just a little slice of information, and I think that part of it deals with, too, is that the creators designed it so that it would work better with cellphones and with texting, because that's one of, I think, one of the primary odes of communication, just these very short little bits of information, but then things can kind of explode out of that. And how I use it in an academic context is that I've had quite a few opportunities, publishing opportunities, come up that way, just because of starting conversations and finding out, okay, we both follow this person, so maybe I should pay attention to what they're doing. And this is actually something I advocate for our, some of our graduate students in the MA program, is that if they're interested in things like digital rhetoric, social media, video game studies, that where a lot of the interesting conversations are happening, they are on blogs, but the more day to day, just distribution systems, news items, that where it's happening, it's happening on Twitter... There's always that potential for engagement, like if you're on there, there's always that chance that someone's going to respond to you and, depending upon what you, how you decide to use it, whether you're more social and, you know, say what'd you have for breakfast every morning as, which is is one of the criticisms of it, it's been going, how you use it, you will, you will get followers based on how you use it. A community will develop, based on how you use it, whether you're, you know, a fan of the Detroit Tigers, you'll get maybe, you'll get ten to fifteen people to follow you, just based on that, because, you know, you, you made a couple offhand comments about, you know, a play last night or you engage somebody in a more academic context and talking about video game studies so you will either get attention or, you know, get follows, based on that... You know not everybody is using Twitter, or any other kind of social media for that matter, for, you know, honest and true purposes, that there are some nefarious endeavors trying to break through that, even through Twitter... I'm a big fan of the Detroit Tigers and so I follow Dan Dickerson, Mario Impemba, Rod Allen. I even follow some of the players: Will Rhymes, Casper Wells is on there, Robbie Weinhardt is pitching for Toledo now, he's on there. But, yeah, usually one of the windows that I will have open any time a Tigers game is on is I'll have the Tigers hashtag in a search bar and just see what, what other people are saying about the game, and sometimes I'll say stuff, but sometimes it's usually, it's almost like a secondary spectator sport, just to see what everybody else is saying about it... It's kind of similar to, um, I think it's kind of similar actually to sitting in a bar, you know? And, just, everybody isn't using, is in this one place for this particular purpose and so they're a bit so that you'll hear bits of different conversations going on, but they're all be about the same thing.
Leaving Academia by Christopher L. Caterine
The Silence by Don DeLillo
Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn
How We Live Now by Bill Hayes
Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley
Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic
Erosion by Terry Tempest Williams
The most we can do is to write -- intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively -- about what it is like living in the world at this time.
- Oliver Sacks in How We Live Now by Bill Hayes