Staggering to imagine trying to explain this to 2015 me, who was happily listening to Art Angels without a care in the world...

Ahahah and Riskin's book is a HEFTY tome. Maybe you need a taller house? :))

Love this! I think that Jessica Riskin's Restless Clock (2016) is a version of this book. But her book is marketed/formatted as scholarly, even though it is very engagingly written

Devastatingly accurate, isn't it?

I do! Also anecdotes about this had an afterlife in quote a few essays and critiques of the tech industry (I'm thinking Roisin Kiberd's essay on normcore / Zuckerberg / the hoody as coding uniform)

Jessica DeFino's review of beauty is really good at staying up to date (but also very smartly critiquing) the beauty/fashion culture industry
open.substack.com/pub/jessicad...

One of your best!

This is a truly incredible series, cannot recommend enough!

The actual centre of literary studies? What unites it as a form of enquiry?

One of the main answers: the method of close reading.

But that has led to some really interesting historicising of how close reading developed (see Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant forthcoming book on close reading).

Most obvious focal point for this discussion is John Guillory's 2022 book "Professing Criticism", and reactions to that book.

He basically asks: with the capacious breadth of 21st c literary studies (ecocriticism, queer studies, diaspora literatures etc are all very different subfields), where is

The defining conversation of the recent 5 years of literary studies centres on: is/why literary studies is dying/being defunded? How/should it be saved? What part(s) are worth saving?

Not so much "can literary studies save the world", more like "is it worth/possible to save literary studies".

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Only on page 1 and we’re already off to the races! This is excellent.

My bf and I have a spare room in Oxford? Pretty easy to do day trips to London

This episode was a game changer for me.

Those of us who have had the pleasure of reading and thinking about your work are not indifferent to you. And we're part of the universe. So, in a small way, the universe is not indifferent either. Good luck, Helen

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Interesting that behavioural economics was the fusion of studying folk psychology and economics -- and it became about how humans have biases, heuristics, and frailties when it comes to gambling $10, rather than about the stories we tell about The Economy writ large

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