It ALSO gets perfectly right the causality of our equally embarrassing discourse about our own expertise. I mean!!!

“Accidentally”

Oh I absolutely think that some people have a type of special talent for this stuff, sure — but that kind of just proves my point (and/but also, speaking as a creative writing professor: we can’t start ceding ground on the “teachability” front lol)

Yeah I think history might actually be the best (by which I mean most challenging) test case for this theory

This has I think something to do with whether a discipline is fundamentally empirical or rhetorical, and I don’t think you can turn the latter into the former just by force of conviction.

Anyway, I know the discourse is going to be fully about sex pests for the foreseeable future; I’m just having some silly thoughts over here

But that “newness” doesn’t translate straightforwardly to “progress,” as much as we might like it to. It’s just a guy amongst a bunch of guys. The number of things you can do with a book still way outnumbers the things we now view as fully outmoded.

The goal as I see it is to get your brain to a point where you can squint so hard at a piece of literature/art that some weird new way of reading it pops out, like some kind of hermeneutic slot machine

I very do American lit and I’d never heard of her, but I’m also an idiot, so ymmv