Currently about halfway through a proof version right now. Would set it right alongside The Parasite or The Five Senses just on the strength of the “Betrayal” essay alone

Rainer Hanshe’s intro to Toward the One and Only Metaphor was 🥰🥰🥰

...generalizing just within that district seems like it would be difficult to the point of impossibility. Too many different factors, both inside and outside of the education system. Seems even more difficult to make sense of reading habits at an even bigger scale

Thought about this quite a bit when I worked as a sub in a district in Appalachia with a pretty extreme funding disparity between schools -- the county included a school in an R1 STEM university city, a school in a rural agricultural pocket, and another in a town facing severe drug/poverty issues...

From the standpoint of practicing authors, John Barth’s essays, “Limits of Imagination,” + “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism” as well as the suite of essays from William Gass’s Fiction and the Figures of Life are also very, very good

Seconding the Banfield and +1 for her book Unspeakable Sentences!!!

Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination and Rule of Metaphor, some of the early sections Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, Timothy Bewes’ Free Indirect (and his older essay from Differences on Literary Landscape).

Lukacs on reification?

++ some very strange implications to pull out of what it might say about the present if we're to look to contemporary autofiction for our "sacrificial rituals" and "dying gods"...but I think they might be hiding in there somewhere 👀

From Frye:

"Irony descends from the low mimetic: it begins in realism and dispassionate observation. But as it does so, it moves steadily towards myth, and dim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappear in it. Our five modes evidently go around in a circle."