iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Reminder, for folks in the business of comparing literatures, to propose to this ACLA panel trying to figure out what Exemplarity and Comparability amount to - abstracts due Sep 22

000

Reposted by @kenoma.bsky.social

Contemporaries at Post45 @atpost45.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

New cluster, new cluster!! 🚨💡 💌 💫 💌 💡 Come to post45.org/contemporari... to read "Asian American Mass Culture," edited by Leland Tabares and Timothy K. August! post45.org/sections/con...

post45.org

Contemporaries – Post45

Post45 seeks to reinvigorate the erstwhile convention of academic critics not only describing past traditions but also actively intervening in current tastes. It provides a forum for writers to conver...

175

Reposted by @kenoma.bsky.social

Sarah Brouillette @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

The introduction to my book is now available online, thanks @dukepress.bsky.social 🫶 The official pub date is in October www.dukeupress.edu/content-mach....

tinyurl.com

109238

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Exemplarity and Comparability seminar at ACLA next year: how do we pick our examples, and how do we decide what to compare? Chaired by Alya Ansari and Carson Welch, abstracts due end of August: www.acla.org/seminar/c983...

Exemplarity and Comparability
Organizers: Carson Welch, Alya Ansari
The selection of "cases" is a fundamental aspect of literary criticism. As early as 1952, Erich Auerbach observed that choosing a proper Ansatzpunkt is an important task for...
Keywords: exemplarity, comparison,
Criticism, Method, judgement
Date Submitted: June 24, 2026

•ACLA
American Comparative Literature Association
This seminar scrutinizes the process by which we make claims on the basis of exemplarity or comparability. These claims are at once aesthetic and conceptual: aesthetic, in the sense that what leads us to single out a set of passages for scrutiny or comparison is often, effectively, our intuition; conceptual, to the extent that what justifies a selection is the coherence of the argument built around it. We would like to explore more rigorously the nature of these judgments which quietly undergird the field's critical practice.

030

Reposted by @kenoma.bsky.social

Pavel Andrade @pavelandrade.com · 30/07/2026

Combined and uneven modernism seminar for the upcoming ACLA. In person, U of Houston, 20-23 May, 2027. How do peripheral literatures register, model, and think the historical and material configurations of the world system? www.acla.org/seminar/f2f2...

acla.org

View Seminar | American Comparative Literature Association

1158

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Lefevere hours! scholar.google.com/citations?vi...

Power and the canon, or: How to rewrite an author
into a classic
André Lefevere
Summary
The article sets out to describe various modes of rewriting such as interpretation, commen-
tary and anthologyzing as instruments serving the stability of the literary system. Tradition-
ally, interpretation and commentary were to remain true to the 'Book' and to prescribed
hermeneutic procedures. Since the authority of the text is being discarded in modern
pluralistic interpretative practices, it has become clear that authority of interpretation rests
in the power, vested in the various literary corporations, which in their turn are dependent
on institutionalized educational bodies protecting cultural interests. It is argued that sys-
tems theory allows for the description of the constraints determining rewriting. Defining the
subordinate position of the literary expert to the powers regulating the system and drawing
upon the tendency to self-maintenance which characterizes systems, it is made clear why
rewriting tends to censure and reduce the original text to the norms of a given time and
audience. This is illustrated with reference to the English rewriting of Heine, the reception
of Blake as well as other examples from various literatures. Rewriting is seen as a powerful
force in introducing, evaluating and establishing literary identities. The rewritten text tends
to become the canon even as it freezes the original in terms of its own dominant values.
The rewritten rather than the original text establishes and maintains literature as a system.

030

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Cultural Critique's special issue on "Marxism, Form, and Futurity" now up online, essays by @annakornbluh.bsky.social @kqandrews.bsky.social @cphiliphaines.bsky.social and then some muse.jhu.edu/issue/57283

Table of Contents reading:
Editorial Statement
1 Liam Kruger, Oded Nir, and Christian P. Haines
Marxism, Form, and Futurity: An Introduction
21 Anna Kornbluh A Very Special Relationship:
Capitalism and the Novel Form
34 Oded Nir Utopian Allegory and the Return of Futurity
in Itay Meirson’s The 90- Minute War
49 Liam Kruger The Location of Critique
68 Kimberly Quiogue Andrews Disciplinarity’s
Temporal Forms
80 Mitch R. Murray Undead Academia:
On the Campus Novel of Decline
97 Phillip E. Wegner A Future Worthy of Her Spirit:
Reproductive Futurism and the Neoliberal University
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun
114 Brittany Murray Caring Badly: Reproductive Labor,
Aesthetic Autonomy, and Futurity in Leïla Slimani’s
Chanson Douce
130 Brent Ryan Bellamy (Energy Heterotopia):
The Case of Trouble on Triton

Marxism, Form,
and Futurity

141 Caren Irr Bridging the Metabolic Rift with
Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book
154 Christian P. Haines Marxism and Human Form
169 Books Received

0239

Reposted by @kenoma.bsky.social

Dennis Hogan @dennismhogan.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Many faculty have been sounding the alarm about the problems generative AI poses for student learning. Strangely, some higher ed administrations seem have emerged as major AI boosters. Why? As I write in the latest @hedgehogreview.bsky.social it's a labor story: hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-f...

1622884

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Timothy Mo's Insular Possession -- it's not just a paperwork book, but very substantially a paperwork book

010

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Intro to Nick Brown’s autonomy for the avatar/terminator bit, Sarah B on rise and fall of English novel, Christine Okoth on peripheral labour, Paul Nadal on remittance fiction!

030

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Bloom v Wynter is thematically fun! Wynter also goes well with Johnson’s “using people“ — a critic unafraid of getting rough with their transitional objects

150

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Schwarz’s “misplaced ideas” or “objective form,” Brouillette and Clover on aesthetic autonomy as bourgeois fetish, Lukacs on narrate/describe, Appiah on poco v. pomo, Wynter title essay in we must sit down and talk about a little culture!

160

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

though, also, Fran Hoepfner has the useful genre/running bit of "movies about grad school"

letterboxd review of tenet by fran hoepfner reading "just fully weeping with laughter. absolute nonsense. finally someone has made a movie about grad school"

020

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Novel of ideas sun, campus novel rising: Drive My Car Campus novel sun, novel of ideas rising: A Serious Man

110

Reposted by @kenoma.bsky.social

Tommy Craggs @tcraggs22.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Was not counting on being moved by any "Infinite Jest"-at-30 essays. And but then @pauline2k.bsky.social performed a tour de force of reparative reading. This is so lovely! www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/infinity-plu...

oaklandreviewofbooks.org

Infinity Plus One

You’d never mistake one of his sentences for anyone else’s. At a time when the worst thing you could be was a poser, Wallace was obviously and overtly himself.

34713

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Yamamoto in DeWitt's The Last Samurai!

010

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Brandon Taylor calls himself one (which is not necessarily the same as being one, but): theadroitjournal.org/issue-thirty...

theadroitjournal.org

Issue Thirty-Eight: Campbell Campbell & Thomas Wee: A Conversation with Brandon Taylor

Visit the post for more.

010

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

I think this is part of the story that Emre proposes to tell in her "Post-Discipline" book, whenever that comes out -- but there's a walkthrough in her Helen DeWitt essay for NLH: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

From 1880 to 1920, institutions of higher education
reformed themselves along the lines of the German model, replacing
generalist scholars with specialist “investigators” who clustered around
particularized fields of expertise.7 Much of what we accept as the normal
organization of the academy today emerged during this time: the unit
of the department took on “connotations of disciplinary specialization
and administrative autonomy,” Graff explained; administrators founded
journals and university presses to ensure that academic research had a
means of dissemination and an audience; universities established gradu-
ate programs as a formalized credentialing process, with field-specific
courses and a doctoral dissertation; and a network of department chairs,
deans, provosts, and presidents rapidly proliferated to oversee all these
intricate and interrelated developments.8 The bureaucratic subdivision
of the university proceeded “in an astonishingly short period of time
and with relatively little variation from one institution to another,” Vey-
sey observed, with the process gaining in intricacy and reach over the
twentieth century and all the way up to the present day.9 It impressed
onto the figure of the scholar a relatively delimited disciplinary affilia-
tion—the antithesis of the polymath, who, in retrospect, would appear
to modern intellectuals as a dilettante, an amateur, or a philistine.

The second development, related to the first, is the precipitous de-
cline of classical and vernacular language education. What Albert S.
Cook described in his 1898 MLA presidential address, “The Province
of English Philology,” as “the estrangement of the study of language
from that of literature” was a process that had started decades before
with the separation of the Latin and Greek languages, oratory, rhetoric,
linguistics, and forensics (along with mathematics, logic, and theology)
from the teaching of the modern languages and literatures as a college
subject.10 Modern languages and literatures subsequently split off into
individual language departments, including English, which ascended
to prominence through the postwar period.11 By the 1960s, the separa-
tion between English and non-English languages and literatures was
institutionalized in the MLA by sub-dividing it into the Association for
Departments of English (ADE) and the Association for Departments
of Foreign Languages (ADFL, which recently rebranded as the ALD).
The sub-division of the organization made transparent “the division be-
tween those who teach English and those who teach foreign languages,”
Michael Holquist observed in “Why We Should Remember Philology”:
“Members of the ADE are more often than not, on their campuses, the
moving force in the textual humanities, with all the implications of that
fact, not just as cultural capital but for tenured slots, salaries, graduate
stipends, and funds for development (i.e., money!).”12 The ADFL had
more members, but these members had seen disproportionately shrink-
ing enrollments in their language courses and a growth in the number
of literature courses they taught in English translation. Administrators,
Holquist observed, had responded by converting “formerly independent
departments” into “larger and more homogenized units,” “formed by
combining erstwhile departments into such institutionally mandated
gerrymanders as German-Slavic-Chinese or the all-pu…

The final development is the feminization of language education
subsequent to its estrangement from the study of literature. By feminiza-
tion I mean, first, the fact of gender in the demographic composition
of language teachers across the school system; they have been, and
continue to be, overwhelmingly female-identifying.14 But I also mean
the devaluation of the labor of teaching relative to research in the
contemporary Anglophone university. Like teachers of grammar and
composition (which they often also are), language educators were treated
as members of a lower-level, preparatory, and technical work force and
were described as the feminized “handmaid” to the masculine “master”
that is literary criticism.15 Their teaching was, and is, regularly allocated
to graduate students, adjunct faculty, or non-tenure track professors, who were paid at lower rates and had comparatively little, if any, job security.
This devaluation secured what Sianne Ngai has described as “contingent
labor’s articulation with female labor”—that is, the alignment of the work
performed by contingent employees in the school with the unwaged work
performed by domestic or affective laborers in the home.16 Language
education made the interarticulation of labor and gender especially ap-
parent because, for scholars and policy makers alike, the proper domain
of language education often shifted. Sometimes language education took
place in the home, where it was treated as the responsibility of unwaged
caregivers. Other times, it took place in the school, where it was treated
as the responsibility of waged teaching professionals.

020

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

...but idk if I'm ready to concede that my impatience with Lerner, Oyler is JUST wanting to reassert the prestige of better-disguised (more time and skill expensive) research and curation)

000

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

(which: not so far removed from "my kid could paint that" philistinism, but if RR wants to focus on the work of the curatorial subject then a desire for Distinctive how-did-they-do-that curation makes sense, at least as an attempt at reasserting a kind of prestige...

100

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

small, but: I get that the Manov critique of Oyler's borrowing from wikipedia looks, to Ruby, like small potatoes relative to Melville -- but the difference is that it's trivially easy to trace Oyler's steps, so that "well then what did I need Oyler for" feeling isn't nothing

110

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

my hotter take here is split the difference and drop both for Kim

240

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

Fleming? I hear you on HoD slog but it grounds so much of what follows, Achebe/Roy especially

240

Reposted by @kenoma.bsky.social

Rosa Press @rosa-collective.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

Rosa Press has collated a folio of tributes in memory of our friend Joshua Clover. Please read pieces by @lalouverouge.bsky.social @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social @charmainechua.bsky.social Oki Sogumi, Mark Steven, @andrew-brooks.bsky.social + @alorange.bsky.social here: rosapress.net/joshua-clove...

rosapress.net

Joshua Clover, 1962–2025 – Rosa Press

2115

kenoma.bsky.social @kenoma.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

Reading Big Swiss in coffee shops has yielded consistent gushing from baristas

100

Reposted by @kenoma.bsky.social

Alex Zucker @alexzucker.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

Clear-eyed, strategic analysis from @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social at @thedrift-mag.bsky.social: "I’m not sure that the [pro-Palestine] movement has saved a single life, and that’s extremely sobering. It speaks to the fact that we don’t live in a democracy; + www.thedriftmag.com/we-will-not-...

thedriftmag.com

“We Will Not Win on Our Own”

In April 2024, Columbia’s administration brought in the New York Police Department to dismantle the tents that had been set up by pro-Palestinian protesters occupying the university’s South Lawn.

23113