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Mark McGurl

@markmcgurl.bsky.social
363 followers 263 following 4 posts
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Reposted by Mark McGurl
Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
My whole career the Humanities seem to have been curled up in a defensive crouch trying to justify our meaning/existence. At times it has even seemed a productive thought exercise, but I think generally whatever body has demanded the justification is not really open to being persuaded of anything.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026
LLMs bridge the gap between the honor still accorded to white-collar literacy and the dwindling capacity of educational institutions to reproduce it. andrewgoldstone.com/blog/f26nope
andrewgoldstone.com
Literacy, Language Models, Cultural Capital
The website of Andrew Goldstone, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Scholarship on the history and sociology of twentieth-century literature, pages for undergraduate and graduate literature courses, blog.
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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
If a generative AI CEO is telling you something, take it with a grain of salt the size of an iceberg. So if they want regulation now, it is more likely something to do with finances than an immediate existential threat. These dipshits do not care about existential threats other than going bankrupt.
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Evan Kindley @evankindley.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I'm excited to announce that my book "The New York School: Poetry, Art, and Friendship in Midcentury Manhattan" will be published by Knopf in March 2027. It's a group biography of the New York School of Poets, centered on John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch.
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Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Being the dept chair and preparing for the start of the school year seems to mean updating the "AI Framework for BC English Courses." Here's the new version, if anyone is interested.
docs.google.com
BC English AI Framework 2.0
Min Hyoung Song, Chair Department of English Boston College, August 2026 AI FRAMEWORK FOR BC ENGLISH COURSES Version 2.0 AI tools have grown so ubiquitous, many corporate employers consider the us...
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Barry Petchesky @barryp.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
God bless the confounding dorks of the humanities. It'd be a poorer world without them. defector.com/humanists-ha...
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Gary Kennedy @jazzsnob99.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
🧵
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Victor LaValle @victorlavalle.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Enormous congratulations to this year’s Winner & Finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Daniel Kraus - ANGEL DOWN (W) Katie Kitamaura - AUDITION (F) Torrey Peters - STAG DANCE (F) It was enormous honor to serve on this year’s jury & highlight such ambitious, amazing books. Read all three!
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Rebecca Makkai @rebeccamakkai.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
I can finally tell you that I was the fiction jury chair for this year's Pulitzer. I had a blast, and am so grateful for the experience.
I was honored to serve as chair of this year’s Pulitzer Jury for fiction. Along with Victor Lavalle, Mark McGurl, Elizabeth Strout, and David Treuer, I spent much of 2025 reading a stunning mountain of books.
Out of nearly 600 novels and short story collections submitted for this year’s prize, we were delighted to present the final judges, the Pulitzer Board, with three nominees whose wild, profound, idiosyncratic narratives are, in our collective estimation, the exciting and fully-realized American fiction published last year. 
We read these books during a year of particular national horror, but to be immersed in literature during this brutal year was also a blessing. Dreams help us digest stress and trauma—and fiction (shared dreams, writ large) help us process the world, its tragic failings, its surprising and obstinate beauty.
All three of our finalist books plumb the depths of pain (personal, political, existential), but couple those tragedies with ecstasy. And it seems like no coincidence that in all three books, a protagonist finds deliverance in the surreal or imagined. In the title novella of Torrey Peters’ collection Stag Dance, a folkloric beast terrifies the protagonist but ultimately delivers salvation. In Katie Kitamura’s Audition, the playacting of both theater and twisted familial roles give the narrator’s life shape and purpose. In Daniel Kraus’s Angel Down, it’s a biblical angel who offers both redemption and a glimpse of the horrifying future. 
The five jurists were united in looking for a book that felt like a classic, one that future readers (we must believe in the future readers, or we’re lost) will look back on as something truly great and even, in retrospect, inevitable, born of this precarious moment in history.
Congratulations to all three of the finalists; I’m so grateful that their work is in the world. And Chicago fireworks for the winner, Daniel Kraus.
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Mark Athitakis @mathitak.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Wow, "Angel Down" won the Pulitzer in fiction. Weird-ass genre mashups ftw.
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Alexander Manshel @manshel.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Ten years ago I flew to Austin to attend my first academic conference. Today I'm headed back to Austin, this time to accept the MELUS Book Award. A wonderful echo—and a time to reflect, with gratitude, on the opportunity to do this work alongside so many brilliant scholars, students, and friends!
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Günter Leypoldt @guenterleypoldt.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Looking forward to speak with Carolin Amlinger and Julika Griem about my book at the KWI Essen next Tuesday. Please join us if you can
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Mark McGurl @markmcgurl.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Normally I don’t click on this stuff b/c life too short etc but wow there is some truly astonishing ignorance on proud display in this clip.
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Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
The humanities: weak, contemptible, ineffective, populated mainly by losers, graduates incapable of doing anything but menial service work. Also the humanities: a dangerous, incomprehensibly powerful force whose total destruction is necessary if society is to continue, children are to be born, etc.
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Dr SpookyGoth @ghostingdani.bsky.social · 14/03/2026
Come for Dan taking about material reality, stay for the takedown of the Romantic genius
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Sarah Brouillette @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
y'all !!!! I love that the blurbs are basically like, "listen, she is never not telling you about some bleak shit" 😍❤️‍🔥 (thank you @aarthivadde.bsky.social and @markmcgurl.bsky.social)
dukeupress.edu
Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era
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Deborah McDowell @dem8z.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
“What are we pretending not to know today?” —Toni Cade Bambara
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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
Terrific profile of James Patterson. Surprisingly affecting. Did you know he funds stipends for Iowa Writers' Workshop students? That he dropped out of a PhD in English at Vanderbilt with an MA for a fiction thesis? www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
bloomberg.com
Along Came an Influencer: How America’s Bestselling Writer Became MrBeast’s Co-Author
After decades atop the thriller game, James Patterson is fending off waning sales by doubling down on collaborations—and dabbling in romantasy too.
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 10/01/2026
If Christians quit the Colosseum, the lions win — so I'm staying
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Caleb Crain @calebcrain.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
“ ‘The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation’ … [But] in 2024, food-at-home is no longer 33% of household spending. For most families, it’s 5 to 7 percent.”
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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 13/11/2025
Oh you rich conspiring pedophiles & all your smug weaselly defenders, please lecture me again about how my trans kid is a threat to American family values
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Mark Goble @goblemark.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
Peter Coviello isn't on Bluesky, but this definitely should be: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...
lithub.com
Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…
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Günter Leypoldt @guenterleypoldt.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
Thrilled to announce my new book (electronic version out now, print next month) — it proposes a new value theory grounded in the longue durée of literary institutions, 1800–present.
Cover of my book: Literature's Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value. The Cover depicts a bookseller in 1930s Cambridge, with a book rack on her back, and a customer perusing one of her books
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Sarah Osment @smosment.bsky.social · 14/09/2025
nobody does it like natalie shapero
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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
I’m not depressed, I’m Kojeve-pilled. History ended, desire died, and I became a post-historical functionary sipping tea in silence. You still chase meaning; I enact formality. Fukuyama was late. I microwaved noodles at the end of time and called it Absolute Spirit.
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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
What role do social movements play in recent literary history? @franciscondine.bsky.social and I gathered some brilliant scholars to debate Jeffrey Lawrence's essay, "Mobilizing Literature," published last fall for @atpost45.bsky.social post45.org/2025/03/intr...
post45.org
Introduction - Post45
Rarely does the publication of a peer-reviewed essay generate the excitement that accompanied Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” in the Fall 2024 issue of ELH. Lawrence aims for an ambitious i...
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
This issue of ALH, just released, will apparently be the last edited solely by Gordon Hutner, one of our great "professional readers" (to borrow a @harrys.bsky.social phrase). It's hard to see the mark he's left on his field, because, in a way, it is the field. academic.oup.com/alh/issue
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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
In a time when it seems books coverage only ever shrinks, Adrienne turned Esquire into a books powerhouse. This is devastating.
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Philip Leventhal @philipleventhal.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
"Nothing less than a reorientation of our attention to film, literature, and time." -- J. D. Connor Coming this Spring: DOWNTIME: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN SLOW MOTION, by Mark Goble (@goblemark.bsky.social). bit.ly/4g3u7Rs @columbiaup.bsky.social
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