Johanna Winant
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johannawinant.bsky.social
Johanna Winant
@johannawinant.bsky.social
4.7K followers 1.5K following 2.2K posts
Posts are my own. Poetry is everyone's. She/her.

Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton UP, 2025), Lyric Logic (Columbia UP, 2026), essays, reviews, and other writing in various places
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johannawinant.bsky.social
Johanna Winant @johannawinant.bsky.social · 17h
I wrote an essay for @bostonreview.bsky.social about what I learned about close reading when I taught at West Virginia University

www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
The Claims of Close Reading - Boston Review
Literary studies have been starved by austerity, but their core methodology remains radical.
www.bostonreview.net
Reposted by Johanna Winant
katebbeall.bsky.social
“‘You are the world expert in your idea,’ I would say.”

This essay is big-hearted, heart-aching, tenderhearted, 🫀. It’s also so wise about the value of close reading, now/forever.
November 27, 2025 at 4:13 AM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
heymrsbond.com
Something I’ve noticed and that @johannawinant.bsky.social gets absolutely right: teaching students to focus long enough to build (on) an idea is a gift. It’s no longer standard, at least not in K-12. It requires safety and stamina, both of which are in danger in classrooms across the world.
November 26, 2025 at 3:45 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
sml47.bsky.social
What a lovely essay, full of hard-won wisdom. I wish those of us in academia spent a larger portion of our time thinking and talking about this kind of stuff, in this clear and earnest manner, both with each other and with our students.
It was easy to compare the university to the state's mountains: a site of extraction, a public good that had been plundered by the wealthy and left as a shell. All of this is true, but it's not the only truth. Because several times a week I walked into classrooms of students. Nothing there was missing: my classes were full in every way. Where everything else everywhere else felt exhausted, the classroom was overflowing, plentiful. It was a space for analytic thinking, longform attention, clear expression, cooperative conversation- democratic society and a richer life. All we needed was a poem, a few hours each week, and trust in what we could do, in what we did do, together. All arguments work, at a basic level, in the same way. There is the evidence we all agree on (even if just for the sake of argument), and there is a claim about that evidence; that claim must be able to sustain reasonable counterarguments— it's not obviously the case, or it wouldn't be a claim. And a claim has stakes: implications that follow from the claim, the difference the argument makes. The arguments my students wrote on Renaissance poetry might seem like they worked differently than the arguments made by students who faced down the Board of Governors. But the difference is only superficial. The evidence was different, the claims were different, the stakes were different, but the moves my students made as they argued were not. In both cases, the arguments that students made first required believing that they had the authority to make them. When offered a poem, and time, and attention, and good faith, my students offered their own arguments back as if they had been waiting their whole lives for the chance; they reciprocated my trust many times over. I don't recognize college as written about in the New York Times, where higher education outside of a handful of Ivies scarcely seems to exist, and the misery of ChatGPT-written essays is primarily a story of austerity: the looting of the treasure house of public higher education and the resulting impossible teaching and learning conditions for real humans.
November 26, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
g--0.bsky.social
fantastic. you must read this
November 27, 2025 at 12:32 AM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
ebonyteach.blacksky.app
This may be of interest to #literacies.
November 26, 2025 at 5:50 PM
johannawinant.bsky.social
if you liked reading my essay today, please consider subscribing to support @bostonreview.bsky.social -- with this code, only $17.50
bostonreview.bsky.social Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 13h
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November 26, 2025 at 9:51 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
samcohen.bsky.social
One of the many things being lost to austerity and to the idea that billionaires not only should exist but should be listened to
November 26, 2025 at 9:03 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
joshuaweishart.bsky.social
Such a poignant piece, I'm sad to have shared many of these experiences and sentiments motivating my own departure from WVU. This excerpt is especially sad as the students there proved time and again that they deserved better.
November 26, 2025 at 8:33 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
asia.bsky.social
Really loved this article on close reading. The art of noticing, and of crafting an argument, is how we begin to inoculate ourselves from so many societal and intellectual ills, especially in a world where disinformation, toxic algorithms, and slop vie for our limited time and attention.
November 26, 2025 at 8:37 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
tmksyracuse.bsky.social
Love this
All arguments work, at a basic level, in the same way. There is the evidence we all agree on (even if just for the sake of argument), and there is a claim about that evidence; that claim must be able to sustain reasonable counterarguments—it’s not obviously the case, or it wouldn’t be a claim. And a claim has stakes: implications that follow from the claim, the difference the argument makes. The arguments my students wrote on Renaissance poetry might seem like they worked differently than the arguments made by students who faced down the Board of Governors. But the difference is only superficial. The evidence was different, the claims were different, the stakes were different, but the moves my students made as they argued were not. In both cases, the arguments that students made first required believing that they had the authority to make them.
November 26, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
tisjune.bsky.social
i read this essay as a wonderful unpacking of the material and political conditions that undergird relational, caring ways of doing language together, that underlines the need to collectively fight for these conditions
November 26, 2025 at 7:51 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
andclarke.bsky.social
Really lovely piece. A timely reminder of why lit scholars, tutors and lecturers do what we do.
November 26, 2025 at 7:15 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
josemarichal.bsky.social
Outstanding reflection on the importance of close reading. It's curious that universities are closing the very departments that teach students this critical skill. It's the one "AI-proof" pedagogy that demands attention and rejects cognitive offloading. Which is probably why it's under threat.
November 26, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
hyoyoonkang.bsky.social
This: “they [the students] also have to care about themselves, enough to believe in their own significance.”
November 26, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
jholc.bsky.social
I loved the love in this
November 26, 2025 at 6:13 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
sselisker.bsky.social
A truly gorgeous essay here, and now that, mysteriously, two copies of Close Reading for the 21st Century have made their way into my household, I’ll take this chance to also warmly recommend it, the opening gambit on Red Wheelbarrow alone is a marvel. They are making “glazed” happen!
November 26, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
brandyjensen.bsky.social
this is gorgeous and moving
November 26, 2025 at 5:39 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
dan-sinnamon.bsky.social
This essay by @johannawinant.bsky.social is beautiful on what can happen in the classroom, and on the importance of *argument* to literary studies. I especially like how she writes about helping students to "believe in their own significance"
www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
The Claims of Close Reading - Boston Review
Literary studies have been starved by austerity, but their core methodology remains radical.
www.bostonreview.net
November 26, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
emilyesfraser.bsky.social
“In our work, we assumed—before anything else, before any evidence—that there was meaning, and that we were rational, and we decided that we treat texts, ourselves, and each other this way. This is truly and always radical”
November 26, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
profluskey.bsky.social
A wonderful essay about what we and our students can accomplish through close reading.
November 26, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
devinsanchezcurry.com
johanna's essay mostly resonates with
my experience, except that the classroom i'm teaching intro in this semester doesn't have windows
November 26, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
quatrus.bsky.social
"My classrooms indeed felt magical bcs of the close readings being done there, but...close reading is not magic. Its power lies in argument: always vulnerable, nothing simpler and yet nothing harder. And to clarify my stakes: the way that close reading is powerful is that it lays claim to power."
November 26, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
heymrsbond.com
“Close reading is not magic. Its power lies in argument: always vulnerable, nothing simpler and yet nothing harder. And to clarify my stakes: the way that close reading is powerful is that it lays claim to power.”

#EduSky This is SO DANG GOOD!
November 26, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
joelcalahan.com
A truly moving and beautiful essay about reading by an old friend. I couldn’t recommend it higher to begin your morning.
November 26, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Reposted by Johanna Winant
annieabrams.bsky.social
"I learned about close reading when I asked them to take their own thinking seriously—to take themselves seriously. Doing so, I found, forced me to take my job more seriously."
November 26, 2025 at 3:31 PM