David Laurence
@davidlaurence.bsky.social
Curious, Aaron, to know your view of Kenneth Burke. both the range of materials he addresses and the way he addresses them. Where do you see his work fitting into your account of 20th-century literary studies?
January 21, 2026 at 8:22 PM
Curious, Aaron, to know your view of Kenneth Burke. both the range of materials he addresses and the way he addresses them. Where do you see his work fitting into your account of 20th-century literary studies?
That’s why I invoked it.
January 19, 2026 at 11:19 PM
That’s why I invoked it.
So in your view poesis is irrelevant and useless as an analytic concept for the study of literature? Taking the term literature in the expansive way you ask us to take it. @annieabrams.bsky.social
January 19, 2026 at 11:18 PM
So in your view poesis is irrelevant and useless as an analytic concept for the study of literature? Taking the term literature in the expansive way you ask us to take it. @annieabrams.bsky.social
The nut: Publisher-designed curricula developed to Quality Specifications address, and can only address, an abstract statistical specimen known as The Student. Only teachers free to use their judgment can address the idiosyncratic needs of the living breathing individuals who are their students.
December 13, 2025 at 11:25 PM
The nut: Publisher-designed curricula developed to Quality Specifications address, and can only address, an abstract statistical specimen known as The Student. Only teachers free to use their judgment can address the idiosyncratic needs of the living breathing individuals who are their students.
Ah, edification! A motive for reading interestingly paired with its counterpart and opposite or apposite—the morally suspect influence of novels, of fiction. Sense and Sensibility. Either/Or.
December 13, 2025 at 3:22 AM
Ah, edification! A motive for reading interestingly paired with its counterpart and opposite or apposite—the morally suspect influence of novels, of fiction. Sense and Sensibility. Either/Or.
Or is it through whom?
December 13, 2025 at 3:01 AM
Or is it through whom?
Literacy, the floor, should not become the ceiling. The point of “books” versus “excerpts” is only tangentially “reading ability” as comprehension of an objectified content or “stamina” measured as words or pages read without pause. The core is the reader as a medium through which an other speaks.
December 13, 2025 at 3:00 AM
Literacy, the floor, should not become the ceiling. The point of “books” versus “excerpts” is only tangentially “reading ability” as comprehension of an objectified content or “stamina” measured as words or pages read without pause. The core is the reader as a medium through which an other speaks.
Curious to hear/understand more what you are thinking about. Does it, for example, have something to do with reading as "hearing voices"? Or with how it is that arrangements of letters prompt laughter or tears? With Winnicott's paradox: Did you make that? or did you find it?
December 12, 2025 at 10:41 PM
Curious to hear/understand more what you are thinking about. Does it, for example, have something to do with reading as "hearing voices"? Or with how it is that arrangements of letters prompt laughter or tears? With Winnicott's paradox: Did you make that? or did you find it?
It’s interesting to read the Shanahan blog post to which Dana Goldstein provides a link. A classic case of how a simple-seeming term like “reading” becomes a specialized term in the vocabulary of literacy researchers based in schools of education—and as such largely incomprehensible to outsiders.
December 12, 2025 at 6:15 PM
It’s interesting to read the Shanahan blog post to which Dana Goldstein provides a link. A classic case of how a simple-seeming term like “reading” becomes a specialized term in the vocabulary of literacy researchers based in schools of education—and as such largely incomprehensible to outsiders.
I believe John Holt was the sort of child who taught himself to read before he went to school and—his weakness—who as an educator generalized his idiosyncratic experience into a program supposedly good for every learner. It wasn’t and it’s not.
December 11, 2025 at 7:19 PM
I believe John Holt was the sort of child who taught himself to read before he went to school and—his weakness—who as an educator generalized his idiosyncratic experience into a program supposedly good for every learner. It wasn’t and it’s not.
I recall Jamaica Kincaid speaking at NCTE in the late 1980s or early 1990s (must have been when Lynne Cheney was NEH Chair) and saying something to the effect of, “I’m not going to stop reading Paradise Lost because Lynne Cheney says it’s good for me.”
December 11, 2025 at 4:00 PM
I recall Jamaica Kincaid speaking at NCTE in the late 1980s or early 1990s (must have been when Lynne Cheney was NEH Chair) and saying something to the effect of, “I’m not going to stop reading Paradise Lost because Lynne Cheney says it’s good for me.”
The unchanging light. The changing sound. There is still. There is time.
December 10, 2025 at 2:53 AM
The unchanging light. The changing sound. There is still. There is time.
The problem boils down to this: how people learn to receive, or is it to fish for?, the knowledge to be found in books, or more broadly in the documentary record of artistic expression, truth-seeking, error, self-deception, and mendacious lying that humanity leaves in its wake.
December 10, 2025 at 1:41 AM
The problem boils down to this: how people learn to receive, or is it to fish for?, the knowledge to be found in books, or more broadly in the documentary record of artistic expression, truth-seeking, error, self-deception, and mendacious lying that humanity leaves in its wake.
Why retain the term “canon” to name this necessary functional selection, unshakably freighted as the term apparently is with the metaphorical baggage of its theological source? Why not a term that dispenses with the dim suggestion of a divine origin, like “knowledge base.”
December 6, 2025 at 7:22 PM
Why retain the term “canon” to name this necessary functional selection, unshakably freighted as the term apparently is with the metaphorical baggage of its theological source? Why not a term that dispenses with the dim suggestion of a divine origin, like “knowledge base.”
Tough choice between stoking outrage toward the undeserving poor and stoking outrage toward the undeserving rich.
December 3, 2025 at 3:07 PM
Tough choice between stoking outrage toward the undeserving poor and stoking outrage toward the undeserving rich.
It is one thing to claim that art approved as great approves our virtue in turn through our (real or pretended) appreciation of it. It is quite another thing to ask what our judgments of art reveal about our judgment, for good or for ill; and how reflection about art might educate our judgment.
December 3, 2025 at 1:54 AM
It is one thing to claim that art approved as great approves our virtue in turn through our (real or pretended) appreciation of it. It is quite another thing to ask what our judgments of art reveal about our judgment, for good or for ill; and how reflection about art might educate our judgment.
Ha ha. Or maybe Ho, ho, ho? Recalling this little item from the College English archives.
Coursen, Herbert R. “The Ghost of Christmas Past: ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’” College English, vol. 24, no. 3, 1962, pp. 236–38. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/373298. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.
Coursen, Herbert R. “The Ghost of Christmas Past: ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’” College English, vol. 24, no. 3, 1962, pp. 236–38. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/373298. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.
The Ghost of Christmas past: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" on JSTOR
Herbert R. Coursen, Jr., The Ghost of Christmas past: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", College English, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Dec., 1962), pp. 236-238
doi.org
November 28, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Ha ha. Or maybe Ho, ho, ho? Recalling this little item from the College English archives.
Coursen, Herbert R. “The Ghost of Christmas Past: ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’” College English, vol. 24, no. 3, 1962, pp. 236–38. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/373298. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.
Coursen, Herbert R. “The Ghost of Christmas Past: ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’” College English, vol. 24, no. 3, 1962, pp. 236–38. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/373298. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.
Enact PhD population control or expand employment horizons beyond academia? A problem for English and other modern languages since 1969, and a debate, still unresolved, from that day to this.
profession.mla.org/outside-the-...
profession.mla.org/outside-the-...
November 26, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Enact PhD population control or expand employment horizons beyond academia? A problem for English and other modern languages since 1969, and a debate, still unresolved, from that day to this.
profession.mla.org/outside-the-...
profession.mla.org/outside-the-...
I wager that where there is a comp/rhet program for freshmen there is a rhet/comp doctoral program. And for historical reasons rhet/comp doctoral programs emerged in public universities, often in Land Grant institutions in the Midwest, often in intense conflict with literary studies and faculty.
November 26, 2025 at 2:57 AM
I wager that where there is a comp/rhet program for freshmen there is a rhet/comp doctoral program. And for historical reasons rhet/comp doctoral programs emerged in public universities, often in Land Grant institutions in the Midwest, often in intense conflict with literary studies and faculty.
Another exemplary figure here who should receive attention is Richard “Jix” Lloyd-Jones, chair of English at the University of Iowa and one of the founders of CCCC.
November 25, 2025 at 3:04 PM
Another exemplary figure here who should receive attention is Richard “Jix” Lloyd-Jones, chair of English at the University of Iowa and one of the founders of CCCC.
A more tendentious account might query how and why “mystification” emerged as a term as literary study struggled and departments battled over study focused on the fascination specific works of literature exert versus general questions of what literature is and does.
November 25, 2025 at 2:35 PM
A more tendentious account might query how and why “mystification” emerged as a term as literary study struggled and departments battled over study focused on the fascination specific works of literature exert versus general questions of what literature is and does.
For me, a lot is prefigured in the collision between Cleanth Brooks (and the push to define literature as a disciplinary object of study more precisely as high art) and Kenneth Burke (and a push to an expansive anthropological study of culture and human language use).
November 25, 2025 at 2:21 PM
For me, a lot is prefigured in the collision between Cleanth Brooks (and the push to define literature as a disciplinary object of study more precisely as high art) and Kenneth Burke (and a push to an expansive anthropological study of culture and human language use).
Scholes, also Wayne Booth, were two of a vanishing kind of exemplary eminences active in both MLA and NCTE. Why? Battles over the use of literature in the first-year writing course—intro to English? or to writing across the university? Battles over “literature” narrowly or “text” expansively.
November 25, 2025 at 2:11 PM
Scholes, also Wayne Booth, were two of a vanishing kind of exemplary eminences active in both MLA and NCTE. Why? Battles over the use of literature in the first-year writing course—intro to English? or to writing across the university? Battles over “literature” narrowly or “text” expansively.