Andrew Goldstone's blog

This post could also be called: Walter Benjamin in the Age of Me Noodling Around with Small Data.

A slightly annotated reconstruction of my response to the survey distributed to all Rutgers faculty as part of the new president’s Strategic Planning initative. Subtitle: Why not be idealistic?

(Co-written by AG and Ted Underwood.) Of all our literary-historical narratives it is the history of criticism itself that seems most wedded to a stodgy history-of-ideas approach---narrating change through a succession of stars or contending schools.

What are the eras of publishing history? Are they literary eras?

Seen through a sociologist’s eyes, the literary system can look very strange indeed.

Just what is that infamous thing, a close reading?

Here’s how I got to that question, and it’s not because I’m giving up on the standard English Ph.D. tactic of giving books as birthday presents to everyone I know (which gets more embarrassing every year, really).

Over at the National Humanities Center’s On the Human website, Paula Moya has posted a fascinating piece on cultural neuroscience, science reporting, and race.

A dark fable of global cultural circulation...

(In which poetry specifically does not provide consolation, and a good thing too.)