This episode of The Common Reader podcast is a little different. I spoke to both Jeffrey Lawrence and Julianne Werlin about literature, politics, and the future of the academic humanities. Questions included: what do we mean when we talk about literature and markets? Can we leave politics out of literary discussion? Should we leave it out? If we can’t leave it out, can we have nice friendly conversations about it? What is academic Marxism? We also talked about whether Stephen Greenblatt is too ideological and why universities are necessary to literary culture, academics on Substack.

Julianne writes Life and Letters. Jeffrey writes Avenues of the Americas. Here is Julianne’s interview in The Republic of Letters.

Transcript (AI generated, will contain some errors)

Henry Oliver (00:00)

Today I am talking to Jeffrey Lawrence and Julianne Werlin.

Jeffrey is a professor of English literature and comparative literature at Rutgers University. He specializes in the 20th and 21st century and he writes the sub stack, Avenues of America. Julianne probably needs no introduction to a sub stack audience. She writes Life and Letters, one of my favorite sub stacks. She’s a professor of English at Duke University, where as well as specializing in early modern poetry, she is interested in sociological and demographic studies of literature.

and we are going to have a big conversation about literature and markets, politics, what do we mean when we talk about literature and markets, can we leave politics out of literary discussion, should we leave it out, if we can’t leave it out, can we have nice friendly conversations about it, and also maybe what is academic Marxism and what should it be and why is it so confusing? Jeffrey and Julianne, hello.

Julianne (00:59)

Hi.

Jeffrey Lawrence (01:01)

Hi, thanks for having us.

Julianne (01:02)

Yeah, thank you.

Henry Oliver (01:04)

I am going to start by referencing an interview that you did, Julianne, for Republic of Letters, which everyone has been reading. And you said, I’ve printed it out wrong, so I can’t read the whole quote. But you said something like, you joined Substack because you wanted people to talk with and because you felt a lack of debate in your academic field. There are lots of good things about scholarship being slow and careful, but it also needs to be animated by debate and conversation.

and a sense of the stakes of what we’re doing, and that is eroding in the academy. So I want you both to talk about that. Why is that happening? How much of a problem is it? How much is Substack or the internet more generally the solution? What should we be doing? Why don’t we go to Julianne first, because it’s your quote.

Julianne (01:54)

Sure, I mean, won’t go on too long ⁓ since I have already spoken about this, but my sense within English departments is, you know, they’re becoming smaller, fewer people are taking our classes, we have much less of a role in public conversation and public debate, except as kind of a stalking horse for certain types of arguments. And certainly, if you are an early modernist, it’s very hard to locate a kind of a...

Henry Oliver (02:14)

You

Julianne (02:25)

discrete set of debates within early modern literature because there is so little public salience to literary fields. And I think this is happening in all literature. It’s especially pronounced if you’re working in the earlier periods. So my sense in joining SUBSTAC was that perhaps there will be debates by people who are not already so deep within the particular professional and disciplinary structures of a field that they can

find new points of connection between literature and public life along different ⁓ axes that we have maybe not explored adequately within English departments and are maybe becoming harder to explore as English departments contract and recede from public life.

Henry Oliver (03:04)

Mm-hmm.

So we’re bringing Milton back to the people and also finding out why they care about him at all. ⁓ What do you think about it, Geoff?

Julianne (03:16)

Well, hopefully. I mean, that’s the goal.

Jeffrey Lawrence (03:21)

Great, ⁓ so I actually restacked that specific quote from Julianne because it resonated so much with me. Yeah, I mean, my sense is that as someone who works on 20th and 21st century literature, there is more crossover there, I would say, between sort of academic scholarship and public debate. But I really wanna just echo what Julianne said there, that ⁓ I have gotten the feeling that within

let’s call it like the legacy media. There are particular arguments that come from academia that are pushed forward and that become representative of the field of 20th and 21st century literature as a whole. And those kind of come to stand in for academic debate more generally. And I think it becomes very difficult. One of the things that I was noticing so much is

that the people who had access to those legacy journals, are places like the Atlantic, the New York Times, that those began to dominate the debates and people just aren’t recognizing that in scholarships. So one of the things I particularly like about Substack is that I feel like although it has some of the same problems as social media more generally about kind of like who gets to participate and algorithmic culture and all of that sort of stuff.

I did feel like the ideological diversity both left and right compared to the sort of a kind of monoculture, mono, you know, sort of academic argument that I found over and over in these legacy magazines, that Substack was the place where a lot of these debates are happening. And I only joined maybe four or five months ago, but for me,

⁓ sort of just in terms of my relationship to the Academy, it’s really changed my sense of what can be said and what’s being said by academics.

Henry Oliver (05:17)

feels to me like in some way humanities academia needs deregulating because there’s all sorts of things people can’t feel like they can’t say and can’t do. But it’s such a tangled mess that the easiest thing is for you all to just go to Substack and do it there and just try and avoid the bureaucracy because it’s gone too far. But when you’re on Substack...

I feel like you’re often faced with people saying, these English literature academics, it’s all woke BS. They don’t know anything. They’ve killed this, right? You’re simultaneously in a kind of semi hostile environment. How do you, how does that seem to you?

Julianne (05:56)

Yeah, mean, that’s certainly true. I think that we are avatars on Substack for a kind of authority that we feel in our own lives we do not possess in any way. So we’re in this position where, you know, at least I feel this, I’m responding to comments that are, you know, very much, by people who very much feel that they’re attacking authority figures. And I’m, you know, I’m just a person on the internet, you know, talking with them when I’m on Substack. What I like about it is precisely that it levels any kind of authority structures insofar as they exist, which is debatable at this phase. But that’s not always the reality on Substack. I also feel there’s an additional thing, again, as an early modernist, where you feel like, you you don’t have...

Henry Oliver (06:27)

Yeah.

Julianne (06:52)

there’s not a lot of interest by people who are kind of on the left in contemporary politics in the Renaissance. It’s seen as kind of a conservative, canonical thing to study. And there’s a lot of pushback. even within English departments, there’s a lot of pushback ⁓ surrounding the idea that people should study Shakespeare or study Milton. It’s seen as kind of old and fussy and conservative. And then at the same time, you go on the internet and you’re the kind of ⁓ exemplar.

Henry Oliver (06:59)

Mmm. Yeah.

Mmm.

Julianne (07:22)

of woke cultural discourse. So you feel like as a Renaissance scholar, you can’t win. You’re nobody’s idea of what people should be doing intellectually or culturally.

Henry Oliver (07:25)

Hahaha

Do you think, someone asked me this the other day about why academics write in this funny way and why no one reads their books and all this. That was the way they phrased it. And I said, I think what you’re saying is like, why is there no AC Bradley today? Because Shakespeare in tragedy, so I don’t remember the number, of like quarter of a million copies or something that to us just feels like an insane number.

Is there some legitimate criticism there that A.C. Bradley wrote in a way that, you know, your grandmother could understand? And a lot of what comes out of the Academy today is much more cut off from the ordinary reading experience.

Julianne (08:18)

Yeah, I mean, think that’s not debatable. think there have been quantitative studies, ⁓ DH studies that have shown that academic prose has become more difficult. I think it’s much more a consequence of how literary culture has become this sort of narrow and marginalized field that is preserved within academic debate and academic structures of argument and disciplinarity. Stephen Greenblatt certainly tries to be

new A.C. Bradley and he does reach readers outside of academia but his audience is you know especially as a share of the population is not A.C. Bradley’s audience and I don’t think that’s a fault of his prose. Well that’s true.

Henry Oliver (08:59)

might be the fault of some of his ideas.

Well, Jeff, I want to come to you on that. A.C. Bradley was not politically ideological. Maybe he’s a crazy Hegelian and he’s insane on that level. But is the problem that Stephen Greenblatt’s just obviously kind of a bit cranky in some ideological way, is this a general problem of the modern humanities academia?

Jeffrey Lawrence (09:24)

Yeah, I mean, I tend to see the problem as it’s kind of being a dual problem. One, I think, is the fact that we are facing in a lot of the academy a kind of scarcity politics. there are very, if you look at just academic hiring since the financial crisis in 2008, there’s just much less of it that’s happening. And so I think, I mean, part of what I see is this sense that there are certain

I mean, we could say certain ideological lines that over the past 10 years, but even let’s say over the past 15 years ⁓ have been the ones that have become dominant in the academy. And I think my problem is not that people connect politics to literature. I think that that’s something that we all do to a certain degree. think the part of the problem is that we are now entering a situation in which

if you deviate from a particular political line, which I have sort of identified with the Democratic Party, because I think you can follow a foul of it to the right, you can also follow a foul of it to the left, then you are seen as someone who is saying something that is not in line with the contemporary academy. And I think it used to be that when there were many jobs and many different departments that you could go to,

Henry Oliver (10:28)

Mm, mm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (10:48)

there were fewer consequences for making those types of statements that were out of sync with the dominant. And now I think it’s it’s become very, very punitive. And this is also reinforced again by the fact that what public scholarship we do have tends to be in line with this because the institutions that are kind of the elite, I would say Ivy league.

institutions are also the ones that are feeding people into ⁓ sort of that public legacy discourse.

Henry Oliver (11:23)

Let’s talk about politics and literature because I don’t like making literature political as such. But whenever I read, Julianne’s probably read the Lisa Liebes substack. I don’t know if you’ve got to that yet, Jeff. She’s like, there should be no politics at all and it’s all aesthetics, which I kind of sympathize with. But then it just makes me think like, well, what about Edmund Spenser?

Like there’s a certain extent to which a lot of poetry is political and we have to be political when we talk about it, otherwise we’re just ignoring a big part of it. ⁓ So how do we solve that problem? Like are we like badly trained in thinking about politics in the humanities academy or is it like what’s going on?

have we got to a point where you can say there should be no politics about explicitly political writers?

Julianne (12:19)

Do you want to begin, Jeff?

Jeffrey Lawrence (12:20)

Yeah, I mean, I can just say briefly because I mean, I teach courses, a number of courses that are about politics and literature. I actually think, I mean, I started doing this in 2016, right after Trump’s election. I taught Steve Bannon’s film about the financial crisis alongside ⁓ the Big Short and a couple of kind of like trying to show kind of like the left and right responses. I mean, that’s not literature, that’s film, but many of the

the literary works that we look at in those courses. There are conservatives, there are more classic liberals, there are Marxists. I mean, my personal feeling is that we need to talk about politics and literature, that it is a fair, it is a reasonable object of study. The problem, I think, is partially when you act as if certain...

certain political writers or certain topics are simply out of bounds for study. And so there was actually a post by Dan Silver today about why I teach conservative thinkers and a response from the points John Baskin saying, who would think that you wouldn’t teach conservative thinkers in a sociology course? But I do think that it’s become par for the course that

Henry Oliver (13:20)

Mmm.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Jeffrey Lawrence (13:37)

teaching someone, whether you’re on the right and you’re teaching someone who’s a Marxist or you’re a Marxist and you’re teaching conservatives, that somehow this is kind an ethical failure. And I think that’s a real problem of not assuming that what you’re teaching is kind of necessarily what you believe in or talking about politics means necessarily taking an ideological stance.

Julianne (14:04)

Yeah, I think that’s completely right. I think there’s this very pervasive confusion between ⁓ talking about the politics of literature and

articulating an authoritative political perspective on that literature. Almost everybody who studies literature, especially in a historical context or in a contemporary context, honestly, is going to be talking about politics. Spencer, course, right? Milton. ⁓ How do you talk about somebody who was a literal revolutionary who wrote in favor of regicide and not talk about politics? You have to talk about politics.

Henry Oliver (14:31)

You

Julianne (14:37)

⁓ But then there’s become this confusion where people assume that if you are talking about the politics of literature, you have not just a political, but actually an ethical ⁓ teaching that you are imparting by way of that literature. And that if you’re not doing that, you’re somehow not talking about literature, you’re not teaching the literature. That’s the confusion that has been so devastating to us and I think so devastating to literary study.

Henry Oliver (15:03)

So what’s the alternative? What should we be doing instead?

Julianne (15:07)

I I think that we should be talking about the politics of literature while acknowledging that literature raises political debates, not endless debates. know, there’s not any given author is going to raise, you know, a certain salient set of questions that we can talk about, that we can debate and acknowledging that people historically have had different responses to these, that it has been used in different ways in different moments and that it is still used in different ways today. That doesn’t mean that as intellectuals and scholars, we won’t have our own positions that may inform our scholarship

in our writing and even our teaching, it just means that our positions do not shut down conversation and do not exhaust the range of possible positions.

Henry Oliver (15:48)

Yeah, and we should say, we’re saying about, you you should teach conservative thought and stuff. I don’t think either of you would identify as being on the right or conservative. So you’re saying that from a, from that position. ⁓ How do we, how do we get out of this then? How do we leave politics at the door? Because when I read modern ⁓ literary scholarship, to me, it’s either like very useful because it’s not political.

Julianne (16:01)

Yeah.

Henry Oliver (16:17)

Or I just, as I did with that book that we all, or that Jeff and I, sort of disagreed about. I just find it almost unreadable because it’s not scholarship anymore. It’s just partisanship. How do we move past this? Like, what’s the solution?

Jeffrey Lawrence (16:33)

I mean, if I can jump in just there, I mean, I would say one of the issues is having an ideological litmus test for scholars. And I think I see this in 20th and 21st century literature in a very strong way. And so what I would say is that, you know, allowing people to occupy different political positions, and I really mean

Julianne (16:33)

I mean, if I could jump in just there, I mean, I would say one of the issues is having an ideological litmus test for scholars. And I think I see this in 20th and 21st century literature in a very strong way. And so what I would say is that allowing people to occupy different political positions, and I really mean,

Henry Oliver (16:36)

Yeah.

Jeffrey Lawrence (17:03)

like people who I know on the left because they’re not toeing a particular line are also not welcome or are also kind of meat pushback in contemporary humanities departments that I think we need to get rid of that. And my thought about the Adam Kelly book, ⁓ the New Sincerity book is that to me, I think that what he’s trying to do in that book

Henry Oliver (17:10)

Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey Lawrence (17:31)

is to understand neoliberalism as an economic and political philosophy that has effects on culture and to try to understand how authors themselves are dealing with that in their prose.

To me, that is somewhat different from the way that neoliberalism is occasionally bandied about in the academy, where it doesn’t just, it isn’t just another word for saying, okay, this is the Chicago school or the Austrian school, and we’re gonna kind of take it seriously as a mode of thought. if just saying like, neoliberalism is like our ontological condition in the 21st century, and therefore everything is.

necessarily an expression of neoliberalism and we don’t need to necessarily define it. So I mean, I think that may be where the disagreement extends is that I think that ⁓ Adam Kelly is trying to sort of be precise about that politics in order to understand how contemporary writers generally on the left are using it. Whereas I think that the kind of more wishy washy version of that is

Henry Oliver (18:37)

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (18:44)

You know, just to say that neoliberalism is the air that we breathe. And there, I think I agree with you that it’s just not super helpful.

Henry Oliver (18:49)

Mmm.

Yeah, my problem with the book was that he would not tell you what did Hayek think or say. He would say Hayek was a cheerleader for the free market. Or he would not tell you what is the Gary Becker view of human capital. He would say human capital is an ideology that infuses itself into every aspect of your life so that you can no longer be separate from the market. And it’s all this stuff, and it’s like, well, that’s nothing to do with Hayek and Gary Becker. ⁓

Jeffrey Lawrence (19:19)

Can I just,

just one thing on that, is that, I mean, I did go back and I mean, he has these moments where he’s talking specifically about Hayek and the road to serfdom and saying, I think that this is a worldview in which, he’ll quote Hayek talking about the problem with representative democracy and say, the real moral choices are choices that are made in the market.

To me, I think that that is to engage to a certain degree with the thought. It is true, I think, as often happens in scholarship that you have the people who are defining a phenomenon from the perspective that you may be interested in. So there are a number of people from the left who are criticizing neoliberalism. I see him as engaging a little bit more than you do.

Henry Oliver (20:11)

Mmm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (20:11)

in that in that direct thought and particularly compared to other humanities scholars who do I think what you’re saying which is to just do that. So that’s where I think I see him as doing.

Henry Oliver (20:18)

sure, yeah.

I guess you could sum

my critique up as being like, if this is the good version, things are worse than I thought. Yeah. Yeah. So from here, let’s go to the question of what is academic Marxism?

Jeffrey Lawrence (20:27)

Okay, well.

Henry Oliver (20:35)

Because I think a lot of people think that there’s a lot of Marxism in the academy and that if they’re not woke, they’re Marxists or maybe they’re both, right? And ⁓ personally, I spend a lot of time trying to work out what these Marxists think and it’s quite confusing. And there seem to be lots of, and Julianne, you and I have talked about this, all the different, some Marxists aren’t Marxists, as it were. tell us, give us a quick overview of how Marxist things really are.

Julianne (21:04)

Yeah, I mean it’s a very complicated question to answer.

because Marxism is too, well, debatably a living tradition. ⁓ And there’s a huge amount of disagreement about what constitutes Marxism, ⁓ what is a legitimate form of Marxism, what is not, where do the boundaries lie, what is reconcilable with other schools of thought, what is not. But I think the big picture is that beginning, even in the 60s, Marxism moved into academia. This is a story that is told very inflectionally

Henry Oliver (21:11)

you

Julianne (21:37)

and Perry Anderson’s considerations on Western Marxism, where he argues that in the West, Marxism becomes alienated from actual political, economic, and social movements. It moves into academia. And as a result, it becomes much more philosophical, much more abstruse, much less concerned with the traditional concerns of Marxism, labor and the politics of labor and the politics and economics of labor. And that this continues and is accelerated, in fact, in the Cold War. So what you get at

the same time, you have something called the cultural turn in history and in sociology, ⁓ the rise of what is, debatably called identity politics. so Marxism remains a current within that, but it’s far less of an influential current as time goes by. ⁓ And I think that many, many people...

use the word Marxism and would say that there are Marxist influences in their work, but they’re not viewing it as a kind of systematic approach to economics or to economic history. And so at that point, I do think you have to ask, well, what does Marxism actually mean? There are certainly people that work with, you know, ideas that they refer to as Marxist, but that have implications that to my mind are entirely antithetical to Marxism. And so I kind of feel

as somebody who does work within what I would call the historical materialist tradition.

⁓ in a very sort of straightforwardly economic sense, know, are markets becoming more efficient in Renaissance England? Those kinds of questions. How much does bread cost? How much do books cost? Those kinds of questions. ⁓ If you’re interested in that tradition within Marxist thought, you feel that it’s actually really incredibly peripheral within academia in comparison to, say, the politics of gender ⁓ or other considerations of that kind. And there’s just not always sensitivity

Henry Oliver (23:16)

Mm-hmm.

Julianne (23:35)

to whether these different schools of thought actually cohere in any meaningful or deep way. What would you say, Jeff?

Jeffrey Lawrence (23:44)

Yeah, that’s, I mean, just to pick up on that, think that that’s really helpful in that trajectory, which I also, know, the Perry Anderson, a lot of people who have talked about how Marxism.

moves into the academy after the 1960s, I think it is just really important to say it becomes a different thing. And I think part of the confusion, Henry, may also be that it’s like, so the Christopher Ruffo version of this is it’s like, it’s all Marxism, it’s all everywhere. But then I think that becomes, it’s so broad a definition of Marxism that what we’re really talking about is a

of progressive politics or sort of an amalgam of different ideas that may have some roots in Marxism of previous periods, but really don’t, as Julianne is saying, really don’t align with like Marxist thought or Marxian thought as such. And also as someone who does take that tradition very seriously, I think a lot about Silvia Federici, who’s a feminist, know, a Marxist feminist. Like these are people who are absolutely steeped.

in a Marxist political tradition. And in some ways, these are figures that may be very important to the contemporary tradition. But if you actually read what they’re writing, it’s like, it’s an extremely watered down version that we get in the academy in part, and I’ll just end with this, in part because to Julianne’s point, I think it like when Marxism also becomes

Henry Oliver (24:59)

Mmm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (25:10)

a kind of one discourse among many that you are using in what are often very bourgeois institutions, then it becomes a kind of intellectual tool and sometimes even an intellectual weapon, as many of these things are, where the question of how it relates to practical politics, working class politics,

politics outside of the academy becomes sort of secondary. And so then really we’re not talking about someone who’s a Marxist as in they’re like fighting for the working class. You’re talking about someone who’s just using Marx as a tool, which is fine, but that certainly shouldn’t give them any sort of like, you know, moral high ground when speaking from the position of the left is my view.

Henry Oliver (25:53)

Is there some inherent aspect of literature that means it has been more amenable to Marxist study of any description than it has been to, you know, ⁓

systems of thought that come more from a kind of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek tradition. Because it’s very striking to me how few liberals and libertarians they’re currently, publicly currently, I know a lot of them keep it to themselves, some of them have said as much to me. ⁓ But is there some good literary reason for this? Or is it just an institutional ⁓ problem?

Julianne (26:33)

That’s an interesting question. ⁓ I mean, there are sort of traditional reasons for this in that

Marxism from, you know, in Marxist writing from very early on was interested in the relationship between culture and historical change. So there’s a very, even by the time you get to the beginning of the 20th century, there’s already a very well developed materialist tradition for thinking about cultural change and cultural transformation over the long run in a way that I don’t think is true ⁓ of rival ideologies. Not that there isn’t great literary work, but that there’s not the same

Henry Oliver (27:09)

Sure, sure, sure.

Julianne (27:11)

kind of sense of a methodological tradition. So there’s a lot of momentum there.

⁓ But in terms of more intrinsic reasons, I don’t know. I mean, it doesn’t seem obvious. Certainly at other times and places, we haven’t had the situation that we have now. I often find myself thinking of, know, Piketty’s arguments, which this does not pertain to Marxism, but this does pertain to the ⁓ difference between the political parties in the US, which is just that ⁓ education has become the means of differentiating between two rival elites, you know, not...

Henry Oliver (27:27)

Mm.

Julianne (27:47)

a difference between a working class and an elite, but two rival elites that are actually distinguished by the university itself. So as long as the university plays that structural role, it seems unlikely that its politics are going to drift to the other side, because that is actually precisely what the university has become. ⁓ I don’t know, what do you think, Jeff?

Jeffrey Lawrence (28:06)

Yeah, I mean, it’s a really good question. I mean, I share the sense that, I mean, I think that there is an extraordinary ⁓ Marxist literary tradition that goes back to, you know, sort of Lukacs and these debates, Adorno, Horkheimer. These are critics that are important to me, cultural studies with people like Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams. I mean, they very much, I think, were, though,

Henry Oliver (28:20)

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (28:30)

That was a kind of insurgent force, we could say, within the academy that has now become, I would say, almost entirely dominant. I personally, mean, one of the things when I was writing my first book was on US and Latin American literature. I was very interested in a certain liberal tradition that comes from, you know, John Dewey. We would now say that, I mean, it’s not the liberalism of, you know, Milton Friedman and von Hayek, but it is,

Dewey, think, was for many people the most important philosopher, aesthetic philosopher of the early part of the 20th century. And he was a sort of radical liberal who thought a lot about the liberal tradition. I people like Lionel Trilling with the liberal imagination, these were, I think, writers who were very important.

Henry Oliver (29:16)

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (29:19)

in a particular moment. And I guess, you this is, you may see this as a dodge, I, Henry, but I definitely feel like these are books that are really important to my formation and whether or not I associate with a certain particular strain of contemporary ⁓ liberalism, I don’t tend to think of myself necessarily in those terms. And so,

Henry Oliver (29:26)

Hahaha

Jeffrey Lawrence (29:43)

I think we really should be reading those because those types of people, people like John Dewey, people like Lionel Trilling, know, Philip Rav, these kind of mid-century intellectuals, they were really engaging in major debates and they were foundational for the field, even if now I think there may be some desire to take distance from them.

Henry Oliver (30:07)

It’s the bigger problem that we should just get back to more for literature as literature.

And once we allow a kind of methodological approach from one tradition or another, we’re just no longer really studying literature. We’re using literature to, like I had a professor once and they said an essay about Anglo-Saxon poetry with some Harold Bloom quote saying, none of this is any good. It’s like the great age before the flood, that kind of thing. And I basically wrote an essay saying, yes, that’s correct. And she did not like that. And I said, look, I bet you don’t actually love any

of this poetry. I bet you don’t care about any of this. You know, I just sort of... And she said, that’s not the point. The point is that we can use it to impose the... You we can use it as a way of dealing with the ideas we want to deal with and having methodological... And I was just like, I’m never coming back. You know, goodbye. And that to me is kind of... Is that the more foundational problem, right? Some people want to take a kind of...

Northrop Frye, Christopher Ricks, literature as literature approach, and some people want to have an extra literary methodology. Be it Freudian, be it feminist, be it identity politics, be it whatever. And that is the bigger sort of division here, and is the solution to just say Shakespeare is Shakespeare and you can keep the other stuff for your other classes.

Julianne (31:33)

Well, I don’t know because, I mean, in terms of what actually goes into the classroom, I think that’s a different question. I don’t teach very much theory in the classroom. ⁓ But I don’t think that we can just say that because the ability to say, you know, these are great works, this is part of a canon, it came with its own set of ideological commitments that are now...

Henry Oliver (31:40)

Show. Show, show, show.

Julianne (31:57)

sort of vanishing, right? So we need some kind of framework for making sense of why we read literary history at all, what its coherence is, what its shape is, what its structure is. A lot of those frameworks were implicit. didn’t, you know, they were articulated, they didn’t need to be articulated every single time because they were so woven into the whole system of education. As that becomes increasingly untrue, I think we do find ourselves in a position where we need to explain why we care about this object literature at all.

in the first place. And I don’t think just saying, you know, literature for literature’s sake without situating it within some kind of wider account of culture really works. I don’t know that situating it within some wider account of culture really works either in terms of persuading anyone, but I don’t think you can say to people, look, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, we have to read him because he’s great. I think you need to...

Jeffrey Lawrence (32:45)

Mm-hmm.

Henry Oliver (32:45)

Hahaha

Julianne (32:53)

have an argument about the place that Shakespeare has in culture ought to have ⁓ because that is increasingly not true.

Henry Oliver (33:02)

So I mostly agree, but it is very striking to me. I mean, I sort of half agree. It is very striking to me that the just read it because it’s great argument is winning a lot of ⁓ admirers on the internet, while some version of what you’ve just said is sort of dying in the academy. And I’m not saying that therefore that’s a decisive factor and we should just do this. But in terms of getting people interested,

that does see something on the internet among the new humanities culture on Substack and other places, does just seem to be resistant to these methodologies and ideology, right? Do you see what I’m saying? ⁓

Jeffrey Lawrence (33:43)

Can I, I mean, yeah, I

mean, I would say, and we may just disagree on this, but I agree with Julianne that, I mean, the ideological context of a work, the historical context of work seems incredibly important. I saw Henry, yeah, yeah. And so I think that there, yeah, yeah, but I think that’s not, I mean, I think we can’t totally gloss over that because all three of us have had long educational sort of,

Henry Oliver (33:58)

sure, yeah. We’re all historicists, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey Lawrence (34:11)

a long educational formation that has allowed us to even have this conversation, let alone read these works. I, you you, you, I think you had a post about this on, on Austin about like, you know, sort of there, there are certain things that are helpful for you to know in order, once you’re going into work. I think that that’s different from the thing that you’re pointing to and where I think I would agree with you, which is that when, when methodology becomes the Trump

Henry Oliver (34:15)

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey Lawrence (34:41)

card over literature. think that that is that is an important cultural shift. And I think we are now at the point in which this is my formulation for it. It’s like if you’re just going to read literature for, you know, for a particular political thing, for Marxism, let’s say, in order to understand, you know, sort of like a Marxist conception of society, why not just read Marxism?

Henry Oliver (34:42)

Hmm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (35:11)

like Marxist theory. mean, so I do think that that is a real problem and the failure, and to be fair to humanities scholars, this is, has been a big debate over the past five or 10 years. I think it’s just more contested in the academic space than it is on Substack, where I think Substack is kind of demonstrating to my mind also that some of the more frank, I, I sweat, some of the more BS, yeah.

Henry Oliver (35:11)

Yes.

Say what you want.

Jeffrey Lawrence (35:39)

Some of the more b******t arguments that I see about like, ⁓ well, there aren’t X people, like there aren’t white men who are writing and reading, and then you just see the tremendous number of people who are reading, they may just feel alienated from certain ways of doing things. And that, I think, that’s a wide range of people. And I think it’s a wide range of people who are turned off by certain things in the academy.

Henry Oliver (35:49)

yeah.

Jeffrey Lawrence (36:07)

I think a lot of that though has to do with a general problem that we need people in literary studies who deeply care about literature, regardless of what ideological thing, you know, where they’re coming from. And if you are always just interested in the methodology that you’re bringing to it, as opposed to literature, then this is going to be a long-term problem because people are going to start asking, why is it that we are reading literature?

Henry Oliver (36:34)

To what extent is that the basic problem that the universities have right now? To me that just seems to be it’s that, right?

Julianne (36:39)

I think that’s a huge problem. Yeah, I think it’s a huge problem.

Yeah, it’s a huge problem. guess, you know, while sort of agreeing with you and definitely agreeing with Jeff, I guess what I would say to sort of refine what I was saying earlier is, no, I don’t think you should study the methodologies instead of studying literature. Of course not.

⁓ But the questions that the methodologies ask are really basic to the questions that we need to ask about the study of literature. So it’s not that you should be studying Marxism or feminism or this or that instead of studying literature, but I don’t think you can...

totally do away with the questions of, what is this thing? What is its role in culture? What does it mean? Why do we study it over long, long periods of time? ⁓ It is, it has become very hard to make that, that case. And it’s not that I think making that case explicitly is going to win converts as opposed to talking about the literature itself. In the end, it’s going to be the literature itself, if it’s going to be anything at all. But to have an account of the meaning of what we’re doing, even for our own sakes, we do need to be thinking about questions like what is this thing?

and why, right, which are supposed to be questions that methods help us ask.

Jeffrey Lawrence (37:53)

And can I just add to that kind of the, I mean, a word that we haven’t used so far is specialization. And I think to a certain degree, like what may unite us in this conversation is a sense too, that like, that literature is not just like this particular corner that you’re studying and that you’re interested in because it’s your field. And so,

Henry Oliver (38:13)

Mmm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (38:16)

Those type of turf battles, I think, are also really important to this. The sense that your topic is the thing that you specifically focus on and the difficulty of communicating that is an issue. And also just the sense that, like, I mean, my sense is you can be interested in history and sociology. Julianne and I are both interested in that. And also literature, so that it doesn’t, I mean, part of it is, I think, restoring the notion that a kind of broad

Henry Oliver (38:19)

Yeah.

Jeffrey Lawrence (38:46)

like intellectual training is not a liability, but is actually something that you need in order to understand literature and that heightens your appreciation.

Henry Oliver (38:57)

Somewhere in one of Iris Murdoch’s interviews, she talks about the state of literary undergraduates today, because obviously she was married to John Bailey and had a lot of, and this is like in the 80s or something, ⁓ and she said, well, they’re not interested in just reading the literature and understanding the history of it anymore. They want to have all these crazy theories.

It’s very striking when you see stuff like that from 50 years ago. Did the cannon wars ever end? Did we ever change the arguments? In some ways, is this not just the Harold Bloom thing? It’s still going, right? And one route out that I think you’ve identified is just ⁓ be broader. Just read more outside your own area.

The people who everyone loves on Twitter, like CS Lewis and Harold Bloom, are the ones who weren’t in their public facing work. They weren’t narrow specialists. CS Lewis would do everything from some random Latin medieval writer to Jane Austen. And in a way, is that what we need? We just need to have more of that appreciation of the long history of literature.

Jeffrey Lawrence (40:10)

I mean, just one thing, then Julianna, I’d be curious to like from like a ⁓ 20th and 21st century perspective. Like I agree with that, but I also think that like that was Toni Morrison as well. I mean, talking about the classics, mean, part of the problem I think is that we have these readings of figures that become then sort of symbolic or totemic of.

Henry Oliver (40:23)

Yeah.

Jeffrey Lawrence (40:33)

like a contemporary, you know, whatever that may be, an identity category or whatever it may be. Whereas if you actually read Toni Morrison, absolutely voracious, absolutely thinking about like, you know, the classics, you know, thinking through Greek drama, ⁓ know, Faulkner, you know, ⁓ master’s thesis on the outsider in Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. I mean, I think some of this also has to do

with something that has happened very specifically in the past 10 years of also subjecting figures of the past who were interested in that more Catholic notion of culture to these kind of like very selective readings. I mean, it’s true of James Baldwin. I thought about this a lot. Like a lot of these figures who just didn’t want to be boxed in in a particular identity way get then taken up as

Henry Oliver (41:11)

Hmm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (41:26)

kind of figures for that when actually, mean, in some ways they were, you know, I’m sure Toni Morrison and Harold Bloom wouldn’t have agreed on everything, but there was actually, I mean, but really there is actually more alignment there than like the 2025 reading of them would give credit for.

Henry Oliver (41:40)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey Lawrence (41:47)

Yeah, don’t know, Julianne, if yeah.

Julianne (41:49)

Yeah, no, mean, I obviously I agree so, so entirely with.

everything you’re saying, but especially with your comments about longer literary histories, more capacious reading, know, longer, wider. Obviously you read cross linguistically and do work cross linguistically. So both broader and longer literary histories, much more than kind of a focus on methodology. Part of the reason I’m defending methodology here is because methodology, if used well, forces you outside of disciplinary specialization or can, has that capacity. In my field, the problem is not that

people are adhering to big sweeping methodologies anymore. In my field, the problem is that the big questions have almost disappeared, replaced by, in many cases, extremely excellent, detailed, narrow, pointillist empiricist work. I think that work is...

valuable and it’s foundational, but you can’t have a field that just has that. You have to have something that makes the field cohere. You have to have questions that the field coheres around. know, and increasingly, I’m a historicist. I got into this because I love this kind of like, ⁓ you know,

tell me everything about this particular edition of the Fairy Queen. ⁓ I love that kind of thing. ⁓ And yet at the same time, there is part of me that is starting to wonder.

Henry Oliver (43:09)

You

Jeffrey Lawrence (43:10)

You

Julianne (43:17)

is it actually more relevant even for being a Renaissance literary scholar to have read every single person writing in England in 1592 and then maybe instead of Dante or going the other way, right? Instead of...

Richardson or Voltaire. Like maybe we should be reading more Voltaire instead of every non-entity. And I’m guilty of this because my whole project is every non-entity who published a book in 1592. So this is very much self-critique. But that more capacious sense, and that more capacious sense exactly as Jeff says, is very much aligned with how writers themselves, especially great writers, approach literature. I teach Toni Morrison in my Shakespeare class sometimes because she has a short play on Desdemona.

Jeffrey Lawrence (43:47)

If you ⁓

Henry Oliver (44:06)

So we’re obviously all going to await your blog about the different editions of the Fairy Queen and your favorite things about each of them. Just give us some examples of what the big questions would be and what these empirical questions that people are. Just make it sort of concrete for us what you’re talking about there.

Julianne (44:11)

Ha

well i mean there are a lot of people who have big ideas ⁓

that maybe make their way into their own work, that show up in the introduction of their own work, but that are not defining the field in a meaningful way. There are a few debates that think are actually happening within my field that are interesting, like the extent to which ⁓ Renaissance literature should be understood on national versus international lines. I think that’s quite an active one that’s very interesting. ⁓ But I think a lot of books written in the Renaissance, and I don’t want

Henry Oliver (44:39)

Mm-hmm.

Julianne (45:03)

to

point to any one book because these are all you know good books and books that I like but a lot of books will be have a very narrow date range a set there you know the typical organization of a book in literary studies is to have a sort of thematic topic not always thematics sometimes it’s

book historical or cultural, but ⁓ often it will be a thematic topic. Say a topic like ⁓ shame in Renaissance literature, right? So you’ll take shame in Renaissance literature. This is fictional. This isn’t anybody’s book. If it is accidentally somebody’s book, I apologize. Shame in Renaissance literature, okay? And then you’ll have this ⁓ contextualizing introduction where you might bring in a bit of Foucault and you might bring in various other theorists.

Henry Oliver (45:23)

Mm-hmm.

Sure, sure,

Jeffrey Lawrence (45:39)

You

Julianne (45:52)

But you will also go very, very deeply into, say, sermons, right, the sermon literature. And then you’ll have five chapters. you know, one will be like Shakespeare play, and then maybe one will be Spencer. And then maybe one will be somebody, you know, more marginal or be Ben Johnson or there’ll be Webster, you know. ⁓ And then you will put them, you know, this is the method of New Hizorizis. You’ll put them beside legal documents and you’ll put them beside sermons and you’ll put them beside other very, very contextualized and often very well contextualized.

works from the period. But you won’t write a book that is like, you know, literature and shame, you know, across three centuries ⁓ that would then maybe potentially think about, you know, is there a fundamentally different way that drama versus the novel represent shame? Does this help us understand long range debates about interiority? And again, it’s not that nobody ever does this. It’s that the feel

I feel English literature used to be more aligned over around these kind of shared long-term questions and debates and they’re much less aligned around them now because of specialization and because of the sort of dynamic of know decline and and narrowing of prospects that Jeff has mentioned.

Henry Oliver (47:11)

A lot of people complain about the administrators, the way funding is done, the way you can only get funding for certain types of work, career structures, all these structural factors that make life either difficult as an academic or just force you into certain decisions and activities. ⁓ To what extent is writing on Substack actually going to be a beneficial solution?

to get around those problems and to what extent is it just going to be a sort of useful addition and is going to be very stimulating for you all but might not, you know, might not actually change things. What’s your sense of that?

Jeffrey Lawrence (47:54)

This was something I’ve thought about this a lot because I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education. think Julianne and I have both write or have written for the Chronicle and something that was on the public humanities and I very specifically this is 2022 or 2023 said like, sub stack is not going to be the solution. Partially and my point there was something that I still believe to a certain extent which is that

as someone who has worked in different public humanities ⁓ programs, as someone who knows to a certain degree the publishing industry in the US and Latin America and has done work on that, I think that it’s hard to ⁓ exaggerate the degree to which funding for this type of research, it’s just really expensive and the existing funding models that exist for something like Substack or I mean any other sort of ⁓

platform economy, even public humanities projects, it’s just really hard to do. So I’m much more in favor. So I think Substack is really important as a venue. I think that as a potential model for, you know, a sustainable model for doing academic scholarship, I see a lot more limitations. And that’s why I’ve said, I mean, I think in some ways, if the types of conversations that happen on Substack,

could be then imported back into our fields. Like, I don’t think we should just destroy the institutions and get rid of these departments. I think that there needs to be a sort of infusion of these types of debates that are happening on Substack in the university, because the universities have funding, you know, have funding. And I think it’s partially about fighting for that, this kind of holistic thing that we’ve been talking about up to this point.

Julianne (49:49)

Yeah, I completely agree. That’s my view as well. I don’t think that Substack’s funding model would actually be good for scholarship. I’m not saying that you couldn’t get a few people making it viable, but for a scholarship as a whole, I think it would be terrible for scholarship as a whole. At the same time, for the reasons we’ve been discussing here, we need to be talking with other people and not just with people in our subfield of a subfield of a subfield. And Substack is great for that.

Henry Oliver (50:18)

I sometimes think that if you can draw a distinction between scholarship and criticism, the academy can keep the scholarship and the criticism needs to come outside. You can all still write it, right? But it needs to be done in a way that is free of all the institutional incentives and constraints and just all that problem and you can all just be free to say other things online.

Jeffrey Lawrence (50:43)

I mean, just very quickly on that, I mean, I do think that in my personal case, because I came to Substack partially because I had a very bad experience with a kind of ⁓ a piece that I had pitched to like a venue that was, you know, sort of like progressive venue where I felt like I was saying things about contemporary author that everyone else was saying, right? It was a kind of public secret, a kind of critique of this writer.

And I felt like it was not going to be published in any of those venues and in the Academy itself, that would be a problem. And not because this was something that even, you know, sort of ⁓ departed so much from things that people would say, but just because of kind of like the power structures. And since I’ve been on Substack, I’ve had multiple people, particularly with the first Substack piece that I wrote, but with other ones as well.

Henry Oliver (51:11)

Mmm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (51:35)

people in academia telling me, thank you for saying this. And also I’m reading your sub stack as an academic right now. But I also, do think that there remains, I mean, it’s changing, but I do think that there’s speaking of shame, like there are people who they’re just not sure as graduate students.

what they can say and what they can’t say. And I think that’s a real issue. So I agree, criticism is important, but even for scholarships too, I think that there need to be taboos that are broken in order for scholarship, as Julianne said, to kind of like return to that more sort of vibrant feel that it once had.

Julianne (52:20)

Yeah, I think that’s right. Obviously those taboos are less present in my field than in yours because the contemporary stakes are much less clear. ⁓ And sometimes I’m jealous of people who work in the contemporary field because there are stakes. And then I hear things like what you just said and I’m no longer so jealous. But yeah, no, do think that...

Henry Oliver (52:35)

You

Jeffrey Lawrence (52:35)

You

Julianne (52:46)

People, even beyond what you would think that they would plausibly need to be, people are very cautious and graduate students especially are very cautious and even having the example of people saying things publicly is incredibly important and helpful.

Henry Oliver (53:02)

It’s interesting how many PhD students there are on Substack. There are several English literature PhD students and I find it amazing actually that they’re writing a Substack ⁓ rather than writing something academic. This to me is a very clear signal of something is changing, right? Something important is changing.

Jeffrey Lawrence (53:28)

I would say it’s pragmatic too. I mean, I don’t think that there’s any reason people shouldn’t graduate students. I don’t think that they necessarily need to have a substack, but I also, I just think that there’s a kind of recognition that, you know, especially at this moment, mean, frankly, with a lot of this does have to do with the Trump administration and kind of the way that it’s been directed very specifically at, you know, sort of the humanities and

Henry Oliver (53:47)

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (53:53)

So I do think that there’s a kind of sense that the hiring isn’t happening. And so it’s like, well, why am I going to invest in this very small possibility of getting an, an academic job or even better yet, I’m going to build my own audience. I’m going to talk about these things because that’s going to empower me at the moment in which I’m actually looking for jobs. So I, I, I’m like, I agree with you that I think it’s just like, ⁓ it’s a pretty astonishing thing.

in the sense of the sort of initiative, but it also kind of makes sense given the world that exists.

Julianne (54:30)

Yeah, mean, you know, our graduate students are not.

coming in, I’m sure yours are the same way, they’re not coming in thinking they’re going to get jobs ⁓ anymore. So they’re coming in thinking, I have six years to build the kind of intellectual life to become the kind of writer and the kind of thinker that I want to be. And that’s the priority, much more than anything sort of pragmatic about what they might do in terms of future career prospects, because most of them have absolutely no idea. It’s much more about how can I find an intellectual community? How can I become the kind

intellectual I want to be. And if academia is not going to be their home long term for that, it cannot be in academia. It has to be elsewhere. In addition, now that there are fewer conferences, journals, you know, are delayed by years. That was another thing that got me on Substack is I wrote a review.

And I wrote the review as soon as I got the book. I wrote the review that I was asked to review. Then like, you know, six weeks, sent it back. ⁓ It took four years for the review to appear in that journal. And I was like, why, how can we possibly have a conversation when this journal has just been sitting on this copy edited review until they could find a slot for it in their, you know, in this day and age? How can that be the case? You know, so I think, you know, that’s also part of what’s going on.

Henry Oliver (55:49)

Yes.

So are you running introduction to sub-stack classes for your graduate students? This is not yet, yes.

Julianne (55:59)

No, not yet, not yet.

Jeffrey Lawrence (56:00)

Yeah, yeah. I mean,

interestingly, we had an event with Lincoln Michelle, who’s a very popular at Rutgers, who’s a very popular Substack writer. I mean, that was one of our, was a hugely well attended event. I mean, I do think, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be just Substack, but I think public intellectual work, think graduate students and also undergraduates, they want to understand this because they know ⁓

Henry Oliver (56:08)

Mm-mm.

Jeffrey Lawrence (56:29)

precisely what Julianne said, that it’s not gonna work for them to just stay in their lane and keep the blinders on and keep going. Even if they want a career in academia, they know that they need to be involved in these other things. so, I mean, to the extent that I think we can do that in our institutions and give them a sense of what’s going on, I mean, definitely we’re thinking about that at Rutgers.

Henry Oliver (56:55)

If the humanities goes into some sort of terminal decline and there are fewer departments and the student numbers never recover and all these blah blah blah, all these bad things, ⁓ does it matter?

Julianne (57:08)

Well, for what? mean...

Jeffrey Lawrence (57:10)

Ha ha.

Henry Oliver (57:10)

Well, because everyone talks

about it like, the humanities are dying, this is terrible. And I’m like, what’s the problem? We had like English literature was the number one subject for undergraduates, and now it’s not, right? What is the actual problem if the humanities are in this terminal decline? No, I get that it’s all bad for you. Yeah, no, for all of you, of course, right? But like, what’s the what’s the actual problem here? Yeah.

Jeffrey Lawrence (57:27)

You mean besides the jobs of, mean, because part of that, right, right, Yeah, for us. But for society.

Henry Oliver (57:38)

Obviously when someone doesn’t have a job or can’t get a job, like of course, of course. But can you give us a succinct explanation of why people who are not involved in it should care about the decline of the humanities or should recognize that it’s something that we don’t want to happen in some way?

Julianne (57:56)

I mean, I think the sort of simplest thing is that we still do have, it’s fading, but we still do have some shared cultural literary heritage ⁓ or basis. Yeah, I don’t use the word heritage since it’s a kind of nationally charged word, but some kind of shared basis that allows us to talk with each other about literature. ⁓ And most of this, think, is predicated not on the university, but on the high school canon.

Henry Oliver (58:11)

Sure.

Julianne (58:25)

is an extension of that. So I think our number one thing should be the high school curriculum. ⁓ But then our number two thing should be ⁓ ensuring that people have some kind of foundation in, you know, a...

as wide a range as we can give them of literary texts that they get in university because that is the basis of a shared literary culture. I don’t think you get, you know, I don’t think you get a wider literary culture where people can talk about things, ⁓ you know, like 18th century books or, you know, 19th or 20th century books across the world ⁓ without having some kind of institutional basis, having some kind of shared institutional structure that people have passed through. Otherwise, what you will get is people, you know, picking up things

you know, a bit here, a bit there. Some of them will be so unfamiliar that they will be put off by it. Some of them maybe won’t. ⁓ But you won’t get anything like a common culture. And for me, that’s sort of intrinsically good. But there is also this kind of idealistic ⁓ democratic aspect to this that you got in the mid-20th century in the post-war expansion of higher education and also the expansion of public education. This idea that you would have a citizenship that

be participating in intellectual, philosophical, and political culture at a very high level. I don’t see how you get that without having some kind of shared institutional basis for it.

Jeffrey Lawrence (59:50)

Yeah, mean, would just, yeah, I think everything and then maybe the only like word that I would use that you didn’t use there is just kind of like literacy. mean, cultural literacy, but actual literacy, because I do think that beyond the culture wars, like the one thing that I think I’d like across the political spectrum is that there is this sense that a certain ability to read and to engage in civic life is declining.

⁓ And so, yeah, I mean, I think that reading all sorts of texts is important and having cultural literacy is important to having an informed citizenry. So that to me seems like the reason for doing it. But as Julianne says, and maybe this doesn’t totally answer the question, because I do think some of these are perhaps like for us at the college level, it’s a little bit downstream of these sort of.

broader issues, which is one more reason I think that making the case about why we should care about literature is also on us. It shouldn’t just be assumed, as you’re saying, Henry, that because we want jobs that this is good for everyone. I think we need to make that case.

Henry Oliver (1:01:05)

Will you be making that case on Substack?

Jeffrey Lawrence (1:01:09)

Yeah, mean, don’t know, I mean, I think, you know, sort of more and more, I do think that, you know, that we need to be doing this. I mean, for me, everything that’s happened over the past couple of years, I think the way my sense of kind of like the failure of a certain liberal project after the Trump election, you know, last year was really important to me in saying there is a way that we’re going about the assumptions that we have about

Henry Oliver (1:01:10)

Hahaha

Julianne (1:01:11)

Thank

Jeffrey Lawrence (1:01:38)

literacy and what we should be doing and the role of academic scholarship. I mean, that I feel like was a turning point, at least personally for me. And I think engaging in places like Substack, but just generally in like public culture, to me, seems like it’s just like it is the one avenue that we have. So yes, I guess.

Henry Oliver (1:02:00)

If your colleagues are listening and you both want to say something to them to encourage them onto Substack, what would you say?

Julianne (1:02:10)

Jeff, your colleagues, ⁓ do they subscribe to your Substack? Because one of the things that has happened is at first nobody, you know, I told a couple friends, but nobody else knew about this. But now more and more members of my department have subscribed to my Substack, which feels like, which does make it feel sort of high stakes in a different way. Has that happened to you?

Henry Oliver (1:02:28)

You

Jeffrey Lawrence (1:02:32)

I’m still pretty under the radar. ⁓ I have some colleagues, I know that there’s some graduate students who also read it, ⁓ I mean, and colleague is a small thing. I’m more like, you my colleagues, have a great relationship with my department. I talk to them and sort of, but I think it’s more like colleagues in general in terms of the academy that is important.

Right? mean, and it again, I don’t think it necessarily has to be sub-stacked, but it just shouldn’t be Twitter. mean, I think that the long form writing that one finds in the debates for me, at least this is where it’s happening right now. And so that would be my pitch is that I just think that the debates that are happening are better than they are anywhere else on the internet.

Henry Oliver (1:03:18)

Thank you both. I thought this was very interesting and I hope it encourages more of your peers to come and join us on Substack

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Literature, politics, and the future of the humanities

The Common Reader