My brief piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Lingua Franca on Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2017. In an author’s note, Desmond has written that often the very people he was studying taught him how to see. Nevertheless, he missed much, at least at first, “not… Read more »
Posts Tagged: Lingua Franca
More Stoner
Here’s my latest blog-post for The Chronicle’s Lingua Franca: When the writer Jim Harrison died last month, I came across the following quote from one of his books: “I wasn’t very long at Stony Brook,” he writes in Off to the Side, “when it occurred to me that the English department had all the charm… Read more »
Bad Writing
Here’s a piece that I published this morning about asking my students to do bad writing. Teju Cole makes a guest appearance. An invitation came by email to contribute to a teaching volume. A brief piece, only a few hundred words long, was needed. Describe a favorite teaching exercise from your literature classes. The word… Read more »
Self-Help for Academics
In my latest blog for The Chronicle’s Lingua Franca, I write about the widespread suspicion of self-help books and also why it might makes sense for serious writers to write in that genre: In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book How Proust Can Change Your Life. I was charmed by it. I remember using… Read more »
#TejuCole
My piece on the ways in which Teju Cole on social media sites makes writing and creativity take place in new ways: Everyone understands the idea of prompts. The use of #hashtags on Twitter, in my opinion, offers the most succinct example of incitement to writing. The novelist and photographer Teju Cole has used Twitter… Read more »
Of Academic Interest
I asked the well-known philosopher Judith Butler to unpack for me the phrase “academic interest.” Here is the piece I wrote for The Chronicle’s Lingua Franca: In a video that is available online, you can watch Judith Butler, philosopher and winner of a bad writing award, speaking to a crowd at Occupy Wall Street. It… Read more »
Teachable Moment
I have written a piece about Claudia Rankine and how she creates teachable moments; for instance, in her commentary on what commentators say about Serena Williams. More generally, the piece is about academe and race: Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence… Read more »