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Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
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9 Feb, 5 tweets, 2 min read
1) Let us pause to appreciate the sheer comedic majesty of the fact that French politicians are worried about the threat of US academic theories of race, gender, and post-colonialism.
2) On the one hand, in the US, you have a capacious grifting industry that pins the downfall of 'American values' and 'Western Civilization' on a handful of passé French philosophers ...
3) And on the other hand, you have the French president and education minister parroting nearly verbatim the same US-based grift, but reversing causality and blaming it on US intellectuals.
4) /end nytimes.com/2021/02/09/wor…
Addendum: This part is pretty funny too. Beware Toronto, the Canadian outpost of US academic multiculturalism!!!!

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More from @AaronRHanlon

Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
8 Feb
1) NFL thread from a guy who didn't watch the Super Bowl. Up until about 5 years ago I wouldn't miss an NFL game. Even when I lived in the UK--before the NFL conquered the UK--I'd find creative ways to watch NFL football. What happened? I have to admit: part of it is Tom Brady.
2) There are more substantive reasons why I turned off the NFL, of course. On the principled end of things--by no means my only reasons, I have to admit--I'm uneasy about CTE and the unconscionable League response to its players. ...
3) And on the less principled end of things, the in-your-face marketing that makes the NFL what it is just became so tedious. It's just hard to watch a game with so many stoppages in play, so many of them primarily commercial. It just got really, really boring. ...
Read 7 tweets
Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
30 Jan
1) ‘Literature and x’ works best when the thing being called ‘literature’ actually is or is doing the x, e.g. literature and philosophy where poem or novel is actually doing philosophy and that’s one of the purposes of poem or novel. ...
2) Or literature and science in a time and place (say ~ 1600-1800 in Britain) when ‘literature’ expressly included scientific writing. ...
3) ‘Literature and x’ where the relationship btw the two is ‘x is mentioned in literature’ or ‘here’s a ‘literary’ perspective on x’ is one area where people like to slip from the mere facts of ‘literature and x’ to ‘x is so important, so how could ‘literature and x not be?!’ ...
Read 7 tweets
Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
28 Jan
I don't mean this as a cheeky response (this is a great piece well worth your time), but suppose we see all of this--QAnon, culture wars, &c.--*as* *actual* *policy*. I think that's the way to understand it. It's not policy that helps people or helps the country, but it's policy!
E.g., the Trump admin. used executive orders to execute a lot of policy stuff on the culture wars front. And I think we should understand obstructionism as a policy choice, following a policy agenda that passed libertarianism long ago and verges into nihilism.
I guess I should say: I don't mean this as merely a semantic distinction. I think it's actually instructive to see GOP actions as steps toward fulfilling earnest desires and ideological outcomes (like any other party). The methods are cynical but the desires sincere.
Read 5 tweets
Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
24 Jan
1) A crucial insight here I'd like to expound upon. There's a fundamental mismatch between the purposes for which English departments were set up and the charges of knowledge work today. Neither avoidance nor activism can change that. ...
2) The institution of Literature is not the way it was when knowledge was re-organized and departments created to specialize in the study and close reading of Literature. That's not so say literature isn't important today, but that it's not an institution as it once was. ...
3) I know people think the problem is simply a lack of justice or appreciation for our work and we can awareness or activist our way out of the problem, but I think that's wrong. The institution of Literature is not coming back in the form that engendered our departments. ...
Read 16 tweets
Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
16 Jan
1) A speculative thought on class in the US, prompted by @jbouie's excellent newsletter, in which he quotes (to take issue with) this miserable assessment of the capitol insurrectionists by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic ...
2) @jbouie concludes, correctly and contra Flanagan, with this. Which honestly made me think of class in 18th c. Britain, in the sense that ...
3) ... we're not quite talking about 'lower,' 'middle,' and 'upper' classes, but a more fine-grained 'class' system of socioeconomic ranks, as in the 18th c. To explain ...
Read 8 tweets
Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
14 Jan
Whereas I have tons of pedagogical chill (being patient, supportive, encouraging, looking for the good in student work) the material I teach has no chill. Sometimes I wonder what students think of that.
Sometimes I feel bad about the prospect of students coming to my course because of what they've heard about me and then I'm like 'Cowley was the last of the metaphysical poets according to Johnson...let's talk about Aristotelian referentiality and anti-Ciceronianism...'
'You've signed up for a literature course...Let's talk about the emergence of 'Literature' at the end of the 18th century and why we're not reading any of that...'
Read 4 tweets

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