Author of A Day in the Life of My Mother's Pickle (self-published 1991), Catnip Catnip (self-published 2002), & My Life in Scott Stapp's Gazebo (Atria 2026)
Aug 19, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Close Reading for the 21C has been approved for publication by the board at Princeton University Press. The book includes a three-part introduction by @johannawinant & I:
What Close Reading Is;
What Close Reading Does; and
What Close Reading Has Been.
See 🧵 for contributors
Each contributor has chosen a favorite close reading; in ~2500 words they show how the author of that close reading does one thing that readers of our volume can learn to do, too. And so we have:
SCENE SETTING
Oren Izenberg on Erich Auerbach on Virginia Woolf
Mar 25, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Erich Auerbach was fired from Penn State in the late 1940s, after having written Mimesis. Per David Damrosch, "Auerbach was suffering from hypertension, and the dean didn’t want to make a long-term commitment to a potential invalid"
"Djelal Kadir has uncovered Auerbach’s personnel file at Penn State, including the letter from the doctor describing him as a bad risk. In “Auerbach’s Scar,” Kadir quotes a letter that Auerbach wrote to his dean after receiving this news:
