Archive for May, 2024

A classics student named Esme, who goes by the username @bookswithsmee online, devotes her social media channels — both TikTok and Instagram — to the lives of her books.1 While…

I. Introduction (JR and CLM) This essay is co-authored by John Roache, a “teaching-focused” Lecturer in English Literature at a UK university, and Cyrus Larcombe Moore, a poet and recent…

With heartfelt thanks to each and every student I’ve had the privilege of working with. Last year, in a contemporary literature class, I taught Brandon Taylor’s debut novel Real Life…

Sometimes when I teach, I become acutely aware of how curtailed we can be in approaching contemporary texts by the frameworks we ourselves have put in place supposedly to help…

Note: I wrote this essay in November 2023, roughly six months before students across the United States and in many other countries began setting up encampments to protest universities’ complicity in…

You notice more alertness in the eyes. You sense the stimulated mind. There is something to say, should be said, a willingness to say it. When a person is engaged…

To many, Norway is a land of extremes. One of the wealthiest countries in the world, it’s also said to be home to the happiest people who benefit from the…

Gaming and literature are increasingly entangled, both as media and as academic disciplines. Recent years have seen an explosion of “literary-ludic” games offering inventive approaches to narration, characterisation, and the construction…

What’s the use of contemporary literature? I ask the question as someone invested in contemporary literature, and someone whose teaching often is on, or includes, significant elements of what I…

It feels like a precarious moment to be talking from the classroom. It has for a long time. When I originally wrote these words (January 2024) the politicization of the…