Hannah LeClair

The population of Twin Peaks is larger than Boone, NC

ACLA 2026 seminar cpf: "Literary Landscapes After the Spatial Turn"

How can we “map” literary texts and preserve landscape’s eventful energies? How might criticism expand terrains of thought without positioning itself as an agent of neutral description? What can landscapes tell us about the limits of thought and the status of the spatial, transmuted onto the flatness of a page? Or about where we are (which is to say, "here," an auratic situation in every case, as Walter Benjamin reminds us)?

What do landscapes, in their fullest sense, do in literature? Join us for "Literary Landscapes After the Spatial Turn" as we try to figure out (w)here we are at ACLA 2026—paper proposals due Oct. 2! www.acla.org/seminar/ea7c...

Reading Scenario Experiments. This series of prompts is designed to get you thinking about how the setting for reading affects concentration, comprehension, and even the existential experience of reading. Every week, one of the following prompts will appear on the syllabus. I encourage you to try all of them that you are able. How does a different reading setting affect your mood? Your receptiveness to the prose? Your pleasure or difficulty reading? What are the particular impacts of changing your lighting or surroundings? What do you notice about yourself and about the work you are reading during this experiment? 1. read by candlelight (use a small lamp in dorms where no candles are allowed!) 2. read for one hour without checking any devices, answering texts, etc. 3. walk out into nature (climb a tree, sit on a rock, grab a spot in a hammock) and read 4. host a reading night with friends & food (sit in companionable silence, reading without chatting) 5. read aloud a chapter to someone else 6. climb into bed at night and read by flashlight under the covers for at least 30 minutes, as if you’ve already been told “lights out” as a kid 7. reread a chapter and see what new things you notice the second time through 8. change your ambient-noise level: add music if you normally read in the quiet; or read without music if you are normally a music-listener 9. read with a sketchpad at hand and sketch scenes, characters, or other elements from the story 10. practice focused listening: have someone read to you 11. make yourself a special, fancy snack on a real plate to nibble while eating: pay attention to the cooking or arranging or choosing of ingredients to make it especially appetizing first 12. make tea (even if you’re not usually a tea drinker), and read and sip 13. invent a new reading scenario for yourself, or repeat the one you liked the best from this term [writing assignment using these prompts follows; text character limit prevents inclusion of it in full]

Here you go! I'll write some new ones for this semester too. They loved them. The "read without your phone or screens in the room" was a revelation, and many of them decided to keep doing it. They had NO IDEA (& were horrified) how often they interrupt themselves to look at a phone for no reason.

AGAINST AI

teachers!

excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone.

take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE
against-a-i.com

Our second job material workshop will be tomorrow 8/8 @2pm EST. Sign up below
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Bard president Leon Botstein says Trump’s campaign against colleges follows ‘a classic antisemitic routine’ Botstein, born in 1946 in Europe to Holocaust survivors, has led the liberal arts college for 50 years.

For all Bard's (and Leon's) faults, this is a fantastic interview
forward.com/fast-forward...

dozens and dozens of banker's boxes, full of books

Reflecting on some of my life choices

Describe something you learned from lecture this week that you didn’t know just from doing the readings. Connect something you learned in 209 this week to something you are learning in another of your classes this semester. If Monday and Wednesday assigned readings were from two different texts, make connections between the two. Do they share themes? Forms? Tone? Historical context? Do you find them equally interesting? Look at the very first paragraph of one of our texts and discuss how the opening lays the groundwork for the rest of the work. Quote specific lines, phrases, or images. Using quotes from a text, persuade someone (friend or foe, your grandma or your senator) to change their mind about something important. Compose a 5 song playlist to accompany an assigned reading from this week, and write a few sentences for each song, explaining your choices. Describe an idea you had in response to the readings/lecture/discussions for our class this week- any idea, about literature, or the world, or yourself. How might you pursue this idea, in your studies or elsewhere? Choose a passage (no more than 10 lines) from the readings this week and rewrite it, changing at least one of the literary aspects such as: person (change from first to third-person or vice versa), tense (change from past to present etc), focalizing character (i.e. write it from a different character's perspective), style (adjectives, diction, description, tone). Then write 2-3 sentences about the effect of your changes. Compose a yelp review to strangers, or a letter to a specific person, or a booktok style video, recommending a novel/poem/play from this week’s reading. Write a letter to someone who has questioned your choice of majoring or minoring in English, explaining why you value what you’re learning. Include quotes / ideas from this week’s readings.

syllabus time, teaming up for the herculean efforts of reinventing writing assignments. here, some prompts for required weekly low stakes 250-500 word reflections/ process pieces that have proven relatively conducive to real writing in lit class. please share any similar suggestions in thread.

Winooski Superintendent Detained, Questioned by Border Officials Superintendent Wilmer Chavarria, a U.S. citizen, was questioned for hours at a Houston airport as he returned from a visit to Nicaragua with his husband.

"They falsely stated that I, a U.S. citizen, have no Constitutional rights at a point of entry, and officers became increasingly agitated as I continued to assert my rights regardless."

1/2 A temporary new work of public art on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway by local artist Nicolo Gentile centers the celebrations and protests that have become part of the fabric of Philly's grand boulevard.

Nicolo's "Bar None" will be on view through the end of October!

Rümeysa Öztürk describes the library in the prison where she was held for 45 days for co-authoring an op-ed

Happy Bastille Day from the rive gauche (of the Schuylkill)

My own presentation was about how periodical sketches by Leigh Hunt and Dickens mediated the effects of London's urban development as it blurred spatial boundaries and class lines—and offer ways of reading how histories of civil unrest are overwritten by civic development #RSVP2025 #VoicesVisions

Had a wonderful time at my first #RSVP in Chicago—hearing great talks and viewing some archival treasures at the Newberry and Poetry Foundation!

For Friedrich, landscape was the expression of spirituality and a personal connection with God. By isolating individual objects in this composition and rendering them in specific detail, such as the tree, spider web, and thistles, Friedrich gave them a heightened clarity that destabilizes the familiar and suggests a hidden, sacred significance within organic forms. The viewer’s dilemma---deciding upon the meaning and significance of the scene---is echoed by the woman herself who gazes toward the vening sky. Her pose and gesture suggest a searching awareness that evokes melancholy and suspended resolution. Surrounding her are symbols of morality in the barren trees, thistles, a caught fly, and the setting sun. In this woodcut, Friedrich depicted for one of the first times a theme that became a leitmotif, what art historians have called "the drama of the self facing the universe."

The Woman with the Spider Web between Bare Trees https://clevelandart.org/art/1995.68

Congratulations!

This article is going to turn me into the Joker. Literary style is not a puzzle you solve to get a little information treat 😩😩😩

BREAKING: Mahmoud Khalil speaks out after being released from ICE detention.

"The Trump administration are doing their best to dehumanize everyone here," Khalil said.

Great update: www.wnyc.org/story/new-so...

Action without Hope A study of how writers from the early phases of our prolonged climate emergency used aesthetic strategies to redefine the category of action. What does it feel like to live helplessly in a world that ...

*Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse* is out today! The official release got pushed back due to an issue w the art, & despite being mostly about literature it's very visual.

So to celebrate its full entry into the world, a thread of some of my favorite images from it:

Rainbow over Center City

Happy May Day from Boz—and Bernie

Taught 2/3 classes outside today 😎

omg

Mahmoud Khalil’s Son Arrives After ICE Refuses to Let Him Attend Birth (Gift Article) Mr. Khalil, a permanent resident detained in Louisiana, had requested a monitored furlough for the birth. His request was denied in less than an hour.

NEW: Mahmoud Khalil's wife gave birth to their child without him after ICE denied their request to let him be present.

“This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer,” Dr. Abdalla said. “My son and I should not be navigating his first days on earth without Mahmoud."

Figured out a way to make grading take literally forever, thought it might be helpful to share

faced with a profoundly unjust decision against him, Mahmoud Khalil chooses to show incredible solidarity

First comment overhead while filing out of Philadelphia Orchestra's magnificent performance of The Firebird this evening: "Ah well, of course the Sixers lost"

The panel's abstract reads: Sterile, tedious, vulgar: suburban stereotypes abound. H. G. Wells thought “the Modern City looks like something that has burst an intolerable envelope and splashed.” John Ruskin found “no existing terms of language … to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin,” of suburban development. Yet these supposedly repulsive spaces were extraordinarily attractive. What do the suburbs offer our understanding of the novel’s social horizons? The nineteenth-century novel's realism has been primarily understood as a metropolitan phenomenon. How does literature from the Victorian era to the present, within and beyond realism and the British tradition, confirm or challenge assumptions about suburban spaces?

"The Country, the City, and the Suburbs" convened at NeMLA yesterday with a full slate of great papers and generative discussion. ("Sterile, tedious, and vulgar"?—it was anything but!) Thanks to our presenters and all who joined us. @ruthquante.bsky.social

Amy Offner and Sam Layding | Penn must not obey in advance Guest Columnists Amy Offner and Sam Layding encourage Penn employees to push back against administration's anticipatory obedience to executive orders.

Read Amy Offner of @aaup-penn.bsky.social & @slayding.bsky.social of GETUP-UAW in the DP calling on Penn to uphold research, sanctuary, DEIA and nondiscrimination, and the rights of all members of our community
www.thedp.com/article/2025...