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janm.bsky.social
Professor of German & Comparative Literature at Reed College. Recently finished a book about the languages of botany.
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What are students taught in high school such that they worry that the most basic exegetical move may constitute "overreading"?

Don’t you know that "No" is the wildest word we consign to Language? –Emily Dickinson

I dwell in Possibility - A fairer House than Prose - More numerous of Windows - Superior - for Doors -

Book Botany

#Mood

Sigh.

Furcht vor der Nacht, Furcht vor der Nicht-Nacht -Franz Kafka, 18 Okt. 1917

Recommended!

It’s a genre?

“Sound film as the limit for Kafka’s and Chaplin’s worlds.” –Walter Benjamin

Read Jan Mieszkowski's "Uncommon Senses, Uncommunal Retractions: The Give and Take of Language in Franz Kafka's Der Proceß" in @mlnjournal.bsky.social on @projectmuse.bsky.social! @janm.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/article/945087

icymi: Jan Mieszkowski, @janm.bsky.social, Uncommon Senses, Uncommunal Retractions:The Give and Take of Language in Franz Kafka's Der Proceß (via Proj Muse) muse.jhu.edu/article/945087 speech acts, rescission in contracts ... @law-and-humanities.bsky.social @lpcprof.bsky.social

TFW you realize that the bookstore categories have passed you by.

Required seminar wear.

Reading between the lines.

I just bought the Virtual Sentence and I literally can’t wait for it to arrive!

Nice to see that someone got up early to poster campus.

A review of The Virtual Sentence, eight writing exercises by Kyle Booten, D. Graham Burnett, Brian Dillon, Jeff Dolven, Jan Mieszkowski, Sally O’Reilly, Mónica de la Torre, and Elena Vogman.

Google's default description of WB is great.

Morning stroll.

"The quotations in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby and rob him of his conviction.” –Walter Benjamin "One should never trust what an author himself says about his work." –Walter Benjamin

Schelling's inaugural lecture course in Berlin was attended by Friedrich Engels, Søren Kierkegaard, Mikhail Bakunin, Jacob Burckhardt and Leopold von Ranke. #respect

There's insouciance and there's languid Lukács insouciance.

Decisions, decisions...

I was fantasizing about buying this property and turning it into a critical theory institute – residencies for all! Then I read that during The Great Coastal Gale of 2007 its roof was blown off and its occupants were trapped there for 20 hours as the winds gusted over 120 mph. Now I really want it!