Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow

ars longa, vita brevis

935 Following773 Followers626 Posts

Bluesky

Is this your profile?Claim it and jakeromanow.dirty.social is yours.Claim profile

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· 1d

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· 14d

still from the closing scene of Monty Python's Holy Grail

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Jul 16

Why does the Spelling Bee hate these women

The caryatid porch of the Erechtheion in Athens

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Jul 1

The best Pride & Prejudice adaptation: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

1855 title page for Elizabeth Gaskell's "North and South"

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Jun 17

Delacroix, "Don Quixote in his Library" upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Jun 1

"While Penn ultimately rejected the compact…the university has already adopted many of its proposals…the climate of fear [has] many opting to avoid engaging in controversial or left-coded material." newrepublic.com/article/2100...

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· May 17

I agree that there's a functionalism to genre categories, and also that the idea that some texts are non- or supra-generic is mostly ideological. But every classification is also ideological and I think it's a mistake to neutralize that. This list put Joanna Russ on my mind:

The assignment of genre can also function as false categoriz-
ing, especially when work appears to fall between established
genres and can thereby be assigned to either (and then called an
imperfect example of it) or chided for belonging to neither. In
1971 three white women (one of whom told me this story) were
putting together a course in the contemporary novel for a small,
western college. Hesitating between James Baldwin and George
Orwell, they finally rejected the former and included the latter,
despite the fact that Baldwin was a fellow-countryman of their
students and could presumably speak more directly to them
than the British Orwell.

But Baldwin (they said) was not a novelist. This judgment is
especially striking in that the mixture of fiction and nonfiction
in the works of both is almost identical. But one cannot teach
Baldwin’s work without dealing with American racism and
homophobia, while Orwell’s dislike of British imperialism is
safely distant and much of his work can be taught (inaccurately) as anti-Communist. How much easier it was, rather than con-
fronting one’s own fear and discomfort, to make the appar-
ently “neutral” judgment that Orwell is a novelist; Baldwin is not a
novelist.

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Mar 30

Imagine breaking into a building with this in it and heisting a Renoir instead, smdh

Goya’s The Family of the Infante Don Luis

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Feb 8

Gorey

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Dec 31

Gwendolyn Brooks (at 16)

New Year's Resolutions—1934

1. Write some poetry everyday.
2. Write some prose everyday.
3. Draw everyday.
4. Improvise at least ten pieces of music.
5. Invent several dances, including variations of the tap dance, and know them perfectly.
6. Sing persistently and improve voice by 1935.
7. Have at least seven stories accepted, and paid for by 1935.
8. Have at least fifteen poems accepted and published during the year.
9. Practice the piano continually.
10. Use correct English.

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Oct 30

hyperallergic.com/1052299/cali...

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Oct 20

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Sep 26

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Sep 22

Victorian Network's special issue "Victorian Pedagogy" is out today, including my article "The Moralist Critic and the Student Activist: A Reconsideration"! www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn...

A prominent right-wing truism holds that there is something ‘Victorian’ about the aesthetic judgment of rising generations of the left; that, in the words of Coddling of the American Mind co-author Greg Lukianoff, campus activists echo ‘the thinking of the old Victorian censors.’ Without accepting these terms, I suggest that resistance to this discourse should spur Victorianists to reconsider certain habitual scholarly dismissals made on uncomfortably parallel grounds. For those of us who take seriously contemporary activists’ critiques, what might it mean to take seriously the Victorian moral criticism to which those critiques are persistently compared? In a cultural moment of hyper-alertness to what’s problematic about art, might we be able to better appreciate the conceptual work of certain much-maligned nineteenth-century strategies of aesthetic evaluation? Through presentist, methodologically-oriented readings of Lady Eastlake’s 1848 infamous attack on Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review and F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition, I argue that a “moralist” method links nineteenth-century critics, scholarly Victorianists, and cultural activists, and that scholarly repression of this moralism opens the field up to right-wing cooptation and reactionary thought.

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Sep 22

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Aug 27

Woolf

All is violent, opposite, unrelated. But various causes, such as bad books, the worry of carrying on life efficiently, the intermittent but powerful shocks dealt us by beauty, and the incalculable impulses of our own minds and bodies frequently put us into that state of mind in which poetry is a necessity.

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Aug 17

People present canons as fixed precisely as a rearguard maneuver for their own candidates. So it's worth noticing the vibe shift here vs eg this post from 2021. The right-wing fantasized continuity of canon in 2025 looks more masculinist + imperialist, less pastoralist, and much less Catholic.

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Feb 14

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Feb 2

cf. the Times's use of "Adult Novel" today 👀

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Jan 29

Thackeray:

If I have to complain of any special hardship, it is, not that our favourite works are reproduced, . . . but that ancient magazines are ransacked, and shabby old articles dragged out, which we had gladly left in the wardrobes where they have lain hidden many years. There is no control, however, over a man's thought — once uttered and printed, back they may come upon its on any sudden day.

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Dec 31

Woke up singing this to tune of Limbo Rock what is wrong with me 😞

Jacob Romanow@jakeromanow· Dec 13

I'm skeptical of the premise that this article paints a radically different picture of what's going on. The screenshot aside ("I'm using an AI process to write a textbook and then assigning it" is...whatever), the core issues—claims about in-class work, "replicability," the screenshot below—hold.