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Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

700 followers 810 following 430 posts

ars longa, vita brevis
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/english/faculty/jr75399

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Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

hyperallergic.com/1052299/cali...

October 30, 2025 at 4:20 PM

Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

October 20, 2025 at 2:48 AM

Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

September 26, 2025 at 2:44 AM

Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

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.

September 22, 2025 at 3:11 PM

Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

September 22, 2025 at 2:25 AM

Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

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.

August 27, 2025 at 10:34 PM

Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

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.

August 17, 2025 at 5:59 PM

Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

February 14, 2025 at 5:32 PM

Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

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

February 2, 2025 at 5:42 AM

Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

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.

January 29, 2025 at 8:15 PM

Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

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

December 31, 2024 at 1:08 AM

Jacob Romanow

@jakeromanow.bsky.social

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.