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Caleb Smith

@spotted.fox

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Critic. Thoreau’s Axe (2023), The Oracle & the Curse (2013), The Prison & the American Imagination (2009). Reading, writing, tending my garden.

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Woof woof! taken in Hammonasset Beach State Park by @spotted.fox

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15 days ago

I am so stoked to be working with my crew in Yale English and The Yale Review to host this new program, Writing in Public. Many events are free and open to the public. Let’s get together for the basic, beautiful human practices of thinking, talking, reading, and writing. Starting soon! taken in New Haven, Connecticut by @spotted.fox

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a month ago

Book release day for @sunsetandecho ! Tangled, the manifesto of Critical Hair Studies, comes to life today. My favorite parts of this smart, funny, big-hearted book are its cutting analyses of how white mainstream culture snatches certain styles of strangeness, even some transgressive ones, then domesticates them so that they can be enjoyed in public without risk or loss of status. Much love to Skylight Books Los Angeles for a fabulous launch last night 🥂❤️ taken in Los Angeles, California by @spotted.fox

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a month ago

On a rock in Blue Hill Bay, up in Maine, with Virginia Jackson. We were talking about poetry, her great topic, and then a little about theory, and then most of all about writing—why we keep on doing it even while all the old infrastructure keeps collapsing, and that good feeling that you get when the right shape for an essay that you’re working on reveals itself to you. By shape, I mean not so much an argument as a movement through a sequence of specific turns of thought. Shorebirds hunting in the water, seals barking in the distance. by @spotted.fox

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2 months ago

A very beautiful four days of walking, tromping, climbing, stumbling, and sometimes crawling through the Valle de Tena in the Spanish Pyrenees—50 miles to celebrate 50 years of @sunsetandecho. The mountains are rugged but full of life right now, bright with wildflowers and fluttering with butterflies. It’s good to be alive out there! taken in Valle de Tena by @spotted.fox

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3 months ago

Fatherhood! taken in River Highlands State Park by @spotted.fox

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3 months ago

Next week! What an honor to give this series of lectures named in honor of Barbara Packer, one of the all-time great scholars of the Transcendentalists. Re-reading ‘Emerson’s Fall,’ I see how it is both a close study of his essays, especially ‘Nature,’ and a meditation on spiritual life after secularism. My talks are going to trace the genealogies of two ceremonial speech acts, avowal and disavowal, in modern literature and critical theory. by @spotted.fox

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5 months ago

Coming soon! I wrote the Foreword to the new edition of Lauren Berlant’s first book, The Anatomy of National Fantasy. This is Berlant as a literary critic, studying the shape and movement of Hawthorne’s fiction. It’s also a sustained analysis of a concept under pressure in our time—citizenship. Dig the killer new cover design, where Liberty is in a scaffold that looks a lot like a cage. by @spotted.fox

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5 months ago

Coming soon from Princeton University Press: new editions of 2 classics by Jameson. The Prison-House of Language, with a new Foreword by Paul North and me. Marxism and Form, with a new Foreword by Sianne Ngai. These are the great early books where Jameson worked out his ways of thinking about language, form, and literary theory. Get some! by @spotted.fox

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7 months ago

Snow in the garden. ❄️ taken in Fair Haven by @spotted.fox

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10 months ago

Walking with my sidekick in that good west coast light. taken in Los Angeles, California by @spotted.fox

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a year ago

Maine shoreline high summer ramble with @sunsetandecho by @spotted.fox

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a year ago