Transcripts are now created by Substack. You can access them by clicking the transcript icon just above this message.
The quality remains inconsistent. This is the BETA version of Substack transcription and promises to improve over time.
The prime advantage to the Substack transcripts over our previous provider is that they are synchronized with episode audio, so you can check the text against the recording simply by clicking on the play button to the left of each paragraph. I considered this feature imperative given that I have not been able to find time to edit transcriptions before they post.
Listeners should also be apprised that Spotify is now providing automatically-generated transcriptions on their platform. My cursory investigation shows…
The following warning from previous posts remains applicable…
These transcriptions are computer-generated. Transcription software has been known to make basic errors, even confusing homonymic antonyms, like adequate and inadequate. While I hope such errors are rare, if you are going to quote from an episode of The American Vandal (which I encourage!), please review the associated recording (or have a colleague do so), as that is the proper source of record.
“Criticism LTD” concludes its lengthy examination of the unanswerable questions about the state of literary studies with a lengthy consideration of “The Future of Decline” [8:00], the delusion of progress [16:00], the British model of declinist politics [22:00] and literary criticism [29:00], an insider’s account of the long tail of “The Chicago Fight” [45:00], the libertarian rejoinder [54:00], and the curriculum of cruelty [61:00].
Cast:
Kim Adams is the World Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Humanities Institute and a co-founder of both the High Theory podcast and the Humanities Podcast Network.
Saronik Bosu is a PhD candidate in English at New York University, an NYU-Mellon Public Humanities Curatorial Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, and a co-founder of both the High Theory podcast and the Humanities Podcast Network.
Beci Carver is Lecturer in English at University of Exeter and the author of Granular Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014).
Jed Esty is the Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Future of Decline (Stanford UP, 2022).
Gerald Graff is Professor Emeritus of English at University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of Professing Literature (U Chicago, 1987), Clueless in Academe (Yale UP, 2003), and Literature Against Itself (U Chicago, 1979), among other things. And he is the editor of Limited Inc. (Northwestern UP, 1988) and the Case Study In Critical Controversy Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bedford, 2003)
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is Professor of the Humanities at University of Puerto Rico, as well as author of Decolonizing American Spanish (U Pittsburgh P, 2022), After American Studies (Routledge, 2018), “Where The Humanities Are Not In Crisis,” and “Clean, Well-Spoken: Hemingway’s Cuban Spanish.”
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, and the author of Politics & Criticism (Stanford UP, 2022), The Beneficiary (Duke UP, 2017), Upward Mobility & The Common Good (Princeton UP, 2007), and Secular Vocations (Verso, 1993)
Ryan Ruby is a freelance writer and member of the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, as well as winner of the 2023 Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism and author of “A Golden Age?”, a lecture hosted by Vinduet magazine in Oslo on March 7, 2023. His epic of the poet-critic, Context Collapse, is forthcoming from Seven Stories Press. His novel is The Zero & The One (Twelve, 2017).
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies, and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.
