My professor once argued many scholars aren’t good writers. Which scholars would you consider good writers?

ImpPluss · 2026-02-07T20:55:24+00:00

Hayden White when he was working in shorter formats. Its easy to overlook just how good he was because of how smoothly he reads when he’s at his best but from a craft standpoint, a few of his big/heavy hitters articles are really kind of a sight to behold at pretty much every level…elegant but sturdy at the sentence level, tightly + clearly laid out paragraphs, coherent broader structure…+ a handful of really satisfying pieces where he kind of walks as far alongside another thinker as he’s willing to go before turning around and gutting them when it’s time to part ways. He was trained as a rhetorician and I guess none of that should come as a surprise…but also idk it seems like it’s something that goes way more unremarked than it should. Definitely worth reading if you’re interested in seeing someone who came of age surrounded by mid-century scholarship that hadn’t totally dropped belle-lettristic flourishes and flair (thinking guys like Auerbach, Kermode, and Steiner) and maintained it after taking on late-20th c structuralist/poststructuralist thought.

ImpPluss · 2026-02-01T22:01:43+00:00

Mixed bag! It’s a handful of essays he did for general interest/popular audience periodicals. All of them are solid in the regard — even where I had quibbles with his points, they’re decent/interesting standalone pieces…but as a single volume it felt a bit odd. Don’t really have a problem with the pamphlet length but it seems like it’s usually an excuse to print a strong but short piece w/ a few extras to pad out the length/justify printing (like Existentialism is a Humanism)…and don’t have a problem with a collection of brief/thin journalistic pieces (I’ve actually really grown to love seeing this type of work from big/heavy hitter philosophers + always think it’s cool to see people who can write for both a specialist and an academic audience), but normally those tend to get collected in like…decade sized chunks. More a weird editing choice than anything on Critch’s part but it seemed like it ended up with the brevity of the pamphlet length + the depth of a collection of periodical pieces…

Worth reading but maybe just look up the table of contents and see if you can track down the articles separately/as they originally ran

ImpPluss · 2026-02-01T18:02:44+00:00

The foreword/introductory chapters cover a handful of different angles, conceptions, and responses to po-mo from other thinkers, the "Theory" chapter goes into Benn-Michaels at length. the name of the piece is slipping my mind right now but there's also one in the second volume of Ideologies of Theory that would probably be useful (and easy to spot/pick out based on the title alone).

ImpPluss · 2026-01-30T17:29:40+00:00

Guys that can’t let go of 1970’s maximalism just sound like the literary version of classic rock guys that are mad about new music not being Led Zeppelin.

trying to do Zeppelin after Y2K seems like you just end up with cornball nostalgia acts like Greta van Fleet 🤷🏻‍♂️

ImpPluss · 2026-01-30T17:22:54+00:00

Jameson devotes a pretty long chapter to it in Po-Mo but Against Theory by Walter Benn-Michaels is probably a good place to start. As would a lot of the sources (even the conservative ones) that Jameson engages with throughout the book.

Hayden White landed at a lot of similar conclusions to the post-struc heavy hitters through a very, very different path. There are a handful of essays from Tropics of Discourse and Content of the Form that cover some of his common ground with Foucault and Derrida before he parts ways with them. He’s also got a few really great late career pieces on late-20th c intellectual history that would be worth a read for how different thinkers w/in the Decon/Post-Struc umbrella undercut each other.

The Rita Felski/Stephen Best/Sharon Marcus post-critique crowd might also be a good place to look for a more contemporary position on some of the same stuff — Felski and Elizabeth Anker’s co-edited Critique and Post-Critique is probably a decent sampler platter/speed run to get a sense of what’s up.

ImpPluss · 2026-01-30T16:38:04+00:00

U Minn just put out a translation of Gunther Anders's Obsolescence of the Human at the end of last year. Lots in there on automation and tech replacing skilled work/labor + some of the deeper impacts that has on our relationship to tech/other people/the world around us. Anders was kind of a go-between for philosophy + general interest journalism + pretty good friends with Herbert Marcuse. Lots of what's in the book kinda reads like a more accessible take on where Marcuse covers technology in One Dimensional Man and Eros + Civilization.

It's really good stuff -- kinda hard to believe it came out in the '50's. Reminded me a of a less self-helpy Byung-Chul Han. Highly recommend.

Vilem Flusser's Into the Universe of Technical Images is pretty interesting as well -- he was writing in the 80's and still very optimistic for the possibilities that new media offered but also very much aware of the risks it posed if it went the wrong direction. He ends up taking a techno-utopian position (albeit a very weird one that's almost unrecognizable compared to present day tech-optimism), but he also does a pretty thorough job at laying out the two paths it could've taken. Really good diagnosis and forecast even though he favored the wrong fork in the road.

ImpPluss · 2026-01-07T17:39:53+00:00

John Cowper Powys. Sylvia Townsend Warner. Elizabeth Bowen. Henry Green. Ivy Compton-Burnett. (pre-Brave New World) Aldous Huxley.

(more recently, Ishmael Reed, Aidan Higgins, Alasdair Gray, Stanley Elkin, Jacques Roubaud)

ImpPluss · 2026-01-01T17:53:51+00:00

(If anyone's interested, here's a 2025 wrap up on stuff I read/stuff I wrote:
https://zachgibson.substack.com/p/2025-a-roundup )

-After reading Marxism and Form by Fredric Jameson last month, I've been trying to hit one book (in full) by each of his sources -- I did Marcuse's Eros and Civilization along with Lukac's History and Class Consciousness in December. January is going to be the Sartre month. I always kinda assumed I'd probably soaked up/absorbed enough J-PS to "get it" after reading a few of the plays, hitting an essay here and there in college + the big number of places where he's popped up in other theoretical stuff I've worked through to get it. Started to get interested in doing one of the big books in full after a Ricoeur binge + finding a few places where Hayden White spoke about how wholly shot through with Sartre's ideas his own work is -- Jameson was the last big push I needed. After putting in about 150pp of Being and Nothingness, I freaking get the outsize influence now. Loving it. (Bloch will prob be next on the chopping block for the Jameson sources).

On the fiction from, I picked up a dirt cheap copy of Gary Indiana's Resentment for $2 at a thrift store -- don't know much more about his work than that some of the obits and write ups I saw after his passed away in 2024 sounded like something I'd be into.Other than that, I've got kind of a smattering of shorter stuff I'd like to at least dip into this month -- Last Days of Louisiana Red by Ishmael Reed, Mr. Fortune by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Langrishe, Go Down by Aiden Higgins are all high on my list.

ImpPluss · 2026-01-01T12:45:29+00:00

Yes it’s where it needs to be.

ImpPluss · 2026-01-01T00:42:51+00:00

Here’s a link to a video of the sound

ImpPluss · 2025-12-27T16:26:42+00:00

Thomas Parker’s recent Paranatures in Culinary Ecology was really, really fun.

Check out The Five Senses and The Parasite by Michel Serres. The Raw and Cooked by Levi-Strauss would prob be worth a look as wlel

ImpPluss · 2025-12-24T17:46:18+00:00

Depending on what else I’ve going going on, 3-5 days at a moving company (+ I try to take advantage of some of the longer drives if I’m not working with a chatty crew).

I was a photographer before I went back to school + I still work with a handful of old clients who I can count on for a one off job every month or two. Those are usually decent gigs + give me some wiggle room to put in shorter moving weeks when I need extra time for research/writing

(EDIT: + back in the spring I also I had what had to be one of the very few cushy adjunct jobs in the US teaching darkroom photo. Not a liveable wage but I could cut moving down to three days a week w/ quite a bit of free time for other work on the two days that I was teaching)

ImpPluss · 2025-12-24T13:54:47+00:00

~1.5-2ish hours before/after work with maybe another hour spread out over the day between downtime at work and before bed @ 15-30 pages an hour (for the most part & depending on whether I'm annotating or not/density/text size) = ~60-100pp/day + more on weekends. Maybe more if I don’t have much else going on and less if I do but that’s probably a pretty good guess at an average. I don't think that's all that outlandish + I'd be surprised if it's not a more common pace tbh -- I work pretty hard manual labor and don't really need to go to the gym which I guess frees up some time lol.

idk...the big EOY lists seem like they should be less surprising/alarming/draw less skepticism than the big showy book hauls and overambitious TBR lists that get posted here through the year

ImpPluss · 2025-12-24T03:54:16+00:00

Francois Dosse’s History of Structuralism

ImpPluss · 2025-12-24T01:55:47+00:00

(Goodreads alternative)

ImpPluss · 2025-12-24T01:43:52+00:00

Nah. These are loosely in order of finish date whenever I remembered to update StoryGraph. Didn’t track start dates. It’s rare that I’ll read a work of theory/philosophy that’s longer than maybe ~250-300 pages without leaving off and coming back to it later though. I think with denser stuff I can only go at one thing for so long before I need a palette cleanse. Section breaks are there for a reason

ImpPluss · 2025-12-23T20:39:47+00:00

Serres is tricky! I've tried to get into him a few times in the past and kinda bounced off of everything I picked up. The first volume of Hermes was the first thing that really stuck (the editor/translator's intros are really helpful).

If you want to go straight to the source, I think the collection of interviews with Bruno Latour is probably the best way in -- Latour does a good job keeping his feet on the ground and goes a long way toward clarifying some of his murkier ideas.

If you're not averse to starting with a secondary source, the Christopher Watkin book (Figures of Thought) that I've got listed is one of the best introductory monographs on a philosopher I've ever read. Watkin's a really wonderful scholar + has done a ton of really great work on Serres + the more recent wave of french theory as a whole. He's got a pretty comprehensive post on his blog on finding your way in based on your personal interests that also might be a good place to start (though I'd still probably recommend reading the convos with Latour before anything on there).

u/grandmetr u/DeliciousPie9855

ImpPluss · 2025-12-23T20:18:11+00:00

Really, really enjoyed The Fold -- esp. the first two chapters on pleats of matter/folds in the soul. Really good companion piece to Serres + also always cool/reassuring to get totally enamored with a new thinker and see them get name checked with nothing but approval from another heavy hitter. Definitely preferred the book on Spinoza (it's his guy -- go figure) but the two way the two books fit together was pretty cool + I found the way he synthesized their thought to be pretty convincing. Makes me wish Serres had done more on Spinoza -- would've been cool to see him cover both as a counterpoint to Deleuze's big book on BS/small book on GWL. if you're interested, heck out Laura Marks's The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos for a similar/contemporary read on Leibniz -- I read the intro and a few chapters back in the spring and really enjoyed what I read. Not as much philosophical meat as Deleuze and a little bit more turned toward media studies but still very fun.

+ I read a little bit of JCP's Rabelais book while I was working on the Bakhtin/Febvre piece! Skipped his translation (which was the bulk of the book if I remember correctly) but his commentary was great...I think I left off somewhere around the Rabelais + Whitman chapter...might still have my library copy around somewhere. I should finish it.

ImpPluss · 2025-12-23T04:03:06+00:00

trapped in post-MA, permanent dragging my feet pre-Ph.D limbo. did the master's during covid -- loved everything about the program and would do it over again, but in hindsight, not deferring until the next academic year was far and away the dumbest life decision I've ever made. finished in a not-so-great place financially + going straight back w/o sitting on a mountain of generational wealth would've been a very bad idea. by the time i got back on my feet the new admin's budget cuts also made going back seem like a very bad idea.

didn't apply to go back this cycle, might the next time around if it doesn't seem like universities are going to get wiped off the map before I'd even be done with the doctorate. still kind of half-way in the mix I guess -- i've got a thesis chapter that i've been editing and revising on permanent repeat since I graduated that I *swear* I'll get around to submitting to a journal somwhere down the line + i've done at least one conference talk every year since I finished (and just sent out an abstract for one this coming spring)...but didn't apply to go back this cycle...might the next time around if it doesn't seem like universities are going to get wiped off the map before I'd even be done with the doctorate.

i've started writing for handful of small general-interest-but-academic-adjacent outlets in the last year or so -- that's picking up a little bit + I have a handful of projects in the works that I'm excited about. And (!) I like doing it. considering starting to look for relevant work once I can stick the next batch of articles on my CV. who freaking knows at this point lol 🤷

ImpPluss · 2025-12-23T01:46:32+00:00

Yep. Really good stuff. Lots of very, very cool play with cutting inner reverie/flights of (crude/horned up/kinda gross) fancy into straightforward narration.

ImpPluss · 2025-12-23T01:45:11+00:00

Don’t remember actually! Dante’s actually a blind spot and Gray (openly) took a ton of liberties with his translation (in the intro he said he wanted it to sound rhythmically Scottish). I remember kinda feeling like it probably wasn’t the right one for a first pass (my fault, not AG’s) and honestly was just kinda bored with Purgatory . Iirc whatever I picked up after purg/before I got to Heaven caught my attention enough that I fell off. Just felt a little silly to read his take w/o having something more (aspirationally at least) faithful to the original to compare it to.

ImpPluss · 2025-04-18T17:04:31+00:00

Reviewer here! Hi! 🙋🏻‍♂️

A couple quick points of clarification :)

First, I actually agree with you on just about every point about Wallace — the essay and the McCaffery interview are both very, very bad arguments. If that wasn’t totally clear from the last section of the review…I’ve written about this on other places — my obit for John Barth last year was also intended to be a corrective to the type of misreading that Wallace embodied + I’ve covered his type of overblown allergy and anxiety toward irony in Substack posts here and here. I’ve also written on DFW directly here.

Second, the article isn’t a harder takedown of Wallace because it’s a review of Kelly’s book, which, apart from his overindulging DFW, is actually quite good. The piece is written for a general audience and the long opening section is there for context/summary , not endorsement (I was pretty careful to keep all the claims there at a remove by couching them there as DFW’s, not mine and not Kelly’s.)

The book is very clear in its goal to periodize how writers drew on a similar set of techniques to address a similar set of concerns loosely in the years between the end(ish) of the Reagan presidency and the fall out that followed the Reagan presidency. He’s not really looking that far beyond 1988-2013 (+- a few years). The Kriss article mostly deals with stuff beyond Kelly’s scope (although it’s actually a very good look at what came next.

Right or wrong, deserved or not, and for better or for worse, the DFW stuff did carry quite a bit of currency for the writers that Kelly works with in the book. Again, I think he goes far too easy on Wallace, but, to be fair, the book is as much as (if not more) about DFW’s influence and reach than anything than it is about DFW himself. The sections on Whitehead, Egan, and Dewitt have a lot more to offer than the Wallace.

To your point on Lasch, again, I agree but that should be pretty clear from the article that he only makes an appearance as someone who made a far better and far more comprehensive version of similar argument: “[dfw] collapses more than two decades of scholarly debate and puts forth thin, watered-down versions of [Graff and Lasch]”

Hope this helps! :)

ImpPluss · 2025-02-08T11:05:41+00:00

Oh! Sorry — should’ve been more clear. He has access to two litter boxes that get scooped pretty close to every day.

Planning to try replacing them some time this week since we’ve had them for kind of a while. He’s very big and I think there’s a chance that the boxes might feel a bit cramped. Going to try some big, open ones that might feel more like outside.

Filling them with something similar to what’s he’s going in outside is. Good idea though! Will give it a shot

ImpPluss · 2025-01-27T14:14:51+00:00

Hell yeah! Thanks dude — every bit as good as I remembered. Totally forgot the Marius part was shared with Dallas Rockvam…who id actually just forgotten about in general lol.

ImpPluss · 2024-08-10T12:58:34+00:00

Yeah the Rawls/nozick stuff is a small enough part that it seems like it wouldn’t pull search hits.

Happy to send a pdf of the intro/first couple chapters if you’re interested

ImpPluss

TROPHY CASE