[This transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.]

Robert Carson: This is the Virtual Jewel box, the podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. I'm Robert Carson, Associate Director of the Tanner, and this episode features a conversation about attention, art, difficulty, criticism, and judgment.

The central claim in this conversation is that these terms apply to video games. Just as much as they do to literature games, warrant rigorous thinking about our own aesthetic concepts and assumptions. The discussion is between two scholars of literature, aesthetics, and gaming. Nathan Wainstein and Michael W Clune.

Nathan Wainstein is assistant professor of English here at Utah and a scholar of literary modernism. He'll be discussing his new book published by Tune and Fairweather titled Grant Us Eyes, the Art of Paradox in Bloodborne. Michael Clune is Samuel B and, Virginia C. Knight, professor of Humanities at Case Western Reserve University.

Among his numerous scholarly and literary works is the recent book, A Defense of Judgment, published by the University of Chicago Press. In this book, he argues for a renewed commitment to close reading and evaluation at the core of literary study. His essays on American College campus politics have also appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I'll include links to both of their works and to works related to this conversation in the show notes. Here's Wainstein and Clune

Nathan Wainstein: Really appreciate your time and generosity with this.

Michael W. Clune: No, I, this was, it was yeah. I really, very happy to do it.

Nathan Wainstein: Yeah. I said this to you via email, but just wanted to start by just telling you how much I admire your work.

Writing Against Time was a huge book for me in grad school, and then. What out and game life I've said is my favorite thing I've read on games and the judgment book too. So yeah, it's really an honor.

Michael W. Clune: It's it's been great reading your work and this book is really fantastic.

And when is it coming up?

Nathan Wainstein: It hit the press maybe a week or two ago in Italy where this publisher, where they print. And it's gonna be out in hands shipped in the UK by the end of the month, I think. And then it needs to cross the Atlantic by boat. So end of March or maybe even mid-March, I'm not entirely sure.

But around then is when it'll be in the US shipping. I assume they have some kinda shipping hub in the US and then sent out to US buyers.

Michael W. Clune: I think your book gives us so much to think about and, as an example of what it means to write seriously about video games. It's really exemplary.

But I wonder, maybe I thought it might be a good way to start just to ask you, I'm invite you to talk a little bit about how you came to write this book and what the process was like. I know you're a scholar of modernism and you've got a, a. A project, which it seems there's some overlap with some of the concerns you raise regarding negative form in your academic project.

So yeah just tell me how this came to be and how this fits into, or doesn't fit into your work as a literary scholar.

Nathan Wainstein: Yeah, so it's a bit of a circuitous path. I wrote the modernism book first. That was my dissertation, and that itself had a kind of tortured path to. Full conception and I had a different theme.

It was gonna be about memory in the novel, and that became just one of the chapters on TH Lawrence. And as I was writing, I found myself, at first, I wanted to do a kind of very neutral, classic structuralist neurological study of time and memory. And I found myself just constantly being disappointed by instances where things worked normally where novels were functioning the way they should and was intractably drawn towards places where novels were.

Breaking down or not working correctly. And I just began to think more and more about that this sort of central drive of literary criticism towards the negative or the deviant the weir that distorted and that just gradually took over the project like a virus and became the theme of the book.

Now as I was writing that, I found myself, I was a avid video game player when I was a kid, and then in, in high school even, but really fell off it during college and and in grad school as well. But I found myself just coming back to these examples from games very often, simply as analogies, like in the footnotes.

So the footnotes, there are several long footnotes dealing with games, talking about glitches, talking about the ways that game spaces. Are inherently surreal and bizarre. Much in the way that you're so beautiful on and that this was an analogy to the kind of spatiotemporal phenomena I was examining in the novel.

And then I had this moment after finishing the dissertation during COVID, I finished the dissertation. I had all this time suddenly so I was. Started playing a ton of games and there were a couple things that happened there, but one was that I, I had this thought of what if I just totally reversed the priorities?

What if I made games? The central bit where this sort of deviance that's so exciting and odd for literary critic is just like the norm. The representational norm for game worlds and made novels, the footnotes, and that became the kind of quixotic project in a way. I didn't have any sense of what it was gonna be, but as I was playing the Souls Games, which is really the series that got me back into video games, I kept having this thought.

It's very small moment in the book, but of the art historian Michael Free, who talks about the artwork that turns its back to you. Playing bloodborne and Dark souls. These games I was just completely enraptured by. I just kept thinking, this is a game that turns its back to you. This game turns its back to you.

And I wanted to capture that somehow, that the feeling was so strong that I felt like it had to be a book. I didn't really know what it was gonna be, but I just wanted to write the book about this series where the game turns. Its back to you. So that's what I tried to do here.

Michael W. Clune: Excellent. Yeah. And Michael, my Michael's a friend of mine and he's just, one of, one of our truly great thinkers about both art, but about modernism.

And maybe that's a way to 'cause a question I had, and one thing that I really love about the book is you don't shy away from judgment. And you're both explicitly and implicitly you're making a claim for the video game as art. Capable of extraordinary aesthetic achievement and as, as worthy of not just close attention, which of course, a as you mentioned, as you write about, there's vast amount on places like Reddit, as well as books on the history of video games and so forth.

Video games clearly inspire a lot of writing, but in, in particular, bringing to bear scholarly and the techniques of aesthetic analysis and I find it very successful and very provocative. And I wanna ask you a couple questions about this and I'll just say very often the question of is it art or isn't it, art becomes uninteresting, right?

Famously difficult to patrol the boundaries between art and non art. It becomes interesting in certain moments, as in. I think of Arthur Dato's discussion of Warhol questions around Duchamp and so forth. There are moments when, this status and question of art really become important and interesting, but I wanna approach your take on this question, in, in a way that doesn't place too much pressure on this maybe over rock philosophical question about the difference between art and not art in the abstract, and then ask you some particular questions about the aesthetic frameworks you use. To understand this game and to appreciate this game. So let's take free to who you mentioned.

First thing I'll say is it's completely right. I think you're like, as someone who's played the souls games, Yeah. Anybody who's played the Souls games will recognize that you're like totally that a key part of the absorption in the world is the lack of recognition of the player, right?

And you describe it beautifully. They kill you and then they just keep walking around their day. It's not really like a. Like if you had a diary, these characters, they may not even put it in the diary or they're like totally right. But then I wanted to ask you a further question because I think that games in Free's model is actually really interesting.

So for Michael Free, the key part of his criticism is artworks are trying to convince you to produce conviction of something that's basically impossible. So in, in Freed's case, the idea is. Great artworks in the anti theatrical dido in 18th century French up to modernism. They try to defeat their objecthood, which means the painting tries to convince you it's not an object, which of course it is.

So it's like this impossible quest. And it does it in various ways to make, to absorb you, to make you forget the distance between object and observer. What's interesting to me is that this is like trivially true in games, right? Where you are a participant, right? It's just a feature of the medium in the way that it really isn't for paintings.

And so I wanted to ask you and I, you answered me just maybe no, but is there a is there an analog to that experience of conviction that freed finds in painting in either this game in particular, souls born or in video games in general?

Nathan Wainstein: That's a beautiful question and I've, I already know, I really just can't do it justice.

Partly because I have to be just card from the table. I don't know. Freed that well. I know Art and Objecthood, I know absorption of theatricality somewhat. This was, again, it was a very stray connection. It was like, I just had that thought of the work that turns away from you, and like just played without, with, without getting in.

Maybe I can talk a bit about. Just as a side note about process here I did try to approach this book, although it's loaded with academic references, probably too many. I tried to approach it as a kind of exercise and sheer opinion and irresponsibility where I did just say stuff that I remembered or went by memory or tried to just play with ideas without being incredibly rigorous.

About them, honestly, rigorous. I want it to be rigorous in the thought and rigorous on the page, but not rigorous necessarily in terms of like how I'm using Frank, scholar, right? Of course. Yes. Yeah. But all that's to say I'm so intrigued by this question. So my naive answer, the first answer would be something I think wonder, like the chapter in wonder is really central to me.

It was in a way that. First chapter that I wrote in my head. I had remember an argument with some friends around the table who in grad school and trying to convince them that games, because they create wonder. It doesn't matter whether we call them art or not, they create an aesthetic and kind of the prototypical aesthetic experience.

And that's enough. If I can just rehash some of the thought there. Games are weird because yes, they foreground. Their own structural, their sort of obtrusive form, their artificiality so much more than paintings in a lot of ways, at least the kind of realistic paintings that free's talking about in in, from theatricality.

And yet that awareness of form is not. Mutually exclusive with like complete immersion in the way that it might be for other art forms. Thinking of a film, for instance, if you're, you don't want to be watching like a, a Warner and thinking, man, this is an amazing wonderer. You do, but it's is that a state of grace necessarily?

Is that total immersion in, in, in the, in the world? That the work creates. And in a game it does feel like it's a little bit of both, that you're feeling the objecthood of the game, but in a particular way that sort of mutually reinforces the feeling of total absorption. And I would say that's not the case.

On a narrative level, like the, like absorption does not mean I care about the character. I care about the story. Those are cases where form drops away, right? You're playing a story game like the last of us, and you're so caught up in what's happening with the characters that you've. Sink into it like you're sinking into a film.

That's not the particular gaming state of grace for me, nor is it when you're wrestling with the rules or the systems and you're completely immersed in like stats, or thinking of controls or just in a very difficult boss in the souls games where you're like wrestling with mechanics, wrestling with timings and these purely abstracted formal elements.

I think it's somewhere in between and honestly I don't think I've cracked the nut. Like I don't quite know what it is about that awareness of structure of artificiality that feeds into the sense that this thing is just an amazing world. Like that I inhabit this world while understanding, acknowledging its objecthood, maybe that's the answer, maybe in a game you do acknowledge the objecthood in certain cases, and that's precisely what makes you feel the state of grace.

Michael W. Clune: I love that. I think that's, I think that's right. And I love the chapter on Wonder and I think that's so interesting and just, I have like terrible coordination, which is an irony of my interesting games. And so I was I'm just one of those who just never got that far.

But I remember in Dark Souls too, you're looking at this incredible architecture and these crazy images and there's just something. Yeah there's a kind of awe or wonder there that is related to, but really interestingly, distinct from what you get, before a landscape, a real or painted landscape or a piece of music.

There's a number of interesting things but one aspect that I think what you're saying raises for me and what I think is maybe the most interesting. Theoretical intervention your book makes, which is about intention and intentionality, which is you're talking about negative form about all the ways that the work either disrupts or challenges or subverts your expectations.

And then you remark that this fascinating fact about the souls games and this one in particular. Where you, where it has what you describe as this additive revision process where you the designers apparently got tired of this plot line for whatever reason and had another plot line, but instead of raising the first one, it, the relics of it are still around you.

You raise that as an issue. It's like this not being able to tell on the one hand whether it's intended or not, but as you say, it's much deeper than ambiguity because you may even have a suspicion that it actually was not intended by anyone. And what's interesting about that is how that might relate to something like wonder.

In other words, is there an aesthetic moment that aligns to that where I'm, in the moment where I'm looking at this architecture, in a way, it seems to me like the question of intention there, doesn't really matter or matters maybe in a t sense where it looks like I'm gonna react to this as if it was intended to produce this wonder.

But whether it actually was or not is unknowable or maybe even known negatively.

Nathan Wainstein: So just thinking, starting at the end there, the experience of wonder as being, yeah, in ness without purpose or something. Or looking at this landscape and thinking, this seemed design precisely for me, precisely for my brain, precisely for my sense of wonder, even if it's not being forced upon you in any way.

And I do think there's something about the souls games again, where it's not just like the. From the freed model Hey, look at me, look at this. Isn't this amazing? They do that. That's the thing. They do it, but they do it in a way that also is reticent or neglectful of the player. And that is, it's just such a powerful moment. One thing about the Souls Games, and this has become more and more common as they've, especially in Dark Souls three and Elden Ring is they do hit you over the head with over the head with these vistas, and there is an intentionality of we're gonna curate this moment where we walk out and we see the world.

And yet it's still effective in a way that it just is not effective in other games for me. But yes, the question of like artistic intention and the additive nature, I like, I am realizing now that there is something, and I didn't think in that chapter on double motivation, I'm just skirting around the question of intentionality a little bit.

Like I'm more in interested in unpacking the forms of doubleness, but like I, I'm very wedded to intention as a critic. I think intention is, it's not the be all end all, but I think it's a very significant variable, and, it should be recognized as such. And I do wonder if additivity is a category of literary analysis that isn't theorized.

This is very general, but what do we do with things that are just being added in, when when works, just keep throwing crap in there and we're adding, there's not a zero sum game where adding doesn't mean deletion, where things just accumulate story plot lines and characters and objects.

Ulysses could be a case study for that maybe. But yeah sorry I'm more just trying to like, crystallize this or register this formal category that I've just haven't, you're making me think of for the first time. So I, maybe I need to put a pin in that and come back to it.

Michael W. Clune: Yeah, it's interesting. One of the things that struck me in, in, and you say this in the book, you say it's not either or it's both. And for example, in scholarship on Walt Whitman. That is something that's often pointed out. The critic Alan Grossman talks about Whitman's rejection of the Aristotelian logic of its either or for this both end kind of logic in his, in, in his poems.

And it is just really striking. You're discovering that in the games and that raises a really fascinating question about the kind of game writing you're doing as a genre. I guess one way of putting it is the question of tradition. You referenced lots of modernist Victor Slosky Adorno, a, a lot of modernist critics.

As well as literary works from Dracula to Lovecraft, although I'll come back to Lovecraft. 'cause I love really love what you do with Lovecraft. There. It strikes me there's some challenges with video games as a genre, not with you're completely convincing on the question of the, their aesthetic power.

And you do a wonderful job of excavating that and coming up with a really precise description of that. And, really, one of the many things you do is you reject a lot of tropes of game writing as when you say a lot of people who write about games say, oh, I was on this mountain and I was walking and I was swinging, and you're like, that actually completely distorts the experience of the game.

'cause it's not you. It is rather this extremely circumscribed and strange. Body and sensorium that the game gives you. That is the experience and it, and you can't describe that realistically. That is really excellent. When I think about the kind of game writing you're doing as opposed to literary writing, the thing about literary works is that they are preserved and there's a whole like curation.

And that people are reading Jane Austen and Whitman hundreds of years later with games. I wonder about the persistence of the object. In other words, you talk a lot about like really compellingly about how the wonder, for example, is an artifact of a very particular moment in game design so that the player part of the wonder is like I understand what games have been capable of.

What their capacities are, and this is why this particular moment, this informs why this particular moment is amazing to me. That's really important. Do you see that question of preservation or of lastingness or the recovery of these aesthetic moments in three years, five years, 10 years, 50 years?

Nathan Wainstein: Absolutely. It's not something that factored at all into my thoughts about the book, but as in my current role in my academic position where we're trying to build programming and new just, ventures in game game teaching, game pedagogy and game study it's at the forefront of my mind like.

For, to my mind, there's a canon of games. It's almost a, this is a kind of universally agreed upon canon of games in some ways. There's no syllabus of games that wouldn't include, say, shadow of the Colossus. That's just, that would make it to every single one. And yet it's quite hard to play that game sometimes.

Or even the pre, team ICO's, previous game ico, which for me is a greater gain than shadow of Colossus. It's like that game, it's almost inaccessible without. Emulation or without having students go through the cloud or go through streaming, it's just it's so complicated and it, as a teacher, it really frustrates me that there's not some just standardized method of accessing older games, especially games that are locked to particular consoles or systems.

But that's the kind of practical question that I don't know the answer to. I don't have any technical training in game design, and so it's just not something or coding, or I don't, I'm not very handy with tech, so that's just it's more something that I've registered and I'm trying to I've talked to people to try to figure out workarounds or potentially, hopefully someday there will be this sort of more rigorous standard for preservation.

But what you say is it's almost more of a philosophical question. Like you, it made me just think now what if there were an academic discipline around concerts, like where the object itself was, the concert. It wasn't the, the recording. And I suppose that's true in some sense for for versions of drama, the theater studies.

But I, I don't know. The concert is a unique thing where it's so much about the kind of embodied historical experience of. Being there in, 1969 or whatever that is, irre recoverable in some way. I'm not a historicist thinker. I'm not a historicist critic, but to give. And what, to my mind is just a kind of historical documentation of my aesthetic experience of this game.

And that's just, that's the end goal of this book in a way. And it may be utterly obsolete. There's now a lot of rumors about a bloodborne remake. They've been rumored for years, but the 10th anniversary is coming up. There's some cryptic. Activity around the game in the game industry with, on Sony's side.

And I have a thought of it's great that the book's coming out for the 10th year anniversary. It's also if there's a remake, it could invalidate a lot of the book. They could fix a lot of these things, or a lot of my sort of extravagant, close readings could be voided if the one little bit, like the clipping is fixed or something with a new graphical engine.

But to me, I'm just like. This is about Bloodborne 2015. This is about being in 2020. 2019 is when I played the game and playing this game from four years ago. And that I have to be satisfied with that.

Michael W. Clune: I think that's a great response. In a way, what you're doing is rendering the object, which is the aesthetic experience rather than the game itself.

But you're rendering your object in language, right? That's the part of it that was as, as reading the book was most powerful to me. And what was interesting, and this is a contrast like for example, with my own writing about games where for me it was really about writing about my experience of games and about the relation between the games and other parts of my life.

What's interesting and rigorous about your approach to this is that you are rendering your subjective experience, but you're being really rigorous about. This is the experience that the game gives me. There's nothing private about this. It's subjective without being private. And it's you're often using the second person or somebody's gonna the third person, like when you do this or when you go here or when the player discovers this is what this is what unfolds and.

I'm interested in that move because when I think about in in, in literary scholarship, there's been such a taboo almost about experience, and about the reader's experience as if like it's too fuzzy or vague or private or in intractably subjective to render.

But for you, that's not really a problem. You know what I mean? It's like you are able to give this very detailed, like the clipping. You're not making the argument that. This is just something I noticed could be idiosyncratic to me. Something I happen to focus on. You're like, no, when this strange graphical glitch appears, this is the effect it had.

Nathan Wainstein: Yeah. I love the way of framing that because it, in some sense it maybe it also echo. A t preoccupation in a way, like the idea in this case, it's more a rhetorical one, but framing subject experience as objective or universal. And on the one hand it is a kind of just strict writerly technique or pragmatic aspect of art analysis.

You see it all the time in close reading, actually, like whether there is a true taboo on experience or not. And. I'm very pro experience when it comes to read early experience. I'm obsessed with thinking about what it actually means, what we do when we read, and how we make meaning, and the kind of experience of criticism too.

But the reader is framed as this kind of objective entity or neutral entity who experiences these different mist. Recognitions or mistakes in interpretation, the reader is is deceived. The reader is deceived by the comma. In fact, you read it again and you realize that the comma refers to this thing which makes no sense or which modifies the meaning of the passage.

And that too is a case of an incredibly idiosyncratic subjective readerly experience quite often, if not a fictitious one. And the difference between those is also interesting. Did the close reader actually have this experience or are they reconstructing it in a, as a kind of. The virtual experience of where lots of different readings were.

Melted together into this one, almost like gameplay. It's like you take all the different boss attempts and you narrate them as one boss attempt with where things that happen in different ones happen altogether. In this compact, dramatized version, I would say this is one connection here, or one link to the idea of writing from life or writing of your life is that for me, that close reading experience, that experience of zeroing in on a.

Particular sort of glitch or thing that got stuck in your brain and then reconstructing it and writing and presenting it, as you say, as a kind of neutrally, as if this is just what happens when it's implied that this is what's happened to me. It does make me think of, one thing I wanted to mention in relation to your book and that I found so, so productive and powerful is I was just talking about game life to a friend of mine here, a colleague Sam Tet. And she said, a game life. What game Life tells you is or shows you is how games are not just an object or an art form, they're an epistemology, and that when you play games, you.

You just, it rewires your brain about the world and you have that beautiful moment or, or beautiful moments early in the book about, about numbers or at the beginning of the end of the first chapter where there is this kind of, in the narrator's mind, there is this kind of just total.

Reconfiguration of how the world works and how one interacts with or accesses reality or unreal reality. And for me, there is an element of that actually in this purely through criticism in that I would say I learned how to close read by playing games. I really mean that, I didn't care about literature when I was younger.

I didn't care about literature until I was, 20. But I cared about games and I was obsessed with the. It's the reality of games, yeah. And obsessed with the way that games don't never are always incomplete, and the way that novels are also always incomplete and games are always.

Temporarily or spatially contradictory in the way that novels are temporally, spatially contradictory, even the most realist, perfect novel. And so when I started this game of close reading in college, for the first time ever I basically would do this thing where I would look for glitches in dusty ky.

Hey, they said this. The hotel was full of people, but when you're inside the hotel, there's actually nobody in the hotel, and that's exactly what happens in the game. You see a texture from outside, you see all the lights on, you see a kind of bustle, and then you go inside and there's one NPC, there's a couple hallways.

You can't go in any of the doors. And how do we reconcile that? Discrepancy or that dissonance and how do we describe it and make it meaningful? I would say my readings now, like the way that I analyze texts, is basically just an evolution of that. It's a very, it's like maybe you could say it's just a variation or repetition of that, of the primal scene of something's wrong here.

There's a dissonance, there's a tension here, and I just want to describe it accurately, which is actually quite hard. So in a way, just. There is no, the autobiographical element of this book is my just deep love of close reading. That's really what I'm trying to express by applying it to this object that sometimes resists it and sometimes invites it.

Michael W. Clune: It's a question that has beveled close reading from its inception, which is, it's like with jokes, right? There's one line of thought that, to explain a joke is to kill it. But of course, in my own experience, the opposite was true. I remember meeting this group of friends when I was like 15, and what was revelatory about it was that they would make really funny jokes, but then they would analyze and instead of getting stupid, they would actually get funnier.

You know what I mean? Where they would like zero it. And so that was the first moment for me where I was just like. Wow. Analysis isn't this aggressive act of di of murderous dissection. It's actually a technique for amplification and illumination and pushing it farther. And one, one thing that's fascinating about the close readings in your book is that it does, that it really shows that you can push really hard, you can look very closely.

At these elements in the game and it yields something that is persuasively, it is persuasive. This is, it's compelling. I love that. A question I have is how you conceive of the audience for a book like this, right? Because one of the pleasures of reading your book is finding you've created a kind of plane in which.

Really surprising voices are juxtaposed and put in conversation on the same level. You've got Reddit commentators and then you've got like Slosky and Jameson and literary scholars. And what's really striking is it doesn't seem, and this is like an achievement of the book they don't seem discordant.

You know what I'm talking about. It doesn't really seem like this Reddit editor who's having this close reading of this moment. Is really doing some is really like speaking a different language even than some of these literary critics. And so when you think about audience or you think about you know who this book is for and so far as you do, and of course it's totally possible not to think about audience, but yeah.

What are some thoughts you have about that?

Nathan Wainstein: So the first thought I would have would just to just express my immense gratitude to tune in Fairweather and Jason Killingsworth there and the editor, Christian Dolman who was a kind of icon of mine as I got into game writing. So it was a pleasure to work with him, but that both of them, they wanted to let this book be the book that it is.

And so I, I. I, I basically, I made no, I had to make no concessions to audience. And I recognized that could be problematic. Like when I was, when I showed friends early drafts, they would say, this is, this is cool, but I don't think there's an audience for this who's gonna care about Slosky and Blackhawk Ninja, the Reddit poster or whatever.

But my thought, so I would say I felt this kind of need to write this book and was just like, I'm gonna write this. Like I'm talking to my. Friends and try to be as inviting as possible in terms of in bringing in different voices and open to explanation, and I don't think, I don't know how successful it is at that as far as will the readers who are bloodborne obsessives care about what I have to say about the Adorno or something.

But I will say on Reddit, Reddit is incredible. I think Reddit criticism or analysis is the best gaming criticism you can find in a way. Partly because as I say in one of the chapters, gamings are, games are inherently formalistic. And so what you get in Reddit is just an exacting attention to form.

And what I really respect and admire about some of these long breakdowns is a baseline of, or a combination of once of the most precise tracking, detail oriented acknowledgement that. A fallibility, that a literary critic messes something up or misconstrues something, no one really cares.

But if someone does that in Reddit, it's like everyone's on them immediately. Oh, you actually, this little thing you said in your post is great. Completely wrong. That's great. Yeah. And that kind of precision is just, you don't see it in literary scholarship and you see it. It's just a baseline expectation of Reddit posts and I love that.

But relatedly, Reddit just has a kind of gamers who are. Doing this, these deep dives into these works. Maybe not narratively, but formally, structurally, they just have a basic expectation or understanding of what a plausibility, in the way that literary critics often don't. The question that is.

Is this actually true? Yes, you can say that about Wordsworth, but is that true? Yeah, and Reddit is it has, again, it has the close reading, it has the narratology neurological analysis, and it has the precision and detail, but it also has the, is this true element and I really admire that and found it just immensely useful for writing this book.

Michael W. Clune: Yeah. No, that's it. It's so fascinating and part of the reason I'm interested in this question is I'm I'm core. I organized a conference that's gonna happen in April at the University of Chicago with Merv Re who's a critic, and John Baskin, who did edits a journal called The Point.

But the point is it's, it, my idea for the conference was just like something like literature. Outside of academia or after academia. And what's really interesting is there is, one of the things that's remarkable is there is a kind of like serious, critical community out there beyond academia that in many ways is animated by and responsive to real flaws of academic criticism that you just described, which is like this unbelievable.

I have a friend who wrote an article, it was called like how to get an article track retracted in the humanities. And you pointed out no article in humanities ever gets retracted. And then that's like just speaks a deep unseriousness right in the way that you described. Like all kinds of people have published just totally wrong, ludicrously, wrong, like factually wrong accounts, and they never, it's never retracted.

It just accumulate. So the idea that a, a community like Reddit has a different standard and also a different a really robust and developed vocabulary. And I see this book is, and it's not a university press that's putting the book out, it's very much recognizable to academics.

But I feel like it's also, it's a portal between these kinds of realms at this moment where like, all this stuff is very much in flux. So I just thought that was super interesting.

Nathan Wainstein: Thanks Michael. Yeah. And that, that conference sounds really great. And I may I feel that may be a good place to end, if that's okay.

We're at time and yeah. I'm just, I'm really grateful for Matt for your attention on this book and and for your que like your generous questions. I have to, I really have to say I don't wanna. I don't wanna overdo it, but if anyone, if I could have had anyone to read this book, it would've been you.

So I, I really do appreciate it.