Serendipities

In the latest issue of the TLS, Raymond Tallis, an emeritus professor of geriatric medicine, takes to task the use of neuroscience as a new perspective in literary studies. In “The Neuroscience Delusion” Tallis warns against the tendency to use works of popular science as a basis for interdisciplinarity: in his view, critics use a vague understanding of another discipline as the basis for a new interpretation of literature. Tallis challenges neuroaesthetics as based on an overstated case for neuroscience, and argues that it reduces humanity (as well as reading and writing) to a brain function. 

His main objection to popular neuroscience is that it suggests that the whole of human experienced can be explained from processes in the brain. Instead, human experience is more than a brain - Tallis offers a transcendent alternative that reminded me a little of Jung’s collective unconscious: 

For the extraordinary thing about human beings – and what captures what is human – is that they transcend their bodies; that human experience is not solitary sentience but has a public face; it belongs to a community of minds. This is a process that has developed over many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years since hominids parted company from the monkeys.

What exactly this “community of minds” is and how it relates to literary studies, the article does not make clear. 

Read the rest of this entry »

This comment on Serendipities in the user notes at del.icio.us just made my day: 

Geek is chic, after all.

After my paper on masculinity and anger in early modern revenge tragedies at the ESSHC conference in Lissabon, I was invited to what promises to be an exciting workshop on the cultural history of the emotions in the early modern period in Umeå, Sweden this October. The call for papers is open until 15 May:

Cultural History of Emotions in Premodernity Read the rest of this entry »

My system of keeping track of interesting sites is quite muddled. I use old-fashioned bookmarks in my browser; sticky notes with urls can be found lingering in the corners of my Apple Dashboard; I mail interesting links to whoever I think is interested; I stick links into WordPress posts I think I might at some point write about a subject; I use the nifty research tool Zotero to keep track of research links; and I haphazardly use del.icio.us - but that hasn’t kept me from growing a collection of tags that already looks too unwieldy to me.

If you are like me, then Wess Daniels’ Tips for using Delicious in (doctoral) research may be the thing for you. The post is full of useful tips on organizing your tabs, using the notes feature, and combining your use of del.icio.us with tumblr and DevonThink.

See also how de.icio.us is changing academic research and the del.icio.us blog itself for ideas on the use of social bookmarking in education.

h/t: Academhack

Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007) had been waiting for me on my bookshelf for a while, and this week I finally got round to it. It was a great read. Vanities of the Eye is a wonderfully erudite book, teeming with information and original ideas about the changing perception of the sense of vision in early modern culture.

The book argues that contrary to what theories of the rationalization of sight and the invention of perspective suggests, vision came to be characterized by unreliability and uncertainty in the early modern period. As Stuart Clark puts it with a pun: “It is as though European intellectuals lost their optical nerve.” Read the rest of this entry »

The online library catalogue at Utrecht University not only has a design homepage to go with their cool design building. It has also just integrated Library Thing into their catalogue. When you look up a book, the search results come with a set of tags from Library Thing users, as well as a list of related books based on the Library Thing data:

Read the rest of this entry »

This is what’s waiting for me on my desk:

• William Germano, From Dissertation to Book (Chicago University Press, 2005)
• William Germano, Getting It Published (Chicago University Press, 2001)
• Beth Luey, Handbook for Academic Authors (fourth edition, Cambridge UP, 2002)
• Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato, Thinking Like Your Editor (W. W. Norton, 2002)
• William Zinsser, On Writing Well (Collins, 2006)
• Richard A. Lanham, The Longman Guide to Revising Prose (Longman, 2006)

You guessed it — it’s time to revise my dissertation for publication. People at the ESSHC conference in Lissabon kept asking me where my thesis was published. Their interest really motivated me to take some action in that department.

I read Germano’s From Dissertation to Book while I was waiting for my delayed plane on the Lisbon airport, and I decided that I need to do what he calls a “deep revision” to turn my dissertation into a publishable book. I need to make my chapters more lucid, strengthen my line of argument, speak more in my own voice instead of that of other critics, and get rid of excess block quotes.

Germano’s book suggests that I don’t contact a publishing house quite yet. He recommends revising the book first, so that I am ready to send it out if a publisher reacts positively to my book proposal. So that is my plan of action now: revise first, then write a brilliant book proposal to sell my Wild Justice: The Dynamics of Gender and Revenge in Early Modern English Drama to a publisher in England or the United States. Ah yes, I probably need a snappier subtitle too.

All practical advice on how to go about turning a dissertation into a published book is greatly welcome!