Serendipities

Sorry for the long silence. No excuse for it either, except a prolonged end-of-semester accumulation of jobs that needed to be done. I just finished grading the final pile of essays for the year, only a last week of catch-up seminars and question hours to go,and then a week of oral exams. I have never done a full day of oral exams, let alone four days in succession, so I am a little worried, but I look forward to talking to all the students on their own. 

As for grading, Gloria Monday at the Times Higher Education writes that she used to read every essay in detail, but now she just ”whip[s] through the first page and a bit, read[s] the conclusion, skim[s] the odd section in the middle.” The recklessness of it. I am still young and idealistic enough to be a little shocked by this confession, even if it is pseudonymously made. I do read every paper, often twice, and use elaborate assessment sheets to provide feedback. I am beginning to develop some sort of routine, however. I find myself writing the same comments more and more often, especially on subjects such as structure and argument. If I’m not tempted to sit outside in the sun and fill out the sheets by hand, I can just copy paste them into the sheets. And I now use the timer on my mobile phone to remind myself not to spend too much time on an essay. It really works, and it is almost fun to beat the buzzer on an essay. The life I lead…

More nerdy news: I discovered last.fm the other week. It’s a site where you can tell the interface that you like Keith Jarrett, and then it will present you with a streaming radio station filled with music that is similar to Jarrett’s - based on the preferences of other users. Unlike some book recommendation sites that I just like because they are so serendipitous, this site has so many users that it really works. It’s how I discovered the Tord Gustavsen Trio and Arild Andersen, for example. 

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 »

I just came across a great website on early modern culture — Appositions: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture. It just hosted the ‘first-ever, fully electronic conference in the field of Renaissance and early modern literary and cultural studies.’ As far as I understand, this electronic conference will result in an online journal later this year. The editor is W. Scott Howard, the editorial advisor is Matthew Steggle, of EMLS fame.

The papers of the conference are online now, and among them I found one on early modern translations of classical literary texts about vindictive women (a subject I also looked at in my PhD thesis): Katherine Heavey’s “Translating Medea into the Sixteenth Century“(scroll down the page for the article).

Heavey shows that the figure of Medea attracted and inspired many early modern authors, but their fascination holds a paradox. As a woman, a witch and a pagan with little regard for partriarchal institutions, Medea evoked anxieties. In a lucid analysis, Heavey demonstrates how the sixteenth-century translators Richard Robinson, Arthur Studley [that should be John], George Whetstone, Arthur Golding and George Turberville all attempt to contain the subversive powers of this powerful female figure:

Male authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries deal with her threat by undermining her autonomy, making her more personally vulnerable, penitent or subject to the consequences of her actions. In doing so, they highlight, intentionally or unintentionally, the frictions and conflicts that the Renaissance Medea engenders frictions between male and female, society and the ‘other’, and between classical rendering and Renaissance rewriting.

Also interesting in Appositions (besides many more papers) is Event B: a wiki of “Renaissance /early modern keywords that undergo significant shifts in meaning during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” I think this is an interesting idea — especially if the entries became less OED-based than they are now, and more like short articles.

On a different note: Inkhorn read all of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and lived to tell the tale. Congratulations!