The discussion about Stanley Fish’s column on the uses of the arts and the humanities at the Valve (here and here) reminded me of the Belle van Zuylen lecture that Jeanette Winterson gave in Utrecht, just before Christmas. Her thesis was that art is essential equipment for the task of being human — a “basic [...]

Time for an update on the gender of reading post. There have been many comments, some of which on other blogs, so I’ll attempt a summary here. In the original post, I jotted down some thoughts on the function of books in paintings or photos, elaborating on the Dutch sociologist Jolande Withuis’s observation that women [...]

From now on, I would have to take time off to find out how to write about magical objects like sweets, wires, bags, screens and cards, about the tender madness of mundane actions like counting, folding and falling over, about the secret life of substances. I was going to have to write amid things, rather [...]

In her wonderful introduction to Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (2001), Catherine Belsey reflects on the methodologies of cultural history. She makes a case for a practice of reading that foregrounds dissent, instead of a method of interpretation that seeks to connect meanings to form an internally consistent totality. Objecting, for example, to a [...]

I was having coffee at my parents last week. With the coffee came a cookie, and a paperback. “Have you heard of this?” asked my mother, and put the book on the coffee table. I hadn’t. I examined the blurb, which informed me that the term meme has been around as long as I myself. [...]

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?
Montaigne
In an earlier Friday Companion Species post, I wondered what would happen to Donna Haraway’s ideas about relating to the other if they were modelled on cats rather than dogs. I wrote that the [...]

After yesterday’s Syrian appropriation of Shakespeare, here is news that The Shakespeare Yearbook is going to devote an issue to “Shakespeare after 9/11″, and will sponsor a special session on the subject at this year’s MLA meeting.

In the wake of the New Historicism, much critical work on Shakespeare and his contemporaries has been faulted [...]