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. 

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. 

Because it is not only the application of neuroscience in literary studies that Tallis disapproves of, but the whole range of structuralist, post-structuralist, psychoanalytical (Freudian, Lacanian), historical materialist, and Marxist approaches, I was a little disheartened. I read on because I recently became interested in the subject, by way of Daniel M. Gross’s Secret History of Emotion (2006) [see also this post], which pits cultural history and the study of rhetoric against a biological/neurological interpretation of the emotions. Gross makes convincing arguments against (mainly) Damasio’s neurological approach to the emotions, and I just picked up a copy of Damasio’s Descartes Error to see for myself.

Another reason I wanted to know more about neuroscience was a piece by A. S. Byatt in the new Cambridge Companion to John Donne (2006): ”Feeling thought: Donne and the embodied mind,” on neuroscience and the poetry of John Donne. She writes that she became interested in the relation between cognitive science and poetry, but did not find much information with psycholinguists, who are more interested in the use of metaphors in everyday communication, not in complex poetry. Instead, Byatt used the work of neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux as a perspective on Donne’s poems. Some of her ideas appealed to me, like this one:

Perhaps, this scientist [not Changeux but Dupuy] said, we delight in puns because the neurone connections become very excited by the double input associated with all the stored information for two arbitrarily connected things or ideas. Perhaps we enjoy this excitement. It occurred to me, reading this, that complex metaphors produce infinitely more subtle versions of this excitement and pleasure.

In his TLS article, Raymond Tallis reacts to an edited version of Byatt’s “Feeling Thought” published in the TLS as ”Observe the Neurones” (2006). He does not accuse Byatt of reading only popular versions of neuroscience - he has to admit that she is a careful reader of Changeux’s work. Nevertheless, she sometimes misinterprets concepts from neuroscience in her use of them to interpret Donne’s poetry, such as the concept of the graph. His main objection to Byatt’s approach, however, is that it reduces the reading of literature to a neurophysiological phenomenon: 

That is, by adopting a neurophysiological approach, Byatt loses a rather large number of important distinctions: between reading one poem by John Donne and another; between successive readings of a particular poem; between reading Donne and other Metaphysical poets; between reading the Metaphysicals and reading William Carlos Williams; between reading great literature and trash; between reading and a vast number of other activities – such as getting cross over missing toilet paper [a recurring theme in the piece - KS]. That is an impressive number of distinctions for a literary critic to lose.

Although I generally agree with the idea that scientific approaches to literature tend to obfuscate specificities in order to find a universal pattern (see also this post on memes), I don’t quite agree with Tallis’ reading here. Byatt does make a difference between Donne and other poets. For example, she writes that unlike George Herbert (but like Wallace Stevens), Donne “describe not images, but image-making, not sensations but the process of sensing, not concepts but the idea of the relations of concepts.” I think Byatt’s ideas about metaphors and the play of images in the mind are very specific to the metaphysical poetry of Donne, which brings together in its imagery concepts and objects that are not usually related. Of course, there are other poets who do this, but not all poets, and I don’t think it would be easy to find in toilet paper, nor in what Tallis calls “trash” writing (although there is an image that keeps haunting me from an Elizabeth George detective novel, where the experience of a warm, sticky car seat is compared to the embrace of a sweaty uncle).

On the other hand, I do agree with a point Tallis makes elsewhere in his article, that Byatt’s approach does not seem to distinguish between different readers. When she writes that “The pleasure Donne offers our bodies is the pleasure of extreme activity of the brain” - who is the “we” that she has in mind? Does every brain experience Donne’s poetry in this way?

Read more (random choice from a wealth of interesting links):

• Brainethics’ (blog) primer on bioaesthetics
• Wikipedia has an entry on Neuroesthetics, with links (see also their Neuroscience Portal)
• The Institute of Neuroaesthetics
• Daniel Dennett’s review of Damasio’s Descartes Error from the TLS (2005), which states that “it is important to add that Damasio is not “reducing” human reason, human judgment, human art and genius and moral insight, to the ebb and flow of hormones and neuromodulators.”

Also noted on the web:

• Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon reviews Sylvia Bowerbank’s Speaking for Nature (see also this post)
• Mercurius Politicus has gathered the mixed reviews of Lisa Jardine’s Going Dutch on Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century (I just got the book in the post, and can only say that it is quite lavishly illustrated and beautifully typeset — more soon!)
• The Guardian now has a longer item on the wonderful bookshop in the Dominican church in Maastricht (see also this post).

Geek is chic, after all.

Cultural History of Emotions in Premodernity

An international workshop organized by CHEP, The Interdisciplinary Network on the Cultural History of Emotions in Premodernity. 23-26 October 2008, Umeå University, Sweden.

Keynote speakers

Barbara Rosenwein, Loyola University Chicago
“A Theory and Its Limits:
The Emotions of Thomas Aquinas and His Disciples.”

Anne C. Vila, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“’Finer’ Feelings: A Zoology of the Over-Delicate
in Eighteenth-Century and early Nineteenth-Century France.”

We invite submissions for papers and 20-minute talks from scholars and postgraduate students within the disciplines of arts and humanities who are interested in the history of emotions in the premodern period (i.e., up to the turn of the18th century), for a three-day workshop to be held at Umeå University, Sweden, in October 2008.

We welcome contributions on all aspects of the cultural history of emotions, from as diverse approaches as possible, albeit within history, history of ideas, arts, musicology, politics, philosophy, religious or gender studies. We are especially interested in contributions on the following topics: emotions as a historical concept, emotions in religious and political contexts, rhetoric and politics, cultural expressions and historical repertoires of emotions, the history of gestures, and expressions emotions and gender.

Please send a one-page abstracts by e-mail before May 1 2008 to: jonas[dot]liliequist[at]historia[dot]umu[dot]se.

Notification of acceptance and programme May 15, 2008 The workshop will provide the basis for an electronic and/or printed publication of selected papers.

See also the conference website.

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

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.”

In Aristotle’s chain of cognition, current in the premodern period, the eyes were given priority over the other senses because they were thought to provide the most direct knowledge of things. The eye received the sensible form of a thing, because things produced species that transmitted their likenesses to the eye. This representational model of sight, argues Clark, collapsed between 1400 and 1700, when it was overwhelmed by paradoxes and anomalies.

There are several factors that made the early modern period problematize vision. For example, notions in demonology (here Stuart Clark builds on his earlier Thinking With Demons [1]) of the ability of evil spirits to assume any bodily shape, to make objects invisible, and even to enter a person’s brain or eye to move images around them. Other factors are the rethinking of notions of vision in the context of new perspectival techniques, the Protestant Reformation and its suspicion of visual representation; and the revival of ancient Greek skepticism from the 1560s onwards. From within these perspectives, visual error was in general ascribed to three causes: nature, human artifice, or demons.

Nature could deceive mainly through the workings of the early modern imagination, which occupied an ever more central role in thinking on cognition. It was primarily seen as a visual process susceptible to the influence of bodily humours and passions, and came to be seen as an unreliable and undisciplined faculty that could misrepresent reality. Clarke argues that the early modern fascination with melancholia may have caused the neutral meaning of the imagination to be overtaken by a suggestion of illusion and misrepresentation. In the category of human artifice, the popularity of magicians or “jugglers,” the vogue for magical optics, as well as the new technique of perspectival drawing in the period similarly increased suspicion of the reality principle of vision, simply because these widespread phenomena proved that the eye was not always to be trusted. Demons, the third general cause of deception of the eye, could wreak havoc at every stage of the process of seeing and cognition: they could influence the eye, the air and the species that traveled in it, and the perceived object itself. How the senses were bedeviled is explained by John Deacon and John Walker in their Dialogicall discourses of spirits and divels (1601):

For, much blood descending before into the sensitive facultie, there descends withall, many imagined formes, whereby there is forthwith procured a very lively resemblance of some such things as are not existing at all. By this meanes therefore (there being beforehand procured a commotion of humours, as well in the interiour, as exteriour senses of all the beholders) the Divel might both inwardly and outwardly also, applie certained apparant formes to the very organons of all the senses; even as effectually, as if they had risen only from outward sensible objects[.] [2]

Other chapters focus on the effects of the Protestant Reformation, religious debate on apparitions, philosophical skepticism, and the philosophy of dreams as visual paradoxes.

One of the chapters focuses entirely on Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a play “preoccupied by the workings of human vision” (236): the action pivots on seeing things, the language of the play turns often to eyes and sight, and of course it contains spectres and apparitions. Clark surveys the work of previous critics on the theme of the problematics of sight and seeing in the play, especially that of Huston Diehl, Lucy Gent, Stephen Greenblatt and Iain Wright. He then broadens his scope from the play into the post-Reformation controversies over vision discussed in the preceding chapters. These controversies often touched on the biblical story of King Saul, “a story with an outline very similar to Macbeth.” Clark offers the tale of Saul as a source for the play (given Shakespeare’s habit of analogical thinking across roughly parallel texts) but also as a story that would have been in the mind of early modern audiences of the play, and, finally, as a way to link “a vision-centred play to a vision-centred debate” (246), since the reading of the story of Saul in Protestant Europe accorded a central role to the notion of visual paradox. Thus placing Macbeth in the context of the controversies of sight, Clark argues that the play expresses its central problematics of politics and political morality through the problematics of sight:

If vision was supposed to be the most certain and most noble sense, then to acknowledge its uncertainty in fundamental ways was to dislodge particular political, religious and moral values and question their certainty too; it was to make the problems of vision a vehicle for the exploration of the problems of politics and religion. The reliability of vision became itself a political issue. (257)

In his introduction, Clark mentions that “the one topic” relevant to the book that he has not ventured upon, is “that of the theatre as a newly controversial site of perspectival illusion and other visual fictions” (7). In my seminar on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, I get the students to dive into Early English Books Online and to explore the associations between the demonic, magic, and performance/spectacle in anti-theatrical pamphlets, as well as in the play itself. Clark’s book provided me with an incredibly rich store of primary material and convincing arguments to further contextualise these problems the next time I teach the play — and I am sure I will find many more resonances in other plays as well. Vanities of the Eye has given me a set of spectacles through which to look at early modern drama from a richly documented and convincing new perspective.

[1] Stuart Clark, Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 1999). Strangely, the dust jacket of my edition of Vanities of the Eye (also Oxford UP) refers to the author of Thinking With Demons as “Stewart” Clark…

[2] John Deacon and John Walker, Dialogical discourses of spirits and divels, qtd. on page 134 of Vanities of the Eye.

More reviews:

• Guardian book review of Vanities of the Eye and Simon Ings’s The Eye (see also here for an illustrated version)
• Times Higher Education review
• The Renaissance Quarterly (61:1) that I just found in my mailbox has a review by Sven Dupré of another recent book on early modern vision: Vincent Ilardi’s Renaissance Vision From Spectacles to Telescopes (2007).

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:

The library homepage states that the catalogue has been “enriched” with this new functionality, but it does not give their reasons for including it.

I played around with it for a while, to see what it does. The list of related books below the tags is an odd set. It includes two other books by Greenblatt (Self-fashioning and Negotiations), Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, Stanley Fish on the reader in Paradise Lost, and Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All. Sure, they are related books — but I could think of others that are closer to the themes that Hamlet in Purgatory deals with.

When you click on one of the tags, a tag browser opens to show you other books with the same tag. The useful thing is that this tag browser is integrated into the catalogue: it does not take you to Library Thing but shows you only books that have the same tags in the university catalogue. Here’s what you get, for example, when you click on the tag “Catholicism”:

These are books in the catalogue that have been tagged “Catholicism” by Library Thing users. When you click on one of them, you are taken back into the catalogue, to the data of the book you clicked on.

Now, I can assure you that the university library has many, many more books relevant to a subject search on Catholicism — a search on books with the word in its title alone renders 191 results. The conclusion of this little experiment is that the tag browser might not be a very thorough way of doing bibliographical research. On the other hand, the catalogue does not really have a lucid system for searching on keywords. If you go to the advanced search, there are two keyword-classification systems hidden thoroughly about midway through the list of options, and I do not really understand how to use either of them efficiently. The Library Thing tags could be a useful addition in that respect. They allow for associative clicking, and perhaps they will lead to serendipitous finds!

This is the first time I came across a Library Thing tag browser in a university library catalogue. I found this entry on the Library Thing blog, in which they announce that they will be working with Talis, who design software for libraries — perhaps this tag browser is a result of that cooperation.

• 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!

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!

Another great thing about this conference is that each session has a “discussant.” I had never come across such a thing before — I was one for the first time in my life this morning. It’s a very useful concept: the discussant has read the session’s papers in advance, and after the final paper, she picks out common topics, ideas and arguments in the papers, and asks questions about these issues to provide a starting point for the discussion. After throwing these questions at the panelists, the discussant hands over the management of the discussion to the chair. This works really well, because the discussant is often able to capture the essence of the papers, and to oversee the bigger picture, and this helps to lift the discussion to a higher level.

If you are interested in my paper on masculinity and anger in early modern English revenge drama, there is a PDF version on the conference website. I’ll be presenting it tomorrow morning, at the ungodly hour of 8.30 am.