I’m through Persuasion, Sense, Pride, and Emma.
So far I think Austen’s take on Learned women is more complex than having an explicitly learned character — especially in Persuasion where I think she plays with the idea of what constitutes learning/education/knowledge/genres.
In Pride, Sense, and Emma, education, especially in the form of reading — being well read, [...]
i think i am really circulating around some interesting issues about history, time, story telling, philosophies of theologies and histories. Penelope is in the middle of it all!
I am reading about the bard Demodocus (the one who retold the story of the Trojan war to Odysseus). He is blind but has recounted things [...]
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Re: “Politics and Misogyny”, by Bob Herbert. Op-Ed, Published, January 15, 2008.
It is alarming to witness how a well-intentioned perspective is an even greater danger to women than the most hateful of sexist polemics. However unintentionally, Bob Herbert’s “Politics and Misogyny” is part of the problem, not the solution, and the function is two-fold.
Prostitution, [...]
Saturday, September 15, 2007
i have been having epiphanies all morning! things are still in their incipient stages but i think i am on to something important in reaction to Bonnie Smith’s Gender of History .
i think i am understanding another important piece to the necessary reiteration of women’s intellectual work. it is not only a historiographic [...]
In a nation that relies on precedence and constitutional law to determine our jurisprudence, we consult and depend upon 200 year-old texts for definitions of the way we should live in the present and build for the future. In a nation where our leaders and members of the press have turned to hackneyed catchphrases [...]
yes of course white is looking at historians (and their texts) of the past, michelet, gibbons etc. that was a mistake…gotta be more careful!
but there are still two things i am trying to decipher. for now i will jot down historiography vs. history of ideas. i suppose the former could, [...]
i started Corinne yesterday which is, so far, a pleasure. i like stael’s writing style, it is very hyperbolic and exciting. i’m also revisiting some michael oakeshott hoping to get some philosophical inquiries answered about different ways that knowledge is thought to accumulate, (knowledge, and so history) so that i can begin to [...]
in light of hayden white, who says (and who i believe) that histories are fundamentally of the “literary imagination”, or “manifestly verbal fictions”, etc. that our responses to it are aesthetic or moral etc. what does this mean for the historical exegeses of texts from the past? meaning, is there a difference between the historical [...]
Now that school is over for the summer, I’m trying to stay engaged and find a way to practice the writing. I have found that commenting on the blog portion of the new Lewis Lapham project, Lapham’s Quarterly, is probably as good as I’m going to get until I decide to either post more [...]
what i found, without a lot of help from contemporary historians, is that the 20th century got in the way. feminism got in the way big time. and then postmodernism made it even worse.
but mostly i thought that this might be helpful in either class to talk about women’s history — basically as evidence [...]