Just a quick anecdote from my grazing today.
Edward Gibbon’s only romance was Suzanne Curchod (the future Suzanne Necker, mother of Mme. Germaine de Stael)! Gibbon proposed marriage in 1758 but was thwarted by his father’s staunch disapproval of the match. After a “painful struggle” he tried to cut all ties with her despite her promise [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Among many of Professor Walker’s quotes and ideas that have left indelible imprints in my mind, there is one in particular I have contemplated often. One afternoon in class she said, in so many words, that a woman’s identity—the way a woman experiences herself and is recognized in the world—is [...]
Thursday, February 15, 2007
i have been starting to notice the gender biases in contemporary learned circles…i.e. dissertations listings in the history depts of universities, popular intellectual/literati publications like Harpers and the new Yorker etc…and of course le doeuff has evidences of her own…
Ranft has got me thinking…in order to include women in western intellectual history the definitions of [...]
I am interested in the history of knowledge, its production and transmission, but more importantly its codification and institutionalization. How does something earn its existence as something that is known? How do these smaller occurrences of things-becoming-known then turn into bodies of knowledge? It is here that I suspect there is room for politics. It [...]
Saturday, February 3, 2007
perhaps I am trying–in foucaultian terms–to come up with a geneology of knowledge…specifically a geneology of the gendering of knowledge…how have women been excluded from this enterprise…where have they succeeded in agreeing on their own…
and, incidentally, what is human knowledge? does this exist or is all knowledge politicized somehow?
I am off to a very slow start with this project for a couple of reasons. While trying to take a few more days to prepare for the GRE on Monday I wanted to jot down some of my initial ideas, whims, and hunches about this project. I will take this journal entry as an [...]