Comments for Ad Nauseam

Comment on Sourcing a blurb by W.F.

W.F. — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:16:01 +0000

Mike -

As chance would have it, I am now in the middle of my second reading of “Lolita.” (I read too fast the first time a few years back.) I’ve also researched some of the reviews from the 50s when it was published to see how it might have riled people up in those days. (It’d probably be way worse these days.)

I heartily agree with you about what Nabokov’s novel is “about.” I doubt very much if it would have attained its place in literary history only on the basis of shock value. Rather, I believe that it strikes way deeper — to the heart, to the deep longing and endless ache for the feminine, and for what may be imagined lies beyond that. I agree that’s what it’s honest about. Painful as it may be, it’s the truth.

Thanks for your research. Except for your blog, even Google couldn’t come up with this needle-in-a-haystack.

One of my favorite lines:

“Whether or not the realization of a life-long dream had surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark–and plunged into a nightmare.”

Comment on How rules about indentation have ruined (my) literary analysis by Mike Shapiro

Mike Shapiro — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 04:44:15 +0000

The big deals on Proust, at least those I have read, tend to fish about with tweezers until they pull up just the right symbol, and then you get a dozen pages on the “little phrase” or the glace-bonsai.

So far I have used your Big Honkin’ Quotation system, though there are times that method could be better served with a sort of two-column running commentary.

Comment on How rules about indentation have ruined (my) literary analysis by natswrite

natswrite — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:34:10 +0000

As another MLA slave, I’d caution against ever completely abandoning one form of analysis for another. And while a paper looks a bit odd when there are long indented quotes, I find they are useful because you can cite an important passage and then continue to do a reading without having to constantly cite, basically putting all your quotes together. You also get the added benefit of allowing your reader to see the actual shape of a passage on the page, which is nice for poetry.

And hey, if you check out JSTOR, all the ‘big deals’ do it, so that means it must be good, right?

Comment on Journal Club #3: Hülya Adak, Jale Parla, and Nergis Ertürk on Turkish and world literature by Mike Shapiro

Mike Shapiro — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:32:43 +0000

Apparently it has taken me 11 months to fully process your remarks, Katy. But I might be coming around to your way of seeing things.

If our standards for expertise remain as high as they have been for the past generation or so, instructors will be so tightly ensconced in the areas of their expertise that it will become even rarer to see a syllabus that gives something of the world tour that literature is supposed to be so good at.

If we buy into the theory that a collegiate lit course should teach its students to love reading, that argument alone makes me think that instructors like me should be given at least a semester’s training in how to teach texts whose contexts we will never fully know.

Comment on Speed writing by hilaire

hilaire — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:17:27 +0000

Hmmm…don’t know…I don’t ever have contact with those communities. I don’t generally do literary conferences – maybe they’re all as lovely.

Maybe I like fragmentary and paratactic. :)

It could be that there is a certain – elegant – ironic tone in modernist studies that I like. Probably the thing that drew me to the period in the first place.

Comment on Speed writing by hilaire

hilaire — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:15:27 +0000

Hmmm…don’t know…I don’t ever have contact with those communities. I don’t generally do literary conferences – maybe they’re all as lovely.

Maybe I like fragmentary and paratactic. :)

It could be that there is a certain – elegant – ironic tone in modernist studies that I like. Probably the thing that drew me to the period in the first place.

Comment on Speed writing by Mike Shapiro

Mike Shapiro — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 15:54:27 +0000

Hilaire, can you compare Modernist talks to those from Victorianist and 18th-century conferences? I would have thought Modernists more fragmentary and paratactic than their Victorian peers.

Comment on More corporate shilling: Who needs EndNote? by Rick

Rick — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 07:50:13 +0000

@Wilson: Zotero can search for PDF citation info as well….

Comment on Speed writing by Sisyphus

Sisyphus — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:19:23 +0000

Wait, did you just formulate a master-slave dialectic theory of blogging?

I’m going to have to wash my brain of that image.

Comment on Speed writing by hilaire

hilaire — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 02:07:27 +0000

Interesting. I was thinking, at this year’s MSA, that one of the reasons I like this conference so much, and go to it year after year, is that the seemingly effortless prose is a thrill. Modernist studies folks are simply lovely, elegant writers, and that always gives the conference an aesthetic texture that I appreciate – especially as an escape from atrociously inelegant student writing.