New Research Site

Hello,

Just a quick update to say I have a new research site for the Fall 2011 semester: Indians as Curiosities.  The blog is for Dr. Lisa Logan's LIT 6936: Studies in Literary, Cultural, and Textual Theory: Women and/in Early American Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida.

Also, my new personal blog is available here: http://jayjaystroup.com, which has a list of all my current and past research projects.

-Jay Jay

Spare Thoughts: 2

Question:  How and why did you make decisions about your blog appearance?  What ambitions do you have for it?  What reservations?  What is at stake in fashioning oneself as a public intellectual in this way?  What possible connections can we make between the study of early American literature and contemporary culture?  

Answer:  I have the advantage of previously completing (and surviving) the semester long research project designed by Dr. Logan with last year’s class, LIT6009: American Novel and National Identity—Romanticism and Imperialism (Spring 2009).  So, I am relatively familiar with Blogger thanks to creating Conduct Yourself and feel comfortable with the idea of exposing myself, my research process, and my final academic product online.  With Conduct Yourself, I chose a relatively neutral color palate of beiges, greens and browns to present an aura of professionalism, and only rarely strayed off topic.  

I decided, with this current project, I wanted something completely different, and that I needed to improve and exceed my previous work.  Despite less than a year in between the projects, Blogger has changed and updated their templates, design, and posting tools, which allows for more flexibility and personalization of standard templates.  My entire research project hinges on the ideas of the female homosocial, the lesbian continuum, and the search for a usable past, so I figured I could allow my blog to have more personality this time around.  I chose a template that features a brightly colored watercolor painting, with rather indistinct shapes – they could be random blobs or perhaps flowers, who knows.  I liked the ambiguity of it, to be honest.  

To balance the tones of red, pink, and bright orange, I kept the side tabs, date tabs, and pages’ tabs a dark gray/black (but transparent).  I adjusted some of the color options for the text (kept it black on the posts for readability) to match the colors in the background image.  
I think the blog reflects some of my own personality, which in my Welcome post, I mentioned will be a key part of this research project.  I also recently discovered icons that I really like, including the flourish that now adorns most posts, echoing the flourishes Moore used in her book.

Spare Thoughts: 1

Question:  What kinds of information can you infer about representations of women in early American literature from the publication history and front matter (including illustrations, type, prefaces and dedications, subscriber lists, etc.)?  What do you expect to find in this text?

Answer:  My text, Milcah Martha Moore’s Book*, is not a published text.  It is a commonplace book, a bound manuscript.  As such, there is no publication history in the traditional sense.  I have to rely on the research of others, namely Blecki and Wulf, and trust that their transcription of the original manuscript is correct.  I will also have to look at the role commonplace books played in early American literature in order to understand its importance and place in expanding the canon of American women writers.  Unpublished manuscripts are establishing themselves as viable alternatives to published texts, which in turn, enlarges the scope of women writers of the time.  Ignoring these unpublished manuscripts (and letters, diaries, etc.) was the result of scholars ignoring the historical context that restricted or discouraged publishing works written by women in early America.

*I will refer to the text as MMMB for short throughout this project.

In fact, while I keep throwing the term commonplace book around, I don’t know the history or full meaning.  So, let’s turn to the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory for some illumination.

A notebook in which ideas, themes, quotations, words and phrases are jotted down.  Almost every writer keeps some kind of commonplace book where he can put things in storage.  In a properly organized one the matter would be grouped under subject headings.  A famous example is Ben Jonson’s Timber: Or Discoveries (1640), which comprises a draft for a treatise on the art of writing and on types of literature, miniature essays, sententiae, pensées (qq.v.) and so forth.  Two very agreeable modern examples are Maurice Baring’s Have You Anything to Declare? (1963), the work of an exceptionally civilized and well-read man, and John Julius Norwich’s Christmas Crackers (1980).  (162)

Now, I know that a dictionary entry will not give a detailed history, but the complete lack of mention of the co-mingled history of women writers and the commonplace book is disappointing.  The two modern examples are written by men, and I find it hard to believe that there isn’t a modern example authored by a woman worth mentioning.  At the very least, mention one male author and one female author.  Oh well.