Confessions of a Reader

[image is from Stuff No One Told Me]

I have a confession to make.  I’m only halfway through my text, MMMB.  And by halfway, I mean I’ve read the first two informal sections, entries one through forty-eight.  There are one hundred and twenty six entries in MMMB.  But that’s what tomorrow and Saturday are for – on Friday I’ll read the third informal section (49-70) and on Saturday, the fourth and final section (71-126).  In between reading MMMB, I will read Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” and Smith-Rosenberg’s "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America."  These three readings are my goal for Friday and Saturday.  For someone who normally tears through texts at breakneck speed, I am having trouble concentrating while reading MMMB.  I stayed at home today instead of going to the UCF Library, and I think that was my mistake.  I let myself be distracted by laundry (four loads, ugh), cleaning up the kitchen, cooking dinner, etc.  So, tomorrow, I’m going to brace myself for a marathon of reading and get it done….with the help of Eight O’Clock vanilla iced coffee (thanks Jessica for the coffee recommendation!).

So far, my favorite entry is Hannah Griffitt’s “To Sophronia.  In answer to some Lines she directed to be wrote on my Fan.  1769. —by the same” (entry 39).  It’s short, so I’m going to type it out in its entirety.  I love the Griffitt’s wit and tone, and her gentle rejection of her friend’s advice and/or urging to marry.  I hope you like it too.

Don't Blink

I follow @AdviceToWriters (Jon Winokur) on Twitter, and these are a few of the links that caught my eye this past week or so. 

• “Cliches Avoid Them Like the Plague” by Laura Hayden on Suspense.net

• “A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices” by Robert A. Harris on VirtualSalt

• “11 Stupidest Writing Mistakes” on SalesHQ

• “Thirteen Writing Prompts” by Dan Wiencek on Timothy McSweeney Does Not Need An Apostrophe.

• “3 Crucial Elements of Well-Written Blog Posts” by Bamboo Forest on DailyBlogTips

Here are two other sites I want to share – one that I found the week I started my blog (blog designs), and the other I found this week while trying to find out what soft canon meant (still not quite sure and too lazy to look it up in my Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism or Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory (Penguin) books).

• “45 More Excellent Blog Designs” by Sven Lennartz on Smashing Magazine

• “Literary Vocabulary” by Dr. L. Kip Wheeler (Carson-Newman College)

Enjoy!

My Personal Cheat Sheet

This post is mostly for my own personal reference, so feel free to skip over it.


Sources from my preliminary bibliography, sorted.


That I own:

1. Felski, Rita.  Literature after Feminism.
2. Baym, Nina, Wayne Franklin, Philip F. Gura, and Arnold Krupat, eds.  The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume A.
3. Blecki, Catherine L., and Karin A. Wulf, eds.  Milcah Martha Moore's Book: a Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America.
4. Davidson, Cathy N.  Revolution and the Word: the Rise of the Novel in America.
5. Gilbert, Sandra M., Susan Gubar.  “Infection in the Sentence: The Women Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship.”  The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.

That I checked out from UCF’s Library:

1. Shields, David S.  Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America.
2. Stabile, Susan M.  Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America. (Inter Library Loan)
3. Brayman, Hackel H, and Catherine E. Kelly.  Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800.
4. Hayes, Kevin J.  A Colonial Woman's Bookshelf.

That I have as a PDF file:

1. "Introduction". American Women Prose Writers to 1820 (DLB).  Ed. Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans.
2. Blau, Mellinda.  "The Relationship Revolution: The Internet as a New Way of Life."
3. Logan, Lisa M.  “The Importance of Women to Early American Study: A Social Justice.”
4. Mulford, Carla.  “Writing Women in Early American Studies: On Canons, Feminist Critique, and the Work of Writing Women into History”
5. Rich, Adrienne. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence."
6. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll.  "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America."
7. Cowell, Pattie.  “Knowledge and Power: Cultural Scripts in Early America.”
8. Wulf, Karin Anne.  A Marginal Independence: Unmarried women in colonial Philadelphia.
9. Norton, Mary Beth. "Getting to the Source: Hetty Shepard, Dorothy Dudley, and Other Fictional Colonial Women I Have Come to Know Altogether Too Well."
10. Eagleton, Mary. "Adrienne Rich, Location and the Body."
11. Fox, Catherine Olive-Marie. "Be-Coming Subjects: Reclaiming a Politics of Location as Radical Political Rhetoric."
12. Hallstein, D. Lynn O'Brien. "Matrophobic Sisters and Daughters: The Rhetorical Consequences of Matrophobia in Contemporary White Feminist Analyses of Maternity."
13. Nestle, Joan. "Wars and Thinking."
14. Swain, Tania Navarro, and Marie-France Depeche. "Unveiling Relations: Women and Women-On Caroll Smith-Rosenberg's Research."
15. Rupp, Leila J. "Women's History in the New Millennium: Caroll Smith-Rosenberg's 'The Female World of Love and Ritual' after Twenty-Five Years."
16. Davis, Gayle R. "Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America."
17. Kurjiaka, Susan. "Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America."
18. Purcell, Sarah. "Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America."
19. Thornton, Tamara Plakins. "Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America."
20. Sheumaker, Helen. "Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America."
21. Colwill, Elizabeth. "Epistolary Passions: Friendship and the Literary Public of Constance de Salm, 1767-1845."
22. Curran, Stuart. "Dynamics of Female Friendship in the Later Eighteenth Century."
23. Wenner, Wendy J. "'A Viper and Engine of the Devil': The Violent Woman and Female/Female Violence in Eighteenth-Century Fiction."
24. O'Driscoll, Sally. "The Lesbian and the Passionless Woman: Femininity and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century England."
25. Yerkes, Amy Marie. "Satire, Ideology, and Dissonance in American Revolutionary Culture."
26. Reese, William S. "Americana in the Paul Mellon Bequest."
27. Bolz, Barbara Anne. "Silence and Voices: Individualism, Communities, and the Making of Agency in American Quaker Women's Autobiographies."
28. Tarter, Michele Lise. "Sites of Performance: Theorizing the History of Sexuality in the Lives and Writings of Quaker Women, 1650-1800."

You want to know a secret?  Okay, so classifying this as a secret is melodramatic, but either way, I’ll tell you.  When you’re looking up articles/book chapters in MLA or America: History and Life, you can add them into your folder (I’m assuming you can do this for any database on EBSCO).  Then, click on view folder’s contents.  You can email yourself all the citations (you have to specify MLA format), and for any of the selected sources in your folder that are available as a PDF file, it will also email you that file.  So while I was picking sources for my preliminary bibliography, for each keyword search I did, I emailed myself the search history (as an .html file), the MLA citations, and any PDF files that were available.  I labeled each email’s subject line with the appropriate search information.  Then, this afternoon, I went through all those emails and downloaded and renamed the PDF files to reflect the author and title of the article chapter.


If I have a book checked out from UCF that you think might have information about your project, just get in touch with me.  You’re more than welcome to photocopy the sections applicable to your project. 


Now of course comes the hard part – reading through the sources, and figuring out which ones to keep and which to discard.  Plus, there are some sources from my preliminary bibliography that I need to hunt down the full article as a PDF file, or see if they’re in the library at UCF.  But that’s another list for another day, hopefully tomorrow.

Preliminary Bibliography

The assignment from Dr. Logan:  


Using the MLA International Bibliography and America: History and Life databases at the UCF Library, develop a preliminary bibliography of secondary scholarly sources in the discipline of literature (with contextual sources from historians).  Use MLA documentation style.  Include keywords and searches used to develop this bibliography.  Consult a reference librarian if you encounter difficulties. 

[Submitted: 24 September 2010]

I have included a lot of sources which will (probably) end up being discarded during a closer look at each journal article and/or book.  However, I wanted to include them all because, one, I spent a lot of time looking them up, and two, it provides with me a wide range of possibilities for my project.  This preliminary bibliography will serve as a valuable resource for my project, and while I know I’ll end up spending more time on research, this guide should help me narrow and focus my search.

There were no results for female homosocial, and none applicable to my topic for homosocial in MLA, which is unsurprising considering its absence in the Library of Congress Subject Headings book.

Using MMMB in MLA for various options yielded just the modern edition.  Using MMMB as keyword term in America: History & Life yielded two already recorded book reviews of the modern edition, and one article about her published Miscellanies, Moral and Instructive text.

I included book reviews because I want to know how the book/article was received by the scholarly audience, or to quote Dr. Anna Jones, to see if they “bought it.”  I also included dissertations because of their works cited, which could potentially yield a lot of valuable sources.  I especially want to track down Susan Stabile’s dissertation, not just the abstract, which will require an ILL because the full text is not available via ProQuest.  When I included sources listed in the books I have already checked out of the UCF library, I only looked in the introductions due to time constraints.  Sometimes a source would appear in multiple locations (a book’s introduction, MLA and America: History & Life); I merely recorded it the first time I encountered it rather than list unnecessary duplications.

The categories of my preliminary bibliography at a quick glance:

• Recommendations from: Dr. Logan, and Jessica Workman.
• Found on my own
• From my previous research on The Factory Girl

• From Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America, A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf, Literature After Feminism, The Madwoman in the Attic, Memory’s Daughters, and Reading Women.

• Using of Marty Beth Norton as author in MLA
• Using Adrienne Rich as the subject term in MLA
• Using Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in America: History & Life
• Using Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in MLA
• Using Susan Stabile as author in MLA
• Using Laurel Thatcher Ulrich as the author in WorldCat

• Using commonplace book in America: History & Life
• Using commonplace book as subject (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using Delaware River Valley (N.Y.-Del. & N.J.) (1700-1799) in America: History & Life
• Using female friendship in literature (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using female-female relations (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using lesbianism in literature (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using literature and revolutions, (subject literature: American) (1700-1799): in MLA
• Using Manuscripts, American in America: History & Life
• Using Manuscripts, American (1700-1799) as subject in MLA
• Using Manuscript studies, American (1700-1799) as subject in MLA
• Using Quaker women (1700-1799) in America: History & Life
• Using Quaker women (1700-1799) in MLA

How cool is this?

I am so close to finishing my preliminary bibliography, but then I go and get distracted by David Shield’s introduction in Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America.  In looking for sources mentioned in his book, my eye caught on this passage.

Which brings us to the problem of this study: Can literary history be written without a chronology of classics, without fixing upon master texts, and without depending upon a rhetoric of revisionism or a vision of a new canon?  This study presumes that it can.  A number of scholars have fashioned innovative literary histories that promise to overcome the objection of social and cultural historians that accounts based on masterpieces suffer from the unrepresentativeness of their superlative expression.  Franco Moretti’s Signs Taken for Wonders, an experiment in the sociology of literary forms, blazed paths in the direction of a history of popular discourses organized not so much by genre as by their figurations of society.17  This study will go on a similar direction – away from history constructed as interpretations of a series of classics toward a narrative reconstituting a dynamic of discourses imbedded in a substantial bodies of texts 18 (xxvi).

Footnotes:

17.  Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Form, trans. Susan Fischer et. Al.  (New York, 1988).  It is among Cultural Studies scholars that Moretti’s work has had some influence; traditional literary scholars have passed it by.

18. Or: this study will lead away from a Gadamerian hermeneutics of the classical toward Habermasian anatomy of discourses.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York, 1985), 176-191.

What I like about this passage is the boldness of vision, the willingness to look beyond the “classics” of early American literature and validate letters, manuscripts, commonplace books, diaries and other non-traditional literary forms as worthy of study (keep in mind Shields’s book was published in 1997).  And also, the restructuring of masterpieces vs. non-traditional literary forms into something less either/or can open up discussion if Shields has succeeded in organizing these works “by their figurations of society.”  I am excited to read through his introduction, prologue, and first two chapters, “Overture: The Promise of Civil Discourse” and “Belles Lettres and the Arenas of Metropolitan Conversation.”  But for now, it’s back to my preliminary bibliography.  

Works Cited:

Shields, David S.  Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America.  Chapel Hill: U of North Caroline P, 1997.  Print.

Who stole literature? Why, feminists did!

I’m currently in the library, diligently working on my preliminary bibliography.  However, the UCF computer network is erratic beyond belief (upgrade your servers, you cheapskates!), so I took a break from MLA International Bibliography to look through my actual books, specifically Rita Felski’s Literature after Feminism.  I intended to only skim through the introduction, to determine whether or not it applied to my project, but she sucked me in and I read the whole thing (22 pages).  And now I am begging you, pleading with you, no, make that commanding you to read it as well.  It’s that good.  It’s amazing.  It’s kick-ass. 

Don’t believe me?  Here’s the first paragraph.

I have been reading a lot about myself lately, and most of what I read is not very flattering.  Although I’m a lapsed Catholic, I’ve seen myself described as a “remorseless Puritan” or even, in one gloriously overwrought phrase, as a “destroying angel.”  When I’m not ushering in the apocalypse, I am being cast as a hatchet-faced harridan and paid-up member of the thought police.  I am told that I indoctrinate my students, ruthlessly crush any expression of dissent, and execrate anything written by a dead white male.  Neither my motives nor my personality have anything to recommend them; I am bitter, hostile, resentful, and, it appears, utterly irrational. (1)

Luckily for you, my commanded reader, a preview of Literature after Feminism is available via GoogleBooks, which I’m embedding below.  You’ve run out of excuses thanks to technology, muahaha.   

PS – The introduction goes on to explain Felski’s purpose: “By interweaving theory and literary example I hope to show how feminism has influenced our view of literary works and how those works, in turn, speak back to feminism” (21).  The book is organized “around four key aspects of literary study: readers, authors, plots, and the question of aesthetic value” (20).

Works Cited:
Felski, Rita.  Literature after Feminism.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.  Print.  

Oh. Em. Gee.

I watched the season premier of Glee tonight, and every time Sue Sylvester came on screen, all I could think about was Madam Knight and spew.  Sue Sylvester = Madam Knight!  Think about it.  Sue has a journal (scroll down for a transcription), Knight has a journal (full journal here).  Sue is completely outrageous in her opinions of minorities, gays, non-jocks, ugly people, etc. just like Knight nonchalantly degrades and dehumanizes African Americans, Native Americans, and any one lower in class than herself.  They both have a biting and vicious sense of humor and are quite theatrical.  Unlike Knight, Sue has the opportunity for public publication of her thoughts – Sue’s Corner, her short appearances on the local TV station.  They both spew their thoughts, unfiltered, and see nothing wrong with their thoughts and actions.

“Sloppy freak-show babies!” – Sue Sylvester

Fox has compiled three videos of Sue vs. Shue on the Glee website, which features clips of them trading insults.  Go here to watch them.


Here’s a fan made compilation of Sue’s “zingers” from YouTube.

And you can see for yourself all the horrible and spewing related things Sue says on Glee at TV Fanatic.


Some gems include:

• The two of you are making a mistake, the likes of which have not been seen since the Mexicans sold Manhattan to George Washington for an upskirt photo of Betsy Ross.

• Even if your team has dropped their sequin-covered panties and urinated all over the stage like an elderly Carol Channing, they literally could not have done worse.

• Will: Inside, you're a really good person. I appreciate what you're doing for these kids. I won't forget it.  Sue: I'm seriously gonna puke in your mouth.

• Your hair looks like a briar patch. I keep expecting racist, animated Disney characters to pop up and start singing about living on the bayou.

• And that gay terrorist went on to become the first gay president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.

• I will no longer be carrying around photo ID. Know why? People should know who I am.

• I'm engorged with venom, and triumph.

• All I want is just one day a year when I'm not visually assaulted by uglies and fatties.

• I'm about to projectile express myself all over your Hush Puppies.

• [Ramps] are what I call lazy-makers. They discourage able-bodied students from getting proper exercise by using the stairs.

• Sue: Iron tablet? It keeps your strength up when you menstruate.  Will: I don't menstruate.  Sue: Neither do I.

And so on, and so forth – I think you get the point.  So, what do you think?  Am I totally off my rocker or do Madam Knight and Sue Sylvester have a lot in common?  And if you haven’t watched Glee yet, you’re missing out.