Ive Come to Speak With You Again

My research and writing time, always also hard to come up past, have taken me in various directions, simply Tinsel is patiently waiting for me to do more than update the CV and instead to brainstorm using it again as a record of my work, plans, inquiries. Then here I am.

A piece long in the pipeline, "Gender Identity and Promiscuous Identification: Reading (in) Rebecca W'due south The Return of the Soldier," has recently been published in The Journal of Modern Literature xl.3 (in the company of a "Woolf cluster!" Oh lucky day!). The paper has been described in this way:

Jenny Baldry, the narrator of Rebecca West's First World State of war novel _The Return of the Soldier_, has traditionally been discussed every bit a discrete observer or unreliable raconteur of the narrative's wartime love triangle. But she may be productively understood not only every bit one who tells the story, but as i who reads and interprets information technology. Positioned as reader, Jenny breaches appropriate boundaries between herself and the "characters" or primary participants in the events, exhibiting a radical empathy that Susan David Bernstein calls "promiscuous identification." In doing so, she destabilizes non only her family and course loyalties but her very cocky. Jenny absorbs and appropriates others' passions, and, fifty-fifty more strikingly, unsettles her gender identity through zealous identification with her male cousin Chris, even attempting to psychically access the masculine battlefield. Jenny's desire, class allegiance, and gender identity, all complicated by her reading practise, challenge the novel's stated moral and its seemingly inevitable conclusion.*

Additionally, the book From Page to Identify: American Literary Tourism and the Afterlives of Authors (U Mass P, 2017, eds. Hilary Iris Lowe and Jennifer Harris) has recently come up out and includes my chapter, "'Afoot with my Vision': Whitmania and Tourism in the Digital Historic period," a piece that is meaningful to me in many ways, but not least because it grew out of a fantastic teaching feel, funded by the NEH equally the multi-university projection Looking for Whitman. The chapter is described in this way:

This essay draws upon my feel as a teacher of a digitally-inflected seminar on the American poet Walt Whitman in examining how our practices and experiences every bit literary tourists are affected by the promises of accessibility and immediacy on the internet. The essay raises questions about what "seeing things" really means, questions that are entwined for me with Whitman'due south own exhortations: "You shall no longer take things at second or third mitt, [. . .] nor feed on the spectres of books," he tells u.s., "You lot shall not look through my optics either." What is the difference betwixt our eyes and the lens of the digitizing scanner or photographer? How do we "recall" something we run into in person when the digital images of information technology that are bachelor are all of higher quality only framed past someone else? When nosotros bout online, are we taking things at second or third-manus? Or, instead, are we fooling ourselves that we are really, truly seeing through an author'south eyes and not just our own when we stand up in the author'due south prior concrete spaces?**

My slow work on the poetess/periodicals and my somewhat-also-immersive piece of work on literature of the Not bad War (and all things GW) have also inspired conference papers on H.D. and Charlotte Mew, at the unspeakably crawly conference H.D. and Feminist Poetics in Bethlehem PA, and on Mary Borden (new simply relatively intense person of involvement, sure to reappear) in a seminar on the First World War at MSA in 2015.

Phew.

The poetess is again a trivial bit on hold every bit I am currently working on another commodity, the premise of which has been knocking effectually in my encephalon for awhile, which focuses on H.D's utilize of tropes and language of telegraphy and Morse code across several works.  An earlier paper at SAMLA began this process, including some exploration of the creative person-inventory Samuel Morse himself (an interesting but unpleasant swain tbh) and starting to sketch out some ideas I have well-nigh the effigy of the "active receiver" in H.D.'s aesthetic theory. So I've been reading a LOT about telegraphic history etc. and trying to grasp why a modernist writer, in an era literally defined by the rapid footstep of its technological inventions, repeatedly turns on multiple occasions to a non-obsolete-only-decidely-19th-century-and-problematically-connected-to-news-of-tragedy-in-WWI engineering.  Gentle reader, to be connected….

… .. –. -. .. -. –. / — ..-. ..-.

* mns obsessions here noted: fluid gender identity; promiscuous identification and emotional contamination aka Why I Have a Long Listing of Books I Can Barely Think About Let Lone Teach Because They Brand Me Too Emotional or Crazy; the Great War; madwomen; things the beautiful Rebecca West wears on her head peculiarly beaded headdresses and sooomething on the cover of Time that could be an alien confront  or a coded yonic symbol.

self-evident

the beaded headdress

** mns obsessions hither noted: the anile WW and his eyes; literary tourism and graveyards; my Whitmaniacs of 2009-ten; the haversack; the Civil War in Virginia; the word "hirsute" but not hirsutism.

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