Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

I was asked to speak at Ocean County College during their women’s history month celebration. I spoke last week to about 30 people on the role of gender and class privilege in 1930s England, which was a period I was heavily invested in during graduate school. There are numerous references to Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, F.R. Leavis, Storm Jameson, and Mulk Raj Anand, amongst others.

I will have a podcast of my lecture up as soon as I figure out how to transfer it to mp3 from my phone.

(almost done clearing out the graduate school queue)

For Dr. Bluemel’s seminar on Intermodernism, I wrote my seminar paper in an attempt to define some sort of “sex/gender” system for Intermodernism, beginning with her own full length George Orwell & The Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism In Literary London. To do this, of course, I relied heavily on Gayle Rubin from a theoretical standpoint. From a literary point of view, my focus was on Phyllis Bottome’s The Mortal Storm and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. (pdf)

• New York Times on Orwell’s diaries being blogged on WordPress.
• Christopher Sorrentino reviews John Barth’s new novel in Bookforum.
• A book of letters between Bernard Henri Levy and Michel Houellebecq will be published soon.
• An interesting “first person” piece in The Guardian about asexuality.
• Alice Ferrebe’s Digital Orientalism: Japan & Electronic Literature.

• Scott Esposito reviews Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention Of Morel over at Boldtype.

• The New Yorker profiled Harold Pinter last winter.

Meanwhile…

• Jacket Copy covers Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, which just had a new book come out recently. I didn’t even know this series existed until recently but a lot of people seem to think it will be the heir to the Harry Potter series. But, seriously, a seventeen year old girl moves to a new town and falls in love with a vampire? I think I have seen this before. Hmm…

• Delicious (minus the dots) 2.0 has finally launched in the past few days. Ever since Firefox added tagging to their bookmarks I haven’t had a lot of use for it anymore, but I will check it out.

• George Orwell’s diaries are going to be blogged starting this week.

• Pinter’s Nobel lecture from 2005 is pretty righteous.

One of the great highlights of this spring’s symposium at Monmouth was Kristin Bluemel’s keynote address. Toni and I, along with our adviser [Nothing to link to. Ahem. (Hey, it worked with Toni! Heh.)], decided to pick Dr. Bluemel for a number of reasons. I can safely say that one of the major highlights of my graduate school career has been the classes I have had with Dr. Bluemel. She has been a valued friend, mentor, and teacher.  Her course on Intermodernism was easily my favorite course at Monmouth.

That said, here are my bullet pointed notes for her keynote address Inventing Intermodernism. I know Toni also took notes, and a few others, so hopefully they will upload their own notes soon.

• Dr. Bluemel taught a class on Intermodernism in the fall of 2007
• Before coining the term, the existing categories and vocabulary were not good enough
• Modernism, postmodernism, “lost generation,” none of this was sufficient and was limiting and damaging
• Mulk Raj Anand, George Orwell, and Stevie Smith were the most interesting writers
• So if Dr. Bluemel wasn’t a modernist scholar, then what?
• Mostly interested in women writers
• Found Stevie Smith while studying for oral exams
• Stevie Smith has fictional portrayals of Anand and Orwell
• Intermodernism, the concept and category, helped to design a new map between modernism and postmodernism
• Dr. Bluemel next offers a case study of On The Side Of The Angels by Betty Miller
• Socially conformist
• Complex psychological effects of World War II
• Interdisciplinary: The practice of everyday life
• Place differs from space
• Place=Street Space=People on it
• Reading is a particular place
• Women novels can become space

For Dr. Bluemel’s Intermodernism course last semester, our second paper required students to examine the role of propaganda during the between war period in England. I chose to compare privileged, white, male writers F. R. Leavis and George Orwell to Virginia Woolf and Mulk Raj Anand. Overall, I like this paper a lot. My attempt at defining what I am calling the “Intermodernist Other” still needed work, but I had already gone over the page limit for this paper by two or three pages.  (PDF)

Recently read: The Road To Wigan Pier by George Orwell.