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

Recently read: The Oresteia by Aeschylus.

It’s funny that we are reading this in my summer course on tragedy with Dr. Evarts. I discussed Agamemnon in my presentation on intertextual referencing in Mrs. Dalloway last semester.

Aeschylus is one of my favorite Greek writers. The Oresteia is a powerful trilogy that still feels extremely relevant to today’s world. My classmates were very interested in the role Cassandra plays, but I found Athena’s role, and explanation, for breaking the hung jury to be more intriguing.

I forgot to mention in my presentation on Woolf, and this might be a coincidence, but both Aeschylus and Woolf use foreshadowing to offer a lot of “spoiler alerts!” in their work. Seriously, I argued with a friend a few months back that Woolf gives away the ending of Mrs. Dalloway in the second paragraph. Pretty cool nonetheless. Anyhow, the red tapestries and other devices in Agamemnon also foreshadow the ending.

Also: Robert Fagles’ translation is lovely and quite poetic. Whatever the one the class was using, I can’t remember at the moment, was a lot more…let’s say, bland. Fagles, as always, offers a superior translation.

Recently read: The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf.

This is an excellent collection, one of numerous collections, of Woolf’s essays. We have read a few from this collection in class this semester, but what prompted me to buy a copy was On Not Knowing Greek, which she was writing at the same time she was writing Mrs. Dalloway. This became the focus of my oral presentation for this semester, which I will have notes from online soon.

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 London Scene: Six Essays On London Life by Virginia Woolf.

Wednesday afternoon we are discussing Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas in class. She is one of my favorite writers, especially of the otherwise rather uninteresting Modernist period, and recently her name keeps coming up in conversations I have with friends about a variety of literary aspects. Sadly the excerpt, from the anthology we are using, is very brief but this is my favorite part of it:

When all these comparisons have been faithfully made by the use of reason, the outsider will find herself in possession of very good reasons for her indifference. She will find that she has no good reason to ask her brother to fight on her behalf to protect “our country.” “Our country,” she will say, throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. “Our country” still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. “Our country” denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that Air Raid precautions are written on the wall. Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our country,” let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself or my country. For, the outsider will say, in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

Recently read: Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

• Ready Steady Book interviews the always interesting Melinda Gebbie.

• The New York Times reviews the new biography of Leonard Woolf.

• Laurie Halse Anderson, author of the excellent young adult book Speak, has her own blog.

• National Public Radio discusses “wikinomics.”

• Simon Armitage discusses his new translation of Sir Gawain & The Green Knight over at The Guardian.

The poem is also a ghost story, a thriller, a romance, an adventure story and a morality tale. For want of a better word, it is also a myth, and like all great myths of the past its meanings seem to have adapted and evolved, proving itself eerily relevant 600 years later. As one example, certain aspects of Gawain’s situation seem oddly redolent of a more contemporary predicament, namely our complex and delicate relationship with the natural world. The Gawain poet had never heard of climate change and was not a prophet anticipating the onset of global warming. But medieval society lived hand in hand with nature, and nature was as much an enemy as a friend. It is not just for decoration that the poem includes passages relating to the turning of the seasons, or detailed accounts of the landscape, or graphic descriptions of our dealings with the animal kingdom. The knight who throws down the challenge at Camelot is both ghostly and real. Supernatural, yes, but also flesh and blood. He is something in the likeness of ourselves, and he is not purple or orange or blue with yellow stripes. Gawain must negotiate a deal with a man who wears the colours of the leaves and the fields. He must strike an honest bargain with this manifestation of nature, and his future depends on it.