1. The only problem with visiting truepenny and mirrorthaw is that my book collection begins to seem profoundly inadequate.

2. The flip side of #1 is that going bookstore trolling with truepenny usually makes me feel extremely virtuous, since no matter how many books I buy, she nearly always buys more3. Related to #2, I have purchased books at four indie bookstores in the ( Read more... )

Almost exactly three years ago, I posted a list of the books I'd choose from if I were teaching a class on the 18th c. British novel ( Read more... )

Every now and then I have thoughts about things. Sometimes I post them. This is one of those times.

While I'm on the subject of thoughts: azdak has written an interesting post about morality in the Buffyverse. faith_delivers, check it out! (And join mutant_allies! *g*)

Credits and disclaimers: This post is a version of the Buffy paper I gave recently. It is thus considerably ( Read more... )

I just spent half an hour attempting to write up the implications of the rhetorical differences between serial homodiegesis and embedded autodiegesis-terms that I came up with earlier this morning and which I genuinely hope will provide a useful shorthand for some of the concepts I'm trying to deal with, but which also make me think of "For god's ( Read more... )

As requested by melymbrosia and way2busymom, the bibliography-in-progress about what, in the previous post, I referred to as "rhetorical theories of history." "History as rhetoric" or "the linguistic construction of history" might be better descriptions. Anyway ( Read more... )

As requested by brisingamenThe guiding principle I'm currently interested in for this class is the idea of the 18th c. as a sort of genre soup. All sorts of disparate genre elements (prose romances, the epistolary tradition, epic, crime journalism, satire, political and historical drama and narratives, travel narrative, picaresque, memoir, spiritual ( Read more... )

This morning I re-read great wodges of Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel with an eye to bracing part of my own arguments about recent developments in the genre's history against his account of its origins ( Read more... )

Last week I sent a thank-you note -- or, if you will, a geek mash note -- to the guy who wrote Narrative as Rhetoric, the book that jump-started my dissertation breakthrough a couple of weeks ago. Today I got a delightful long e-mail in return, in which he said, among other things, that my dissertation sounds fascinating. Excuse me while I ( Read more... )