What a difference a year makes--that's the phrase, right? I guess it does make a difference: last year at this time, I was a few hours away from my orals exam, about to spend a night where I thought my anxiety was going to kill me--just crush crush crush my heart. I wasn't consciously nervous; I was deeply calm, but in the way that I get deeply ( Read more... )

short and sweet: I passed my big exam.
traumatic? a little.
finished? totally.

H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
-The War of the Worlds (1898)
Karel Capek, War with the Newts (1936)
( time and space at the end of the world )

Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605/1615)
Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-66)
Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Austen, Northanger Abbey (1816)
Scott, Waverley (1829)
Dickens, Great Expectations (1860-1)
Zamiatan, We (1924)
Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939)
( from failed knight to failed knight )

-Watt, Rise of the Novel (1957 ( Read more... )

Pierre (1852)
"Bartleby" (1853)
"The Happy Failure" (1854)
"The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" (1855)
"The Bell-Tower" (1855)
"Benito Cereno" (1855)
"Billy Budd" (n/a)
The Confidence-Man (1857)
( ready to be annihilated )

Samuel R. Delaney, "About 5,750 Words" (1968/1971 ( Read more... )

Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)
( you're no-body till some-body pays money to love you )

Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (1992)
Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (2004)
( feeling machines )

Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Ladies (1982)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983/1991)
Philip Fisher, Hard Facts (1985)
Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (1988)
Shelly Streeby, American Sensations (2002)
Susan Gillman, Blood Talk (2003)
( from sentiment to sensation )