I feel like these titles speak for themselves, but–honestly–if you are at MLA: this panel is going to be the talk of the town. {For more info, and clickable links, go to mediageist.com}
Read more →In 2002, Charles Rzepka published a paper that brings critical attention to the footnote usually attached to John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”: Keats’s mentor Charles Cowden Clarke introduced him to Homer in the robust translation of the Elizabethan poet George Chapman. They read through the night, and Keats walked home at...
Read more →I forgot about September like good food forgets about butter. Oh, it was there. Wouldn’t have been good otherwise. I just didn’t notice how delightful it was until it’s gone. Now I’m craving late summer warmth and autumnal beginning-of-the-school-year hopefulness and its over, carried away by Rocky Mountain snowcaps and rapidly diminishing morning sunlight....
Read more →I’m on the train, heading in the direction of Germany, with Lake Neuchâtel slipping by in gray-blue early morning light. The experience of “Romantic Prospects” has been saturated by landscape. From the window of our student housing accommodation each morning the Swiss Alps marched sharply around the lake, appearing to advance and retreat with...
Read more →In the last five months I’ve been to Switzerland at least ten times, maybe more. The Swiss border lies so close to Konstanz that it’s possible to buy an ice cream in Germany and enjoy eating it on a Swiss part of the lakeshore. This proximity leads to an interesting relationship between the Germans...
Read more →The first day of language class our instructor asked us to say, in German, one positive and one negative thing about ourselves. There were about ten people in the class, and we went around in a circle answering the question. I was nervous. When it got to be my turn, I said, as a...
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It’s May! And that means that a lot of us academics are taking a deep, post-end-of-term-marking breath, and treating ourselves to the smallest of little vacations… a mini-vaycay, a staycation, an excursion, or what I have recently learned Germans call an Ausflug. In keeping with the theme of respite, here is a little light...
Read more →James Harriet calls cats the “connoisseurs of comfort,” which is perhaps why so many academics are cat-lovers. Like having Of Grammatology on your nightstand, having a cat close at hand reminds you what it would be like to move through the world expressing yourself utterly as you see fit. There is an inverse relationship...
Read more →“Is it okay?” asks the German waitress who’s just served me sparkling water (1.70 €) instead of tap water. Of course it’s okay! By all means, take my change in Euros while I negotiate my personal existential crisis with regards to the gold standard of higher education. What am I doing here? Cloistered in...
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