“The more strange it was to read in a previously-mentioned article by Huxley the following paraphrase of a well-known sentence of Rousseau: ‘The first man…
I’ve just commented, with some befuddlement, on two classes of short papers on the Prioress’s Tale. I had introduced the Tale with, yes, a Trigger…
What Geraldine Barnes called the “nineteenth-century ‘theatre’ of Vinland” began in the 1830s with the publication of Carl Christian Rafn’s Antiquitates Americanae and reached its apogee in the 1890s as a kind of counter-programming to the celebration of Columbus’s landing. The mania offered its adherents two things, a white heritage and a specifically medieval, embattled white heritage, while also, as I’ll conclude, obligating them to protect their whiteness, making them prisoners of their own concocted identity.
Cross-posted on In The Middle. Go there to leave comments, if you want. Maybe you saw an article recently about renewed attempts to change the unpleasant name…
Back in America! If you read Minima Moralia before watching Captain America Winter Soldier Word Word on the flight, an essay drafts itself — Karl…
Cross-posted to ITM. I’m in Iceland for the New Chaucer Society Conference. Today’s papers concluded with a whale watch, expressly framed by the excursion group as…
I’m going to Iceland next week and staying there until the end of the month. To prepare, I read 38 sagas, histories, and assorted tales,…
Here’s the frontispiece (if that’s the word) to one of Wynken de Worde’s printings of Lydgate’s Horse Goose and Sheep. You’ll note that it doesn’t…
First we thought about Azra Raza’s outcry against “Mouse Models” on The Edge, and Jeremy England’s Thermodynamic account of the origins of life. The first story complicates…
by KARL STEEL Over the past few months, as a kind of preparation for NCS Iceland, and also just for fun, I’ve read, in translation,…
