This week in oyster thinking, a chunk of a chapter for Book2. In Descartes, Plato, Boethius, Ficino, in the whole of this tradition, the oyster…
Sae mec feede, sundhelm þeahte, Ond mec yþa wrugon eorþan getenge, feþelease; oft ic flode ongean muð ontynde. [1] [ The sea fed me; the…
For MLA 2017 session: #208. Ecological Catastrophe: Past and Present: Friday, 6 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., 411-412. Seasonality is that quality of being at the right…
The tale of the mouse and the frog appears in all the major medieval British Fable collections: Marie de France (37-39), Berechiah ha-Nakdan (9-11), Walter…
The King of Tars is story about proof. So is Guy de Cambrai’s Barlaam and Josephat. And likewise an account of a divining ape at the early 17th-century…
Today, my “Problems in Posthumanism” graduate seminar worked on Alexander and Dindimus, Montaigne on Cannibals, Petrarch on the Canary Islands (well, we at least read it),…
Every literature academic has an origin story, the book or poem that captured them & ruined them for other study. Mine’s ‘The Hollow Men.’ I…
Nearly two years ago, I announced: For several years I’ve wanted to write an essay on the way that ‘mute beasts’ communicate through gesture in…
“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…
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.
