MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

It seems like just yesterday that I was at Stanford’s Building 460, reading with n+1 magazine; but already the time has come for me to make another appearance in this fine edifice. On January 23 at 5pm in Building 460, Room 429, I will be a respondent for Luba Golburt’s presentation on Pushkin and the historical romance, sponsored by the Working Group on the Novel.

The idea of the Working Group is that everyone reads a paper and a designated novel in advance; then, at the appointed time and place, they all confront the author of the paper, who sits at a long table with a respondent (me), who “kicks things off” with some hard-hitting questions that cut through the rhetoric and get to what really matters to you and me. Dinner will be provided. Think you can handle it? Here are the readings: Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter; and Luba Golburt’s “Seeing History: The Russian Historical Novel between Sir Walter Scott and Les Jeunes-France.”

You don’t actually need a very firm idea of who the Jeunes-France were, in order to appreciate Luba’s paper; nonetheless, I share with you the definition from the Tresor de la Langue Française Informatisé:

A group of eccentric young writers and artists, wearing long hair, forked beards, velvet doublets, and soft fedoras, who, from 1830 on, exaggerated the theories of the Romantic school, drawing notice with their behavior and with their literary and artistic opinions, which tended to alarm the “bourgeoisie”… The most flattering thing for a Jeune-France at that time was to persuade his parents to let him wear a sky-blue habit and the yellow breeches of a young Werther (SAINTE-BEUVE, Literary Portraits).

Alphonse Daudet	Young Werther

Members included Alphonse Daudet (above), who was possibly wearing yellow breeches when that picture was taken… unless the yellow breeches were part of a different look from the forked beard and floppy hat…? I’ll be asking Prof. Golburt when we’re playing “hardball” next Wednesday. (more…)

Inscrutable youth, with their enormous sweatshirts and tiny telephones: what are their hopes, their dreams, their intellectual interests? It is in my nature to sit around making big generalizations about things, so that is what I was asking myself as I paged through the thesis proposals of my potential future students (see previous post).  Here are my findings.

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Happy new year, dear readers, whoever you may be! Whatever you seek from 2008—be it

tumultuous recollections,
relief from labors,
live pictures or bons mots
or faults of grammar—

may you find, in this blog, at least a few crumbs!

Some of you may recall that I spent the past seven years getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Well, in 2008 I will be putting this degree to use as a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford, where I’m going to teach an “academic writing workshop” for seniors who are writing interdisciplinary honors theses in the humanities. I am very excited at this opportunity to convert my own recent dissertation-writing experiences into beautiful pedagogic theories. “Do as I say, not as I did,” I will tell my students, whom I will be instructing in the use of EndNote.

Do I myself use EndNote? This is a technical question. Many scholars don’t; I remember one professor who renounced it on the grounds that he didn’t want any superstructure mediating his relationship with the text. For me, it was always more about how EndNote costs $250. But now I have scored a free copy from the Interdisciplinary Humanities program (w00t!), so you know, bring it on. (more…)