A friend of mine is in the process of digitizing her own journals. Because she has written in a journal so regularly for about a decade or more, this is also a significant feat. However, having her journals digitized will serve as insurance for the physical journals, in case anything ever happens to them. Additionally,…

I got to around the part of Mark Sample’s article “Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities,” in which he states, “Reading backwards revitalizes a text, revealing its constructedness, its seams, edges, and working parts,” and then I scrolled to the bottom of the article and started to read it backwards. Obviously this is not what Strange…

When I read through Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, I did not find it particularly inspiring. I had just been reading Tennyson beforehand, and Duffy’s language seemed less rich, more cynical–something did not approach the older classics. While I still do really prefer Tennyson, discussing Duffy’s poetry in class helped me appreciate her own…

In winter semester, I took ENGL 366, Studies in Poetry. We focused mainly on the postmodern era. At the end of the semester, I wrote a paper on Adrienne Rich, analyzing the use of environmental feminism, mostly from her book of poetry Diving into the Wreck.  Likely prompted by the experience of reading Adrienne Rich with…

When Moretti mentioned in the introduction to “Notes on Abstract Models for Literary History–1,” that he would work on “a shift from the close reading of individual texts to the construction of abstract models,” I thought of an experience I had last semester. I attended a lecture by a visiting professor from Harvard. One of the…

The MBTI, or Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator, is a personality type system that categorizes the way that many people process information. The sixteen types, or categories, are formed from four sets of letters, E/I, N/S, F/T, and P/J. Because the MBTI is pretty mainstream, information about the types and test can be found readily online. While …