January 2025
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I'm a lifelong fan of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I love all the shipboard stuff, the adventure, the exoticism, Crusoe's self-reliance, his psychological complexity, his religious ponderings, and especially the recapitulation of nascent capitalism on the island. I'm as entranced as ever by the attempt to domesticate goats, by his attempt to build a boat, by…
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I'm still trying to come to terms with Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary. I've wrestled the title to a draw, and now I'm going to take a crack at the Introduction. Is this task a good use of my limited time? Let me quote a sentence that I take to be the very heart…
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I am absolutely buffaloed by Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary (Cornell UP, 2023). The title is a puzzle. Why does the adjective come after the noun? And what does the word "counterhuman" mean? (One hundred and forty-six pages to go and I'm already off balance. I'm worried that if I can't understand the title I'm…
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Nowadays, the ordinary meaning of the noun "poop" is feces. Perhaps because "poop" is a nursery word, it is apparently less offensive than "crap" or "shit." And yet less infantile than kaka or doodoo. But "poop" did not refer to the work of the lavatory until about 1720. Nor do I remember it being in…
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To begin my project of getting a fix on Cornell's Department of Literatures in English, I attempted to read Professor Jeremy Braddock's Collecting as Modernist Practice (Johns Hopkins, 2012). My plan is to read these Cornell contributions to knowledge with as much empathy and as little prejudice as I can muster. Despite my good will,…