I haven’t done one of these round-up posts for a while, but it seems as if some interesting new blogs have been coming online (along with others I’ve followed for awhile), and I wanted to call your attention to them. Here are some links:
- The 18th-century Common has had some good posts lately. Jonathan Lamb has posted an essay about Hogarth’s blush and Maori tattoos; and Margaret Koehler discusses her new book, The Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century, in the Common’s ongoing collection about Cognitive Science and 18th century studies.
- The Early American History blog The Junto has a very useful omnibus posting called “This week in American History.” This week’s post contains a link to the soon-to-be-indispensable UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership database, along with a great post (at the worthy journal of narrative and experimental history, The Appendix) about colonial-era drunkenness.
- At Persistent Enlightenment, James Schmidt asks “What, if anything, does Dialectic of Enlightenment have to do with the Enlightenment?“
- Ted Underwood makes a case for the use of DH methods to help us revisit and refine our categories and macro-narratives of literary history, using the (admittedly incomplete but still voluminous) digital archives now available to us. Takeaway line: “The blurriness of literary categories is exactly why it’s helpful to use computers for distant reading.”
These are just a few of the posts I’ve been reading and thinking about this week. If you’ve got your own thoughts about them, or more suggestions for this week’s round-up, please hit “comment.”
DM
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Another in the long line of interesting and generous posts from you, Dave–thanks. Esp glad to be referred to the Junto post referenced here, where I was glad to see attention lingering on “Django” and the reciting of Rivka Maizlish’s great piece “The World Tarantino Made” for the U.S. Intellectual History blog. Her critique of the movie’s reliance on the old notion of anti-intellectual Southerner and culture-less Americans has implications also, I think, for the erasure of Northern slavery that seems to be furthered whenever the wrongs of slavery are defined by violence, and by violence of these kinds. Speaking of which, did anyone hear Jennifer Morgan’s talk a few weeks ago on slave law and women in slavery (at Mass Hist Soc)?
The Maizlish piece on Tarantino is indeed terrific, and I think that its invocation of previous writers like Cooper and Dumas indicates how Tarantino managed, in his usual incoherent way, to summon up very old and important debates about the place of violence and culture in American identity.