Two nice moments on the scholarly front today.
When I got back from my afternoon class I found a lovely note in my email inbox, written by another academic working on Trollope and who had come across the Trollope's Apollo website as well as some of my other Trollope-related work.
I prepared for tomorrow's Latin class today before dinner, as I was waiting for a meeting of Chris' to finish. That meant that I had time this evening to read an article for my research, and I chose an essay about the dynamics of gift exchange in Emily Dickinson's correspondence. The article was well done, I thought, and it felt plain good to learn and think about something new.
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5 comments:
... I like Emily D... and to be honest I can't imagine what "the dynamics of gift exchange in Emily's correspondence" refers to... is there any link on the net to this...?
Hi, directed here by your postcrossing profile! My card to you will be posted tomorrow. My good thing happened for today is finding someone who posts something positive every day :D
Blessings,
Spright
Thanks so much, Spright--and I'll look forward to receiving your postcard!
Hi, Meri--The essay I read (by Paul Crumbley) talked about 19th century letter-writing as a kind of alternative cultural activity, something alongside other social or economic systems. Crumbley suggests that Dickinson used her correspondence (in which she would often include her poems along with notes) as a way of circulating her poems counter to traditional publication. Sending poems via correspondence was a kind of gift exchange, and Crumbley discusses how other poets who received her poems didn't always see that Dickinson wasn't sending them as a stepping-stone to publication; she was sending them instead of publishing them in usual ways. I like Emily Dickinson's poetry very much, but I'm finding it challenging to work on it in a scholarly way--I have a research paper due in March that uses Dickinson & she kind of confounds a straightforward approach!
Thank you so much for this!
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