As this starts the downhill side of the list it is only appropriate for things to get weird. Since many of these literary, print, American culture books are from interlibrary loans, the reading order is currently being structured by when the books are due back to their respected libraries. The other somewhat bizarre occurrence is that the books are starting to all say the same thing. I would like to think this is due to some achievement of enlightenment on my part and not simply due to the fact that the only people publishing on this topic are the ones on this list. That being said it is getting harder to figure out how these books fit together in the sense that many of them use the same early secondary source and then interpret it slightly differently. I want to keep up the series here until I am finished with the readings and then I can go back and study through here and my notes, but I can see the usefulness starting to drop off at this point. Maybe it is just a lull, maybe not. Either way, I am keeping on keeping on.
Welcome back to the “teach yourself literary criticism in 12 easy steps” portion of this endeavor. This will actually (likely) be s shorter than average post as almost half of the readings subdivided here were companions or intros to Poe or Twain. The differences in which are interesting themselves and something I will come back to at the end.
This literary and print culture is one of the longer subsections and for means of brevity, sanity, and any semblance of understanding I have cut it close to half (8/7) in order to try and make sense of it.
This is an area of study I had no idea existed, wanted to pursue, and was then told there would be no jobs all in about 3 months time. Of course, the job field isn’t exactly a tyranny of choice these days for anything else either.
I have finally finished the first section of the comps list. This marks the end of the first “question” in theory if not practice. Most of my work crosses the subdivision created to make the list make more sense. Before I start to work on the rest (I am almost finished with the background section on the American Studies portion at the moment) I wanted to share some of the things I have learned about this type of work and how I manage to stay sane throughout the attempts to synthesize everything in print.
The final section of the first portion of comps prep has the longest title, and the longest entry. These books are mainly a cross section of methodologies used in framing historical accounts of Natural History in America. The best part about looking at these different approaches is that the content was generally useful as well. They also criss cross the same time periods, geographies and often the same people.
One if by land, two if by sea! This section looks at fieldwork in guise of expeditionary forces from Captain Cook to American Army explorers in the American West. Exploration and fieldwork have been the two longest lasting interests since I started working with history professionally. To see how some of these books fit together was more useful than anything that they may have actually argued.
As I continue to look at the professionalization of disciplines in the later 19th century I believe I am beginning to see the historic thread that connects these things starting to match the thread of my personal interests in their modern incarnations. The greatest thing about these readings (and the few before in the last post) is that I have been part of their modern machinations. Aside from working in the Vertebrate Paleo lab (such as it is) at Lamar for most of my undergrad, I spend a summer field season in Belize with the University of Texas following the Maya. Not only did it help me see I was more interested in the history of archaeology as a direction of inquiry (I still follow the latest Central–and some southern-American discoveries) than actually making a career working with those personalities, it has provided me with an already primed canvas to start smearing my own theories onto.
Midweek post, but I think I have a schedule and routine that will facilitate more efficient information acquisition and postings. This is a subset under the 19th century natural history block, the next few are particular to that as well. It will be a big deal when I get to the next “question” area of study.
In the pop culture multiverse, Darwin had another Bulldog. If you make it to the end you can watch the entire episode of X-men The Animated Series.
That is the subheading for this seemingly insurmountable portion of the foothills of the mountain that is comps prep. Nothing about this is going to happen in even a remotely timely manner. In fact, you never know just how many things can happen to get in the way of actually finishing a book. This can range from the mundane–neighbor’s son’s dogs jumping the fence and wanting to hang out in our yard–to the earth shaking–literally a 5.6 earthquake at 7 a.m. so you can spend the morning looking for cracks in your drywall and mortar.
