January 23, 2021

Something I thought about:

• Change of place and perspective – specifically what it's like to orient oneself in a new place and the fundamental shifts that are required – like learning to navigate Lausanne using the lake and the mountains as reference points, or the Citgo sign or the Pru in Boston.

Something I did:

• Part of my travel grant was supposed to go to a trip to the US for special collections research, and the funding agency let me redirect some of the grant towards manuscript duplication fees instead, so I requested some more manuscript duplicates from Vassar’s Special Collections. The librarian there, Dean Rogers, is amazing. I have a ton of material to work through now and am already trying to figure out how to rework a thesis chapter to incorporate this new material.

Something I read:

• Craft Capsule: Rethinking Theory and Poetics by Khadijah Queen on "feeling-centered" literary analysis and developing a new critical framework that's inclusive and enjoyable.

The literary criticism class I took was aggressively white, misogynist, and dead. The language of analysis favored rather violent words like argue, interrogate, force, demand, impose, rupture. The more I read, the less I understood why literary analysis had to be so painful. I loved literature! Why couldn’t I love analysis as well?