A Lady's Adventures in Academia, and Other Tales
My readings for this weekend and the upcoming week.
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Happy reading!
Christmas time is almost here! I have browsed Etsy’s delightful Christmas offerings and put together a list (kind of like Santa) of things to look at to get in the holiday spirit! This is an extra long Just for Fun post, but the holidays are extra fun so they deserve this long first post of many to come. Here are the (Christmas-y) things that make me happy today:
- I love this Santa Hat crow sculpture since it reminds of something of out The Nightmare Before Christmas (indigotwin)
- Adorable animal cards to send to your loved ones (piggytailsstationary)
- Need some extra Christmas spirit when you’re entertaining this holiday season? Try putting this awesome candy cane soap in the guest bathroom. (InseineCreations)
- This snowman made out of a gourd reminds me of the adorable knick-knacks my mom always liked to festoon the mantle with around this time of year. Those cherubic cheeks and puckered lips take me back. (PoppyGoRound)
- Big hair bows may no longer be fashionably tolerated since I’m no longer in elementary school, but I’ll be darned if this rocking candy cane bow wouldn’t get me some (charitably?) festive compliments. Perhaps the making of a smaller DIY version is in order. (BOWquet)
- I love this idea for personalized holiday stickers not necessarily as a cop-out for handwritten notes but for labeling those difficult-to-decorate goodie bags that I will be handing out at the office this year. (StickerDoodles)
- And finally, winning the award for longest item title ever, is this awesome, vintage-inspired Christmas apron. I think wearing something like this would help me get to the domestic baking nirvana that I try to achieve each Christmas. Or at least I would look like I was channeling Mrs. Claus. (loverdoversclothing)
For my medieval lit proseminar (about how passion is represented, valued, suppressed, repressed, and transgressed in medieval literature) I am planning for my final paper to cover subjectivity in female mystic autobiographical accounts. This project stems partly from my interest in autobiography in general and Isabel Davis’ “Expressing the Middle English I” specifically.
For my project I will be looking at Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich as representative of two female twigs stemming from the same autobiographical branch. In her Literature Compass article, Davis looks at (among other things) spiritual and allegorical autobiographies (as she labels them) in order to understand how Middle English authors “revised the influential accounts of subjectivity that they inherited from late antique writers like Boethius and St Augustine” (Davis 842). She includes both Julian and Margery in her accounts of medieval autobiographies, but she invests far more space and analysis on Julian than on Margery. Davis uses Margery more as an example of how medieval autobiographers do not always fit “modern” conventions of autobiography.
I am interested in this idea of the modern versus medieval autobiography, and more specifically how issues of authorship, authority, and audience are complicated by “mediated” texts such as Margery’s. While this issue seems a far cry from my interest in contemporary autobiographical graphic novels, I think the idea of pushing against a “tradition” and its conventions spans the centuries to tie medieval texts (that Davis rightly acknowledges as complicating autobiographical tradition) to issues of identity and subjectivity that are relevant to reading the numerous graphic autobiographical works that have emerged in the past three decades.
Things that make me happy today:
- How To Use An Apostrophe (The Oatmeal)
- This way addicting tone laboratory from André Michelle produces such pleasant and cheerful music that you can’t help but smile when you’re playing around with it.
-What are your eyes giving away? (LifeSnips). This makes me feel more like I could join Dr. Lightman’s crew on Lie to Me, and the article even talks about the Gaze! (Though perhaps not quite in Lacanian terms)
Today is my boo’s birthday, so I woke him up with lots of cards and confetti and a present. Here are pictures of his bounty.
Since Modern Warfare 2 is not out yet, I preordered it for him and gave him a cheesy and fun jewelry box with a mock-up of the logo. Happy birthday!
My medieval lit proseminar is about to get neck-deep in Chaucer. Fun!
Work:
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Happy reading!
Things that make me happy today:
- These fabulously romantic customized fingerprint wedding bands from fabuluster (Etsy)
- Dezign with a Z’s beautiful floral wall decals would have made college room decorating far more fun!
This evening I will be attending (along with some of my fellow grad scholars) a lecture given by Gábor Klaniczay. The lecture is entitled “Bodily Effects of Visions? The Medieval Evidence.”
We were instructed by the chair of the Medieval Studies Program to read three pieces in preparation for this lecture and dinner with Professor Klaniczay: “Dream Healing and Visions in Medieval Latin Miracle Accounts,” “On the Stigmatization of Saint Margaret of Hungary,” and “Saintly Princesses and their ‘heavenly courts,’” a chapter from Klaniczay’s book Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe.
Hopefully this lecture will give the vital context needed for better understanding the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (see post from 10/30). Klaniczay’s historical perspective opens a greater understanding of the role of the feminine in medieval ecclesiastical movements and the peculiar trends of canonization that women experienced during the high medieval period.
Enough with the wall of text. Here are some fun pictures of the saints whose lives we will be discussing tonight.
Professor Klaniczay’s university profile can be found here.
Here (in a nutshell) are some of the things that make me happy today.
- As someone who has recently come into the world of Twitter, I try and find fun new faces/entities to follow. This week I added Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself), who takes his twittering very seriously.
- This Christmas card by gemmabear (Etsy)
- WebSoup (cousin to E’s The Soup) host Chris Hardwick’s blog, The Nerdist.
- Kiplinger’s list of simple, timeless toys
Have a fabulous time with the pumpkin carving and costuming festivities. I have partaken in the former and will be partaking in the latter this evening with some fellow grad students.
Here are photos of my happy pumpkin and my not-so-happy pug.
For those of you history buffs, here’s a brief article on the origins of the modern jack-o’-lantern.
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