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Holly Gilbert edited the blog post What Women Wrote in the group Digital Humanities: 6 years, 4 months ago
19th century American women writers received plenty of disapproval and even derision for their work during their lifetimes, and their texts were often placed into boxes – domesticity, sentimentality – that may not be fair representations of what they were really interested in writing about. Take Nathaniel Hawthorne’s biting remark about his femal…[Read more]
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Holly Gilbert edited the blog post Seoul Map in the group Digital Humanities: 6 years, 5 months ago
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Holly Gilbert edited the blog post Progress: Women Writers & Social Change in the group Digital Humanities: 6 years, 5 months ago
My project is a text analysis of the works of American women writers in the 19th century. Based off the core texts I read in Dr. Caroline Woidat’s ENGL 439: American Ways: Plotting Women, I hope to prove with digital tools that women writers in this period were intent on tackling pervasive and even controversial social issues. This work will…[Read more]
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new blog post Folger Digital Texts in the group Digital Humanities: 6 years, 7 months ago
Folger Digital Texts is a project undertaking a very traditional humanities aim – preserving, organizing, and making available Shakespeare’s collection of works – but breaks newer ground with digital tools and a […]
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Holly Gilbert replied to the topic Visions of Education in the forum Digital Humanities 6 years, 7 months ago
For me, one of the most startlingly relevant issues was brought up in “The Informative Content of Education.” Wells specifically details his concerns over the ability of educational institutions to impart crucial knowledge to learners, outside of specific needs like teaching to read and write, musical training, physical education, etc. He asks,…[Read more]
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Holly Gilbert replied to the topic Gleick on Information in the forum Digital Humanities 6 years, 7 months ago
- Like Phoebe and Zack, I never really considered the mathematical basis for the creation of a computer. Much of the time, I don’t even think of the term “computer” as “something that computes,” despite the fact that human workers and simpler machines have always been computers; I just associate the word with the mysterious machine I use every…
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Holly Gilbert's profile was updated 6 years, 7 months ago
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replied to the topic Gleick on Words in the forum Digital Humanities 6 years, 7 months ago
- The difficulty of defining an entirely new and unfamiliar concept with underdeveloped language was something I was surprised by as I read the essay – I guess that when new terms are developed now, it feels so intuitive. The only way I could wrap my head around this was to remember what it’s like to try to communicate with someone in a foreign…
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new post on the site Digital Humanities at Geneseo 8 years, 11 months ago
Henry David Thoreau was a busy man, and our group was tasked with listing and detailing his many lectures, publications, journal entries, and general biographical facts along with his work on […]
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new post on the site Digital Humanities at Geneseo 9 years, 1 month ago
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new post on the site Digital Humanities at Geneseo 9 years, 2 months ago
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Holly Gilbert joined the group Digital Humanities 9 years, 3 months ago
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 9 years, 4 months ago
While working on my paper, I’ve been attempting to use the many typos in Zulus as an example of the novel resisting attempts to be analyzed with guidebooks or archives. Every time I type a sentence, however, I get […]
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 9 years, 5 months ago
When reading Percival Everett’s Zulus, I couldn’t help but have my expectations shaped by other novels and ideas about dystopian environments that I have been exposed to. My perceptions of the rebels in the book, […]
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 9 years, 6 months ago
In my last post, I expressed my surprise that by reading the fourth chapter of Interdisciplinarity, I was able to connect the books we are exploring in class to Marxist theory. A few days later, I found the entry “Marxist criticism” in The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms and must admit that I had missed something important in my last post – Marxist literary criticism has been pretty prevalent in the West since the 1940s (Murfin & Ray, 282). Had I known this, it wouldn’t have been a surprise to me at all when I was able to look at Cane and Meridian through the lens of Marxist criticism.
This realization made me wonder just how many approaches to literary criticism could possibly exist – in this semester alone, I’ve been exposed to several, some of which I had used in one way or another in the past. Little did I know, each has its own name and history attached to it. For instance, in the beginning of this semester we discussed New Criticism, the idea that texts are “self-contained and self-referential and thus [New Critics] based their interpretations on elements within the text rather than on external factors such as the effects of…historical materials” (Murfin & Ray, 335). On the very next page of the Bedford, an approach called “the new historicism” is explained, a type of criticism that nearly directly contradicts new critical formalism because “New historicist critics assume that literary works both influence and are influenced by historical reality…” (Murfin & Ray, 336). Based on the three approaches I’ve already mentioned in this post, there’s a range (and there are so many more forms of criticism I doubt I’ve even heard of yet) of ways to analyze a single text.
I’ve always heard people say that literary works mean different things to different people, and now it’s more clear to me how that can be. How one chooses to interpret a text depends on what perspectives, experiences, and ideas about the world you bring to the table. A Marxist critic isn’t going to see the same things as a New Critic, and both will differ from the ideas of a New Historicist. Furthermore, I question if literary critics even neatly line up into one track or another. Although I’m only a freshman English student, who hasn’t had nearly enough time or experience studying literature to be aligned in any way, it seems to me that most people approach literary works with components of all the theories I’ve talked about and more. For instance, in class we discussed how many of the tools we learned in high school stem from New Critical Formalism – I’ve done an endless amount of close readings, and have always been prompted to focus on imagery, rhyme, etc. But nobody adheres to this; we also look at the historical context of the books we read, the experiences of the authors, the messages works deliver about the nature of society and humanity. Interdisciplinarity and The Bedford help expose readers to an endless amount of ways to evaluate literature, something which helps reinforce the idea that a variety of perspectives and ideas is incredibly valuable when trying to discuss a work.
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 9 years, 6 months ago
When we first started reading Jean Toomer’s Cane and Alice Walker’s Meridian, I probably would have laughed if someone had told me I would be, somewhere down the line, talking about them in the context of how they […]
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 9 years, 6 months ago
In Interdisciplinarity, Joe Moran explains various viewpoints about the significance of pop culture in cultural studies, but what stood out to me was cultural critic John Frow’s explanation of “the commodification of high culture and the democratization of low culture” (Moran 69). Frow’s belief that both traditionally highbrow and lowbrow forms of literature have an impact on pop culture today challenges the stereotype of English majors as pretentious scholars who only place value on works they deem worthy of study. After all, if classics written by Shakespeare and Dickens are recycled over and over again in different forms as a part of mainstream culture, then it seems that a wide variety of people would be familiar with the themes, characters, and concepts of these works. Those who study English aren’t special or exclusionary because they read classics; classics are incorporated into modern texts, movies, plays, children’s books, and more.
While thinking about this, it became clear to me just how present classic literature has been throughout my life. When I was younger, the Disney movie The Lion King introduced me, although I couldn’t have known it at the time, to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Years later, when I read Hamlet, the plot already seemed familiar to me – I had come across it in so many forms already. Plus, most people know some of the play’s most famous lines because Hamlet is quoted in numerous television shows, movies, and books. I also has easy-to-read, abridged versions of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe when I was little, which familiarized me with forms of “highbrow culture” before I knew anything about classic literature. These examples, and undoubtedly many others, support Frow’s belief that literature is available to a wide variety of people, not just those who study it. I’m not saying that watching The Lion King is a substitute for reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but the classics have become so ingrained in modern culture that it’s hard to say that English majors are pretentious about which texts they read. Choosing to study literature means not only analyzing the work itself, but understanding its impact on society and how it has been drawn from countless times by other forms of entertainment.
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 9 years, 6 months ago
In the second chapter of Moran’s Interdisciplinarity, “Literature into Culture,” it is said that “Literary works are also interesting ideologically precisely because they often fulfill several functions with […]
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 9 years, 6 months ago
The English discipline centers on literature, which is absolutely wonderful for those who enjoy reading, analyzing, and connecting books, but Interdisciplinarity refers to an argument against the need for such […]
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Holly Gilbert wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 9 years, 7 months ago
I don’t think it’s any secret that one of the biggest challenges to English is its failure to put students on a specified career track. While students majoring in chemistry, for instance, know they are going to be […]
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