Three unrelated thoughts
- I'm currently teaching D. G. Rossetti's poem "Jenny" (strictly speaking, I was supposed to have finished teaching it on Friday, but eh), and I was thinking about the recurring book imagery. Most Victorianists are familiar with the poem's deliberately perverse Marian references, but surely the book should also be in that category [PDF]?
- As I've said before, I don't really have too many criticisms of, well, criticisms of "interdisciplinarity." I certainly don't think my own work is interdisciplinary, even though I've been published in one history journal and am due to appear in another next year; rather, I'm a literary historian, trained to seek out interrelations amongst literary works, who also spends a lot of time reading scholarship in religious studies. (One of the referees for next year's aforementioned history journal said, in effect, MOAR HISTORY PLZ, which I had to concede was a perfectly valid point.) I'm not actually qualified to lecture historians of religion on what they are or aren't doing, although I'm certainly happy to suggest that more English professors ought to read religious novels. Moreover, academics tend to be attracted to whatever looks most like their home discipline in other fields, which gets you things like English professors in the 1990s following historians engaged with the "linguistic turn." Clune is also correct to say that "close reading" constitutes the core of literary scholarship, but only as it is currently constituted: except for distant reading and its related digital humanities approaches, most theory-driven scholarship is rooted in close reading, whether it likes it or not. (Deconstruction turned into hyper-New Criticism once English departments got hold of it.) But it only became so with the rise of New Criticism, which in certain fields displaced, e.g., philology, what we might call "old" historicism, etc. (I say "certain fields" because medieval studies certainly has a whole lot of philology still going on.)
- The current debate over citation practices is, if you'll excuse a quasi-vampiric turn of speech, the last nail in the coffin of the dead author.