Tip-toe

Yes, radio silence again, because the article I needed to finish a draft of before needs to be really and truly finished now.  Or more finished than it was the last time I made this excuse, take your pick.  In any event, this project has been slightly disorienting, as it is entirely outside my normal line of work: not a single offbeat religious novel to be seen! Or a canonical Victorian novel! Or a pop romance about Anne Boleyn! Or...any novels at all! Because I'm writing about film, which is not only an entirely different subject, it's an entirely different discipline.  This is not a sudden swerve from my normal routine, in the sense of some proverbial bolt of lightning striking me with inspiration from above, but emerges from an ongoing interest in post-Victorian representations of Benjamin Disraeli--which, obviously, requires attention to cinematic goings-on.   (I should really get around to working on that project.  Maybe when Book Two gets finalized.)  As it happens, while the article itself features Disraeli, it's not about him, but about a handful of kings and queens--which just goes to show that sometimes articles spring forth from apparently unrelated ideas. 

I don't plan on suddenly becoming a film studies specialist any time soon, but I did contemplate becoming yet another English professor who randomly crashes about in other people's disciplines.  ("Hey, philosophy! Don't mind me, just borrowing the Socra--oops, dropped him on the Derrida.  Bit of a mess there. Clean up in aisle three?")   Granted, English professors tend to find themselves nesting in film studies on a regular basis, but we are trained to look for and at entirely different things; the most common critique of English professors writing about film, for example, is that we focus on language to the detriment of all the visual elements.  (It's not as though one "naturally" notices and articulates how Kurosawa utilizes depth of field.)  This is also why I am in a state of permanent bemusement about being confused with a historian, as I neither write like one nor think like one.  Literary history is a type of historiography, no doubt, but surely the way I analyze literary works--even in the context of a larger historical narrative--separates me out fairly clearly from a historian? If I were to caricature the difference, I'd say that literary scholars are primarily interested in the work itself (even historicists), whereas historians tend to be interested in everything that brought the work into being.   (Then again, I wonder if Moretti's "distant reading" will break down that distinction.)