It is, in fact, an opportunity for me to spend lots of time in the postgrad study rooms when they are really empty. I have a stack of books to get through, and they must be gotten through by the end of the month! I've had a couple of skype meetings with Simon, so it looks like I can leave Goethe behind for a while, so now it's all Shelley all the time. Primarily, I'll be looking at Frankenstein, but Percy's Prometheus Unbound will probably play a significant role as well, once I actually read it and its surrounding material. Reading about the Shelleys is super entertaining, as well--so much scandalous living! The only drawback is that their letters and things aren't archived online, as far as I know, so it's a bit more work to have to read through massive compilations rather than search by key words. Clearly I was meant in this round of research to kick it old school, so that I can gain further appreciation for how much easier my life is with the help of the internet.
Speaking of more books, just before the end of Epiphany Term there was a massive book sale held at one of the college libraries, so I have managed to add to my personal library in unexpected and awesome ways. They were trying to get rid of a whole bunch of stuff, so every book was 50p, so my housemate and I spent a lot of time combing through the chaos to find interesting things. I now have some old editions of the first volume of Carlyle's The French Revolution, and H.G. Wells' The Dream, which I have never read, as well as critical books on industrial culture and structuralism and various other things. My best find was definitely Landes' The Unbound Prometheus, which is an well-respected commentary on technological change, and a must-read for me.
I am already dreading having to move house to wherever I'm going after finishing my degree.
In other news, I have been generously invited to be part of the central organising group of NENC, so I will be blogging there a bit more as well as helping out with organisation of events and things. I'll post here with links about my contributions when they appear. Nicole and I will be talking about our first tentative steps into teaching, and I'm going to do a short essay at some point on an aspect of my research that I haven't decided on yet.
So, many things afoot, though I have to get over my disappointment at the weather going back to rainy and cold after a glorious couple of weeks of nice weather. Grar, hazards of the northeast.
No comments:
Post a Comment