Making progress on the "Year's Work"

30 July 2025: I think I've just finished my last batch of reading and note-taking for my portion of the "Year's Work" essay, having made my way through The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature. Feels good to have this part of the task done. Next comes writing, of course, but that's on a little pause until my co-author and I can talk about a new approach to that task.  

Pretty sweet Sunday...

20 July 2025: I know I sometimes document days like today--posts that are basically lists of things I did. They aren't the most interesting posts, I know, but for me, they can serve as little snapshots of ordinary but sweet days. So here's one:

I got an early start with a trip to campus (my first in over a week!) to do a little work and (almost more important to me, at least emotionally) water my plants. 

It's pretty cool to be close to the end of my reading for the "Year's Work" essay. My syllabi are coming along well, too. On Friday, I accepted a new role--Coordinator of First-Year Writing--that means a course release for me, which cut that syllabizing work down quite a bit.

Once I got home, I took my walk through the neighborhood. Laughed really hard at an Extra Hot Great episode. 

From there, I was basically inside the rest of the afternoon. (Still pretty hot out there; it's been an intense summer.) I watched some TV (finished You, which was okay) and read a horror novel by a local writer. I'm enjoying it and have about 120 pages to go.

Then Amy and I saw Magdalene, a CATF play. I really enjoyed it; terrific acting, as always, and some cool ideas. From there, we had dinner at King's.

Home now and just finished a phone call with Tim. Bob's Burgers time (it continues to be my comfort show) until some more reading, bath, and bed!

We love a good mutter...

15 July 2025: "'A girl's best friend is her mutter,' observers [Dorothy] Parker, playing on the traditional notion of a girl's dependency on her mother while suggesting that she hide her defiant thoughts through the muted indirection of muttering" (57).

I don't know much about the very witty and cool twentieth-century women writers that Sabrina Fuchs Abrams writes about in her book, but it is a lot of fun learning about them. (Another text for the "Year's Work" essay...)

Work Cited

Fuchs Abrams, Sabrina. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century, The Pennsylvania State UP, 2024.

Hoffman's brick of a book

14 July 2025: Spent some of the day working my way through an 800-page book that I need some sense of for the Year's Work essay. There is no way to "cover" everything in it--we spend about a paragraph on each work, if that--but I am grateful for skills I learned way back in my undergrad work to get a sense of a book and its arguments relatively quickly and accurately. 

The book's title gives you some sense of its scope and size: Perspectives on Values the Network of Satire and Humor, the Tragic and the Absurd, the Grotesque and the Monstrous, Play and Irony, Parody and the Comic Mode. I mean, come on...it's also very German--like those huge words we laugh at--in that it is about exactly what the title promises.

The author, Gerhard Hoffman, turned a manuscript in shortly before his death in 2018. Hoffman was one of the leading scholars of American Studies in Germany and, according to the book's preface, written by a former student, he transformed the field. So this text--this absolute brick of a book--is a sort of magnum opus. A team of folks helped get it into print, including Hoffman's wife (who died in 2020). 

The book is huge and sweeping and just awe-inspiring in its scope. For me, it's almost too much--too much to take in, too completely at ease with its terminology and philosophy, and overwhelming for a reader. But that says more about me as a reader. 

Yet I did my best and carved out some notes and thoughts for that single paragraph. 

I am not sure how many of his arguments will stick in my brain, but I know I will hold onto the story of the book's journey to publication. Every bit of it is quietly moving. 

Back at it...

6 July 2025: Besides some emails, I haven't done any substantial academic work in over a week. It has felt bizarre. Got back to it today, working my way through a book for the "Year's Work" essay. Rest assured, my co-worker also reported for duty. 

Her little paw on the book prompted me to take the picture. "I'm on it," she seems to be saying, both literally and metaphorically, of course.

Long, good day

17 June 2025: 

Things I did today: slept in a tiny bit because I slept awful the night before, mowed the lawn, had lunch with Tim and two recent graduates, helped do a bit of advising for the last group of entering first-year students, did some planning for next semester with Tim (we are taking our students to the Poe House), did some research work, hosted trivia, played with BabyCat and the laser pointer (a promise I made to her yesterday), and listened to a heck of a thunderstorm roll through (with Jo hiding under my chair). 

Not the most exciting post, but I kind of like days like this. 

Nineteenth-century snark...

13 June 2025: Laughed out loud at this bit about nineteenth-century American poet Phoebe Cary (sister of Alice): "Once asked whether she and her unmarried sister had ever had their hearts broken she replied, 'No, but a great many of my married friends have'" (qtd. in Petrino 200).

Interesting to think about especially after seeing Materialists this evening.

Work Cited

Petrino, Elizabeth A. "Speaking Double: Parody as Resistance in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry." Studies in American Humor, vol. 10, no. 2, 2024, pp. 186-207.

Old school research tools...

21 May 2025: Betty has mostly moved out of her office leaving just a few remants behind, including a big stack of these: old school volumes of the MLA Bibliography. I never had to use these paper copies--databases came just in time for me--and holy cow, I am grateful for that.

"Return need not be regression"

13 May 2025: “Power, too, can be adapted—that is, destabilized, disrupted—and again both memory and mutation, theme and variation are at work. Return need not be regression” (Hutcheon 175).

Thinking a lot about Hutcheon's work on adaptation--particularly this idea--as I conceptuatlize my SSAWW paper, about a YA book inspired by Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." 

Work Cited

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013. 

We have a tracking notice!

24 March 2025: My copies of my book? They are heading my way. Scheduled delivery is Wednesday. My goodness--what a cool feeling!

New (little) project...

10 January 2025: With the exception of opening convocation, today was a kind of quiet day, which worked out just fine. Did some more preparation for Monday (and beyond), filed/sorted/tossed a lot of papers from last semester, and ran some errands. 

I also got (a bit more) started on a new research project: a proposal for SSAWW in Philadelphia in November. It feels good to jump into a new (small) project. The rhythms of the process--having an idea, searching for sources, tracking them down, getting a sense of the conversation, finding ways into it--are pleasantly familiar and quietly exciting. Nerdy as heck, but I am who I am. 

Maybe one more?

16 May 2024: Right now, I am about 2/3 of the way through my first re-read of all the book's entries. So far, I am not hating what I've put together. I've been reading with a million things in mind, one of them being whether or not I need to add entries. Right now I think I definitely need one more: on modernism.

It's interesting; an entry on modernism seems out of place in a book on nineteenth-century American women writers. And modernism basically led to the erasure of so many of the writers I discuss in this book.Yet it comes up in entry after entry. So, it needs some exploration and definition. 

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts

7 May 2024: Found myself genuinely emotional at the ending of Greg Hecimovich's amazing book on Hannah Crafts. 

Works Cited

Hecimovich, Gregg. The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondswoman’s Narrative. HarperCollins, 2023.

Amazing Ida B...

14 March 2024: Spent the past few days reading and thinking about Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the subject of my next book entry. Obviously, she's amazing--tenacious, brave, and unwavering in her activism. It's been a kind of privilege to read about her. It's hard to pick just one bit of text to highlight, but this little excerpt from her memoir is pretty amazing, an indication of how she continued her public activism even after marriage and motherhood: “I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches” (244).

Work Cited

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Edited by Alfreda Duster, U of Chicago P, 1970.

"jollitude"

11 March 2024:I think I could sit and think about this letter from Harriet Beecher Stowe to George Eliot for the rest of spring break. Stowe is teasing Eliot abotu Middlemarch's seriousness: "My love, what I miss in this story is just what we would have if youcwould come to our tumble-down, jolly, improper, but joyous country,--namely, 'jollitude.' You write and live on so high a plane! It is all self-abnegation. We want to get you over here, and into this house, where, with closed doors, we sometimes make the rafters ring with fun, and say anything and everything, no matter what, and won't be any properer than we's a mind to be" (qtd. in Silvey 61). Silvey adds that the "house" that Stowe want Eliot to visit is Annie Fields' home in Boston. Just an amazing quotation that makes clear how small the writing world was in the nineteenth century. Moreover, Stowe pretty accurately describes what Eliot does in Middlemarch and it is just very funny to think that she believes some good old American "jollitude" can help a bit. 

Work Cited

Silvey, Jane. “It All Began with Jane Eyre: The Complex Transatlantic Web of Women Writers.” Gaskell Journal, vol. 19, 2005, pp. 52–68.

"...life is always undoing for us..."

25 February 2024: Thinking this evening about this passage from The Gates Ajar, spoken by Dr. Bland right before he throws his sermon on his old view of heaven into the fireplace: "It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done” (Phelps 127). It's a small moment in the novel, but seems to me to be profound view about how life helps/forces us to change our beliefs and ideas--and it can be a blessing. 

Also, at 9:19 p.m. on the Sunday of an almost entirely work-filled* weekend, I have just finished my last (I hope?) set of notes for my Phelps entry--and the last item on my weekly "book goals" list. This week: composing, revising, etc.

*One non-work thing: helping Chuck and Bill run the Flagship Trivia tournament today--back at the Clarion for the first time since the pandemic. The other non-work thing: a really lovely Zoom book club meeting earlier this evening. 

Work Cited

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Gates Ajar. 1868. Edited by Elizabeth Duquette and Claudia Stokes, Penguin, 2019.

"A symbol of something, to be sure...but still a symbol..."

22 February 2024: "Can’t people tell picture from substance, a metaphor from its meaning? That book of Revelation is precisely what it professes to be,—a vision; a symbol. A symbol of something, to be sure, and rich with pleasant hopes, but still a symbol. Now, I really believe that a large proportion of Christian church-members, who have studied their Bible, attended Sabbath schools, listened to sermons all their lives, if you could fairly come at their most definite idea of the place where they expect to spend eternity, would own it to be the golden city, with pearl gates, and jewels in the wall. It never occurs to them, that, if one picture is literal, another must be. If we are to walk golden streets, how can we stand on a sea of glass? How can we ‘sit on thrones’? How can untold millions of us ‘lie in Abraham’s bosom’?” (Phelps 46). 

In this passage, Mary's Aunt Winifred just tears into Biblical literalism. This book is something else. Phelps wrote this in 1868--and it was a huge bestseller!

Work Cited

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Gates Ajar. 1868. Edited by Elizabeth Duquette and Claudia Stokes, Penguin, 2019.

"demand[ing] a piece of squash pie..."

18 February 2024:"The phenomena occurring in his Connecticut home included floating candlesticks, walking chairs, leaping dishes, bent forks, turnips falling from nowhere, images made of underclothing that came from locked cupboards, and‘ 'alphabetical raps [...] demand[ing] a piece of squash pie’" (Harde 249).

I got such a kick out of the opening to Roxanne Harde's article about Phelps and spiritualism. In the passage above, Harde describes the haunting that Phelps's grandfather--a God-fearing minister--experienced in his home. 

Work Cited

Harde, Roxanne. “‘God, or Something Like That’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Christian Spiritualism.” Women’s Writing, vol. 15, no. 3, Dec. 2008, pp. 348–70. EBSCOhost.

"a vast undiscovered country..."

17 Feburary 2024: "Writing to George Eliot in 1873, [Elizabeth Stuart] Phelps observed that 'women's personal identity is a vast undiscovered country with which Society has yet to acquaint itself, and by which is it yet to be revoutionized" (qtd in Duquette and Stokes xix).

Fully emerged in all things Elizabeth Stuart Phelps for my next entry. Besides the titles of her best-known novels--and a loose understanding of The Gates Ajar's plot--I didn't know much about her at all before starting this research. The quotation above is a great example of how compelling and important she seems to be. 

Work Cited

Duquette, Elizabeth and Claudia Stokes. Introduction. The Gates Ajar, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelp, Penguin, 2019, pp. vii-xxv.

"Dely's Cow"

21 January 2024: "There are two sorts of people in the world — those who love animals, and those who do not. I have seen them both, I have known both; and if sick or oppressed, or borne down with dreadful sympathies for a groaning nation in mortal struggle, I should go for aid, for pity, or the relief of kindred feeling, to those I had seen touched with quick tenderness for the lower creation,—who remember that the 'whole creation travaileth in pain together,' and who learn God’s own lesson of caring for the fallen sparrow, and the ox that treadeth out the corn. With men or women who despise animals and treat them as mere beasts and brutes I never want to trust my weary heart or my aching head; but with Dely I could have trusted both safely, and the calf and the cat agreed with me" (Cooke 187).

Sitting here this afternoon, typing up notes on Cooke's stories while BabyCat and Jo chase each other around the room, these words from "Dely's Cow" sure ring true to me, just as they have every day of my conscious life. 

Work Cited

Cooke, Rose Terry. "How Celia Changed Her Mind" and Selected Stories. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons, Rutgers UP, 1986.