While reading Survival and Memory by Anderson, you may have read over a part where she mentions the “Rousseauism” in Walsingham’s response to the song. She actually says the following: Walsingham’s mixture of admiration and condescension toward [Mary’s] song is worthy of an aristocrat in a Paris salon in 1770 toying with fashionable Rousseauism: it’s very […]
Read More →Archive for February, 2014
Discrimination Persists in the Face of the Plague
The Gradual Abolition Act, a legislative action moving away from slavery, was passed in the state of Philadelphia in year 1790. Anti-slavery movements were well in motion and progress, and so stood strong the opposition. In year 1793, Philadelphia was the nation’s capital – and most cosmopolitan city in the United States. Internationally renowned physician, […]
Read More →I know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy…
Team Pushkin was given the beautiful gift of a person who speaks Russian, so our post used this expertise in our approach to this piece. Here is what we learned. Enjoy. Translations and imitations are among the large number of works of Alexander Pushkin. These works make up about a fifth of all the works […]
Read More →The Origins of Yellow Fever in Arthur Mervyn
Some of the stories we have encountered about contagion so far stress the nature of the disease as an extraneous agent. Thucydides specified that the pathogen causing the Plague of Athens came in through Africa and H.F. took note of the rumors about the Plague of London of 1655 coming in from Holland. Although Yellow […]
Read More →An epidemic of rumors, or rumors of an epidemic: The making of a rumor
Last class we talked in depth about the paragraph at the end of Chapter 13: Such was the tale, distorted and diversified a thousand ways by the credulity and exaggeration of the tellers. At first I listened to the story with indifference or mirth. Methought it was confuted by its own extravagance. The enormity and […]
Read More →Love me, I’m not Contagious
Back in 2012, the previous Contagion group was chilling on the beach and reading Arthur Mervyn by Charles B. Brown… Today in February 2014, as the weather wasn’t too beachy, our group ended up eating strawberry cake, drinking pink smoothies indoors in an environment of red balloons, lovey-dovy roses and valentine cards, trying to find […]
Read More →Categorizing A Journal of the Plague Year
Here are some thoughts from Sebastián following our last discussion: Today in class we discussed how does the fact that A Journal of the Plague Year is a fiction affects our responses to the text. We also made an effort to categorize the piece; is it a proto-ethnography or historical novel? I would like us […]
Read More →Defoe as novelist, novels as something new
During our last discussion of Defoe I mentioned, briefly, Defoe’s place in the history of the novel. (It’s hard to overestimate, for instance, the influence and longevity of his best-known novel, Robinson Crusoe, but he was the author many other popular works, including the one we’re reading.) Here’s a post I wrote on this topic […]
Read More →Fortune’s wheel
Thinking about our discussion of Fortune today, both as it informs The Decameron and butts heads with Protestant reformers later on, I was reminded of this piece by the cultural historian Jackson Lears about the concept’s history (especially in Western thought). A few relevant excerpts: In ancient Rome, Fortuna began as a fertility goddess but […]
Read More →Defoe round-up
Hi, all. As we prepare to begin discussing Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, here are a few links to help get us thinking: An earlier convener’s post, taking up the question of public discourse on the plague. In what ways is communication like the disease? What mileage does Defoe get out of the link […]
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