Hawthorne/Izumi Update

Ah, the wonders of teh internets! Not to mention the kindness of strangers and the generosity of friends! Since I last wrote on a possible Hawthorne/Izumi connection--Izumi perhaps using the crisis of faith and epistemology in "Young Goodman Brown" to add some interesting resonances to his meditation on dreams and reality, life and death in "One Day in Spring"--I've heard back from Charles Shiro Inouye and Susan Napier at Tufts and my friend Koichi Fujino at Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka. The bottom line: there's no definitive evidence either way on whether Izumi could have read "Young Goodman Brown" before 1906. In fact, they know of no work in English or Japanese that takes on the question directly.

The Full Metal Archivist approached the question from an oblique angle that may well prove to be helpful. She noted that Izumi's mentor--おざき こうよう Kouyou Ozaki--read a good deal of literature in English and was a huge influence on Izumi in his literary and wider life. So it's possible that Izumi heard about "Young Goodman Brown" from his mentor. Another line of research to pursue.

What makes this very specific empirical question of perhaps wider interest is that it points to a more general problem: when an intertextual reading isolates structural homologies, what ought we to do with them? I speculated with my students in class Friday on any number of directions we might go in to pursue everything from the meaning and significance to the implications and stakes of the structural homologies, should they actually turn out to be intentional allusions on Izumi's part. Clarifying the conditions of possibility for an actual case of translinguistic/transcultural influence/revision can do more than establish a factual base for an interpretive reading; it can also help reveal pathways for transnational communication at the turn into the 20th century.

How the University Works

Do yourself a favor and get Marc Bousquet's How the University Works--and of course visit his book's blog regularly. The journal he founded and I edited for awhile is doing just fine without us--check out the latest issue and back issues over at Workplace.

This academic labor moment has been brought to you by the letter W.

Amazing Colleagues, Part I

Since I've been neglecting the Research Weekends part of the CitizenSE programming schedule for so long, I figure I'd better start bragging about my colleagues' work until I actually have time and energy to blog about my own. And since Aimee Nezhukumatathil has a new book of poetry out from Tupelo Press, I thought I'd start with her. You can read and/or hear Garrison Keillor read one of her poems from it, "After Challenging Jennifer Lee to a Fight," at The Writer's Almanac, if you didn't happen to catch it on NPR on my birthday last Thursday. If you want to read more of her poetry online, a google search on her name turns up quite a few, but a recent Verse Daily entry collects many of them. Right now, At the Drive-In Volcano is stalled in the low 200,000s on Amazon.com's bestseller list, but I'm confident that CitizenSE's 5 regular readers and 25 daily visitors will do such a good job spreading the word about it that we'll see it in the top 10,000 by 2008.

You know, it's actually much more difficult to write about your colleagues than yourself or your family. You never quite know what's TMI with a friend, do you? So I'm going to close by simply noting that Aimee blogs over at Gila Monster, but never lets on that she's a fantastic teacher, active with students in our Writers' Ring and Sigma Tau Delta English honors society, one of the driving forces behind our Visiting Writers Series, and a new mom. So let it be said that her son is super-cute, that her husband is a pretty damn good basketball player (among other things), and that it would be cool if he would find the time to start playing with us again (it's just two lunchtimes a week!)....

Ready with Harry Potter 7 Spoilers in, oh, about a Month

In the apparently eternal struggle to make CitizenSE relevant to someone else in Blogoramaville, I can report that thanks to that honors thesis student on whose behalf I blegged last weekend, I'm currently making my way through that next-to-last one in the Harry Potter series this weekend--Half-Blood Prince, if memory serves. So like it says in the title, I'll finally be able to participate in the HarPot-blogging-fest about half a year late.

On the bright side, a student and fellow Gaiman fan has lent me her copy of Anansi Boys. If the blogging is light (in more ways than 2) here over the next couple of weeks, you'll know who to blame!

Fantasy Bleg

So I'm doing one of my favorite things this year, which is mentoring an honors thesis on a topic I'd be focusing on if I were starting over as an undergrad doing an honors thesis right about now. No, it's not science fiction, comics, or video games, but fantasy. The student is interested in the ranges of the rules and functions of magic in fantasy, figuring that it may not be that dissimilar to the rules and functions of (new) technology in science fiction. The larger project is to make a case for the scholarly study of fantasy.

Not only does this give me a chance to introduce her to some of my favorite writers--Steven Brust, Neil Gaiman, Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles de Lint, and Sherri Tepper--as well as others I respect but don't like as much yet should be crucial to her project--Piers Anthony, Lloyd Alexander, Ursula Le Guin, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., and of course J.R.R. Tolkien. But, most important, I get to read some George R.R. Martin and Irene Radford--not to mention finally finish the last three books of the Harry Potter series! What's more, this is work, or should I say guilt-free pleasure?

So, keeping the former part of the last sentence in mind, is anyone out there aware of good scholarly studies of fantasy? Lucie Armitt's Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction is our entry point, but she's a bit too hung up on the fantastic and the possibilities of Lit-ah-rary fantasy, for my taste at least.