The section of House of Leaves with paragraphs that were in blue boxes, upside down, or rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise was crazy (pages 119-148). What would posses an author to spatially arrange paragraphs on a page like that? Was Danielewski just trying to be really unique and avant-garde without meaning anything by the positioning? When…
Author: Noreen Siddiqi
Digital Humanities is About Building AND Sharing
Sample’s analysis of what digitals humanities is actually about was energizing and inspiring to read. His call to push the boundaries of how people share knowledge made me excited about the prospects that people in my generation and beyond have to look forward to. I can’t help but think back to a philosophy of science class I…
“Model Village”: The Drafts and the Published Work
After giving “Model Village” a more meticulous read, I became interested in Duffy’s choice of characters for the poem. Because the poem concerns the dark thoughts of residents of a seemingly ideal village, I found it curious that Duffy gives the reader access to the musings of a maiden, a farmer, a religious figure, and a librarian. I read her… Read more →
“Penelope”: The Draft and the Published Work
While I was at first apprehensive about the idea of researching in MARBL and examining Duffy’s manuscripts, I ultimately found the experience itself to be painless and, dare I say, even enjoyable. Looking through Duffy’s drafts kind of made me feel like an archaeologist who had found rare cultural documents that very few people have ever come across. Granted, there… Read more →
CORRESPONDENCE
During our last class meeting, we complied a short list of themes that permeate Duffy’s work in Selling Manhattan. The list included death, language, and meaninglessness among other concepts. Now that I have finished the second half of her poems in the book, I would add communication and distance to the list of themes. Of the twenty-two poems that occupy… Read more →
Paradigms in Literary History
The dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity makes me uncomfortable because often, it is a false dichotomy. Perception is always shaped by expectation and so nothing can ever be purely objective. Bias from the beholder always influences interpretation. With my reservations about the use of the word objectivity in mind, I will however say that Moretti seems to be calling for… Read more →
The Clock Stops for Nobody
After finishing Mrs. Dalloway, I was at first left feeling a little disappointed. None of the characters in the story seemed to go through any kind of transformation or had a significant change in their life or affected the lives of the other characters in a significant way. At the end (spoiler alert), Septimus dies, Clarissa has a successful party… Read more →
Mrs. Dalloway’s Extraordinarily Mundane Life
The approximate one third of Mrs. Dalloway that I’ve read so far has reminded me that there is no topic too mundane or boring for a writer to adopt as the focus of a work of literature. At first, I struggled to understand why a reader would be interested in this story. I’ve liked the other stuff we’ve read up… Read more →
Reading Response 01/20/2015
When I first read the title of this week’s subject “mapping digital humanities”, I couldn’t have guessed that we would be reading about actual maps. As someone who is being exposed to digital humanities for the first time, the idea presented by Moretti that a map can serve as a way of understanding a literary … Continue reading Reading Response 01/20/2015 Read more →