CFP: Victorian Thresholds: Between Literature and Anthropology, 28 April 2012

The Victorian Studies Association of Ontario is soliciting paper proposals for its annual conference, which is happening on April 28th this year, at York University’s beautiful Glendon campus in Toronto.

The call for papers might be of interest to those working on or around 19th-century borders, boundaries, hybrids, peripheries, dusks, dawns, doorways, vestibules, amphibians, fringes, frontiers, ambiguities, or other similarly delicious ideas that relate to that of  “the threshold.”

The Heroic Life of George Gissing

In the spirit of Karen’s Holiday Reading post, I thought I’d offer a few words on a book in which I’ve been luxuriating this holiday season: the first volume of The Heroic Life of George Gissing. Pierre Coustillas’s eagerly-anticipated, triple-decker biographical tour-de-force has been several decades in the making, and, judging by this first installment, the completed project will deliver a masterfully detailed account of Gissing’s strange life.

Monday afternoon verbiage

The third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English debuted last week, granting something approaching critical legitimacy to some 2,000 newly-added words and phrases. Focusing as it does on current English usage (unlike the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, which traces wordiness along a historical axis), this Oxford embraces and explains words of recent provenance like freemium, sheeple, and, a personal favourite, chillax.

I love words. I get a giddy thrill out of discovering freshly-minted and newly-disseminated coinages, and I happily await those competing “word of the year” announcements from organizations like the American Dialect Society, The Global Language Monitor, and the New Oxford American Dictionary. At the very same time, however, I find myself growing ever more appreciative of words that I come across while reading Victorian literature, words that feel a bit mossy or stodgy upon first encounter, words that never made it out of the nineteenth century.

Silas Marner meets Melvyn Bragg

Just a quick note to mention that even Melvyn Bragg is joining in on George Eliot month! This coming Thursday, January 28, Melvyn will be discussing Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861) with Rosemary Ashton, Dinah Birch, and Valentine Cunningham on BBC Radio 4′s In Our Time. Be sure to listen in!

What’s the time, Mister Wolf?

As part of my dissertation research on representations of automata in Victorian literature, I’ve been reading a bit about the figurative history of clocks. I’ve been particularly fascinated by the changing fortunes of the clock in metaphors relating to the nature and construction of knowledge. As Otto Mayr details in Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe, the clock was an extremely flexible concept that was conscripted for symbolic use in many different epistemological projects.

The Work of Handwriting in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

While doing research at the British Library last fall, I came across a thoroughly fascinating pamphlet advertising Edison’s Electric Pen, known more properly as “The Edison Electric Pen and Duplicating Press, for the Rapid, Accurate, and Economical Production of all kinds of Writings, Drawings &c.”

Back to the Future – now in 3D!

Whilst wandering the streets of Montreal recently, I came across an outdoor photo exhibition displayed along the west side of McGill College, just north of Ste-Catherine. The exhibition, entitled 1 image 2 eyes 3D, has been curated by the McCord Museum, and consists of 12 images of nineteenth-century Quebec.

Going the distance

The 2009 spring ascent season on Mount Everest has just drawn to a close, with what may be more than 330 climbers managing to reach the summit of the mountain in this record-setting year. The march to the top of Everest is a fascinating phenomenon, not least for the entanglements of cultural values, political exigencies, and psychological contouring that are revealed in each individual bid to stand on the highest spot on earth.