Category Archives: Uncategorized

Catharine R. Stimpson is for me one of the unrivalled masters of peroration. The endings of her essays are designed to carry your thought forward in an amiable meditation on what has been presented. Take for example the lines just … Continue reading →

Sheila Rowbotham. Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World Oppression is not an abstract moral condition but a social and historical experience. More along the same vein: The Ruling class grows sentimental at its own convenience. And a little factoid in need of … Continue reading →

I found these two quotations transcribed on separate index cards and am pleased to juxtapose them here. Mothers may weep goodbye or wave their sons into manhood with patriotic fervor, but they cannot prevent them from going. No need to. … Continue reading →

Towards the end of “What Matter Mind: A Theory About the Practice of Women’s Studies (1973)”, Catharine Stimpson comments on the open-endedness of self creation. She observes that loneliness and insecurity […] are transformed into humility, a recognition that the … Continue reading →

One of the best descriptions concerning the circularity of interpretation and the steps of the hermeneutical endeavour is to be found in the pages of a book by David Couzens Hoy (The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics) Language … Continue reading →

Sorry I will not quote an extensive swath of his prose and thereby impinge upon your attention. Excuses betoken, we might say, the incessant, unending vulnerability of human action, its exposure to the independence of the world and the preoccupation … Continue reading →

Samuel R. Delany in “Atlantis: Model 1924” astonishes the reader with an evocation of the evanescent stream of perception and the inability of recall to master every moment. What at first seems like a melancholy meditation on the passage of … Continue reading →

It is perhaps not particularly fair to pull out this fighting-words excerpt from one of Christopher Norris’s lectures (the Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory published under the title Spinoza & the Origins of Modern Critical Theory) — but while you … Continue reading →