Future paper topic: Cats and Gender in Medieval Europe

This horrifying incident on campus made me think about the treatment of cats in the Middle Ages and how they always seem to be the ones to get tortured and maligned if any animal is going to be. I was especially interested in the folklore of cats and their connection to witches, and I wondered if a connection could be made between medieval attitudes toward women as witches with cats as companions, and the modern stereotype of the crazy cat lady or the sad single woman who lives with her cats.

Then again, here is a very different kind of cat companion from an Old Irish monk's poem: 

Version by W.H. Auden:
Pangur, white Pangur, How happy we are
Alone together, scholar and cat
Each has his own work to do daily;
For you it is hunting, for me study.
Your shining eye watches the wall;
My feeble eye is fixed on a book.
You rejoice, when your claws entrap a mouse;
I rejoice when my mind fathoms a problem.
Pleased with his own art, neither hinders the other;
Thus we live ever without tedium and envy.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdtamsHbqJ1qbisi2o1_r3_400.gif

It would be very interesting to sort out the cultural and folkloric origins of these different beliefs about cats, evaluate them with respect to gender and female sexuality, and follow them into the modern era.

Books I reread, and why

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

This is probably my most reread book, and my reasons for rereading overlap the most between pleasure and professionalism, though it's safe to say they still lean more toward pleasure. I read the trilogy about every other year, and I find that it grows richer the more I know about the real medieval literature and myth that inspired it.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

I haven't been back to this one in a few years, but it is still the standard against which I measure character development and tightness of plot.

The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende

I've read this one twice, and I once tried (unsuccessfully) to read it in Spanish. Both times were purely for pleasure.

Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card

I read this one a couple times when I was in middle school and high school, and then again recently, and it is one of those books that, as Spacks notes, shows its literary greatness with every reread. There are lots of science fiction novels, like The Hunger Games, that are spellbinding for a while but which lose a lot of their luster on a rereading, but every time I read Ender's Game, I am more impressed. (Now that I think about it, it has a lot of interesting similarities to The Hunger Games.) I have always read this book for pleasure, but my most recent rereading has convinced me that this book might be worth devoting some research to.

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle

Another childhood favorite that I've seen pop up in surprising places lately. Only a couple weeks ago, I read some of a new graphic novel version of the book. A pleasure read.

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee

I read this book three or four times in high school, but I haven't read it lately. It doesn't have the impact for me that it used to, and now when I read it, I am reading for the sentimental love of favorite scenes and narration and the fond memories of past readings.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This one started out as a pleasure read, but subsequent rereadings have been mainly professional. I've been rereading it aloud this semester with Song School for an entirely new professional purpose: polishing my pronunciation of Middle English.

Beowulf

Probably my most reread professional book. I gave it one cursory reading in high school, reread it in college, mostly out loud because I liked how the words sounded, again in college for a class, and then again for another class. Over break, I will be reading it again in preparation for my Beowulf course with Rob Fulk next semester, and then over the course of the spring, I will read it in Old English with that class. This is an especially interesting rereading because it will be the first time I have read it entirely in its original language, so in some ways it will be a first reading as well as a rereading.

"Wulf and Eadwacer"

"The Wanderer"

Rereading Davis

"Theatricality is not likely to be present when a performance is so absorbing that the audience forgets it is spectating." (Tracy Davis, "Theatricality and Civil Society in Theatricality", p. 128)

-The spectator must decide that the performance is significant for them before they feel sympathy. (p. 129)

"As long as sympathy is withheld, the theatrical circumstance persists; only if sympathy is granted can we cease to be spectators to ourselves and others." (p. 141)

-The spectators feel admiration and sympathy for the brave man on the scaffold, but they turn away from the brave man being pilloried. We choose sympathy when it benefits us, ennobles us, not when it makes us feel shame. (p. 150)

"A world where only sympathy occurs would be a dull one indeed, but it is the conditioned choice to sympathize or theatricalize that matters." (p. 153)

"Is this not how new law is conceived: not by cathecting with victims but by enabling the seeing of acts (sexual harassment, stalking, driving under the influence of alcohol) where before there was either 'nothing' or sympathetic social sanction?" (p. 154)

New things to consider in my second reading:

1) The first time around, I didn't focus so much on her interpretation of sympathy as a choice, but now I think that has far-reaching implications for transport. We can be transported only because we are willing to allow ourselves to do so, and that allowance is predicated on complex personal, cultural, and social situations. Maybe the important question is not, "What is the quality of science fiction that transports me?" but "What is it in me that is so willing to be transported by science fiction?"

2) Empathy is not unselfish. This was underlined by the example about the pilloried man vs. the hanged man, and although it might seem obvious, it deserves closer attention than I have given it. If sympathy/empathy is a choice we make, then it is affected by the flaws of human nature that affect every choice. I often think of empathy uncritically as a good effect of encountering difference through literature, but I should be more aware of the circumstances in which empathy is generated and its more selfish benefits to the one who empathizes.

3) Naming something brings it into view. This one comes mainly from the last quote from page 154. Science fiction and fantasy is uniquely equipped to give new names to things, especially when it constructs societies radically different from our own. I think immediately of the concept of shifgrethor in Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and the dispossessed language usage in The Dispossessed. I never thought of the ways that possessive language might have negative consequences with regard to the way I think about other human beings (for example, Le Guin's Odonians would say "the mother" instead of "my mother" because the use of a possessive would imply ownership over another person).

Notes on Spacks

"Rereading of this sort, the kind we do for the sake of teaching or writing, may feel at times merely routine, yet it can also come to serve as an index of literary quality."
-Patricia Meyer Spacks, "Professional Rereading" in On Rereading, p. 163

"The value of recreational rereading inheres largely in its unpredictable results."
-p. 164

Professional rereaders "direct the text to our purposes rather than give ourselves over to its intents."
-p. 165

-collective rereading is largely responsible for canon formation

Visits to living history museums

http://www.connerprairie.org/Plan-Your-Visit/1836-Prairietown/Meet-the-Citizens.aspx

http://www.indianahistory.org/indiana-experience/you-are-there

http://www.indianahistory.org/indiana-experience/you-are-there

http://www.indianahistory.org/indiana-experience/you-are-there

Witcomb Notes

"This opposition [between multimedia and high art] in relation to the introduction of multimedia into museums is sometimes unhelpful." (Andrea Witcomb, "The Materiality of Virtual Technologies: A New Approach to Thinking about the Impact of Multimedia in Museums", p. 36)

-defining multimedia as 'other' results in limited readings and applications (p. 36)

-through multimedia, museums become more openly politicized (p. 37)
-an experiential model of democracy (p. 46)

Notes on Walsh

"It is the mechanical reproduction--the photograph--that created the aura of the original, much as it was the machine that created the 'handmade,' the negative that created the 'positive,' and the digital that gave retroactive birth to its latent opposite, the 'analog.'"

-Peter Walsh, "Rise and Fall of the Post-Photographic Museum: Technology and the Transformation of Art", p. 29