by Dr Davis on October 11, 2008
Emily Dickinson was engaged at college. She had a lover later on, perhaps a judge? But no one wants to talk about it, argues Christopher Benfey, because we like our story better.
We tend to reserve special roles for our favorite writers—sepulchral Poe; sardonic Mark Twain; sexy, world-embracing Walt Whitman—and resist evidence that contradicts our cherished images. Emily Dickinson in this constellation is forever the lovelorn spinster, pining away in her father’s mansion on Main Street in Amherst, Mass. We assume that the grand passion behind her poems (”Wild nights—Wild nights! Were I with thee”) must have had a commensurate inspiration, whether imaginary, superhuman, or divine. Evidence that Dickinson’s love life was fairly ordinary, with ordinary temptations and disappointments, doesn’t quite fit the bill. Her exile on Main Street has seemed a necessary part of the Dickinson myth, so necessary, indeed, that contrary information—which happens to have been piling up lately—has often been discounted or ignored.
…
If there’s a surprise in all this, it’s an ordinary one. It turns out that Emily Dickinson had the kind of early romantic entanglement and disappointment that so many young people have. They find someone congenial; they exchange gifts and promises; their parents intervene for various acknowledged and unacknowledged reasons. If such ordinariness seems somehow beneath the dignity of one of our supreme poets, that’s probably why even this latest challenge to the image of isolated Emily has gotten so little attention. Alas, there’s nothing mysterious or mystical here except what Emily Dickinson made, in her extraordinary poems, of her all-too-human disappointment.
Read all the scintillating details at Slate.
by Dr Davis on October 11, 2008
The conference will be hosted by the Rhetoric and Writing Program at Michigan State University, October 7-9, 2009. Beginning December 15, 2009 [sic], the 2009 Feminisms and Rhetorics committee will be accepting proposals that explore the connections between the conference theme, “Enabling Complexities: Communities/Writing/Rhetoric,” and our scholarly communities and practices.
Proposals accepted from Dec. 15, 2008 to Feb. 1, 2009. See more.
Found at Culture Cat where she says they are looking for proposals that
• *reflect* the complexity and diversity of who “we” are as a scholarly community;
• *make manifest* the deep structure of the connections, intersections, and overlaps that actually make us a community;
• *help articulate* who “we” are as a deliberate community of scholars, and what that means about our responsibilities and relationships to one another across scholarly areas and institutional positions;
• *highlight* scholarly and teacherly activities that deliberately create space for more complex notions of scholarship and teaching within the discipline of Rhet/Comp;
• *include* and significantly engage communities outside of the academy;
• *focus on* antiracist pedagogies and scholarship; present interdisciplinary scholarship in Afrafeminist Rhetorics; American Indian Rhetorics, Chicana Rhetorics, Asian American Rhetorics, post/neo-colonial rhetorics;
• *highlight* the intellectual traditions of women’s communities, especially communities constellated around specific identity markers such as race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation issues, geographic origins;
• *explore* the relationships between written, oral, and material discursive production;
• and other topics that *address* the connections in the conference theme.
