ONE VERY LARGE INDEX CARD

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-23726731-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); ABOUT ME: Radical queer femme grad student in the upper right hand region of the U.S. Any more details might be incriminating. THE PURPOSE: I'm reading for my oral comprehensive exams for my PhD in American Studies. I have over 200 books to read and only 180 days until the exam (you do the math). That equals (at least) ONE BOOK A DAY for the foreseeable future. I happen to also have a propensity to take 10x the notes I need on any given book/subject/idea/matter etc. To keep myself from doing even more than I've already got to do, I'm taking some words of wisdom from previous examinees and limiting my note taking to ONE VERY LARGE INDEX CARD per book. Which I will post (are you ready for this?) ONE TIME A DAY. And just to keep with the one-a-day-keeps-the-examiners-at-bay theme... each index card will be accompanied by ONE PITHY STATEMENT that wraps up the day's selection.

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Thanks for the follow

you're welcome!

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I love the idea of this blog!

i love you! ok, i don't know you, but i linked to you through the FYVBO tumblr. righteous. thanks. i got through my qualifying exams so this blog doesn't get updated anymore, but i still use it for all my tumblr purposes. 

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your blog is immense! i love it!

thanks! my camera broke half way through my studying period, and so i only have about half of the cards up. i keep saying i'm going to upload the rest one of these days, but until i get through this dissertation prospectus, and this article i'm revising, and these fellowship applications, and all this teaching... yeah. sigh. someday, though. in the meantime, if you have any requests for a book not on here, let me know. i might have read it for orals :)

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Do not fear...

... I have SO SO SO many books backlogged for uploading on here. Now that I'm teaching and trying to pull my crap together for the Big Day I can't seem to find the time to post. However, have no fear. I am well on track still, and I will post all these cards in a gleeful post-orals, tipsy free-for-all on November 29th. Or whenever I wake up once this is all over. 

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Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003)

Pithy one-sentence summary:

"The tale of possession is something stranger than the history of a culture of consumption--it is the Story of Americans using things to think about themselves."

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Constance Classen, The Color of Angels: Cosmology, gender, and the aesthetic imagination (1998)

Pithy one-sentence summary:

Gender has informed, at a structural AND representational level, the formation of discourses on sensory perception, with deep implications for the hierarchy of the senses and aesthetic imaginaries.

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Heather Nathans, Slavery & Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787-1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (2009)

Pithy one-sentence summary:

There is a hole in the historiography of representations of slavery on the antebellum stage, beyond the pioneering work on minstrelsy and blackface or examinations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Nathans demonstrates how frequently sentimental portrayals of slavery appear, arguing that "sentimental enterprise" marked true value and made sentimental exchange with oppressed people one strategy for coping with change.

Pithy one-sentence critique of my summary:

I'm quite certain the summary above has several grammatical problems.

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Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (2000)

Pithy one-sentence summary: 

"Women's professional exploitation of the 'innocent eye' at the turn of the century laid the basis for a new social division of labor in seeing... and naturalized the dominations it was assigned to document."

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George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, & the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994)

Pithy one-sentence summary:

To classify men's sexual behavior and identities using the simple polarities of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" would be to misunderstand the complexity of their sexual systems; also, before the 1930s a thriving, public, and complex gay male world flourished in NYC.

Pithy one-sentence critique of this one very large index card:

I have read this whole book multiple times, but I just couldn't fit the whole thing on one card. 

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Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss & the Politics of Queer History (2007)

Pithy one-sentence summary:

By examining refusal, disidentification, and shame--a turning away or "feeling backwards"--ambivalent late 19th and early to-mid 20th century literary texts register the painful negotiation of the emergence of the modern homosexual subject and constitute a political subject position queer scholars need to take seriously, as well.

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Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America's House Museums (1999)

Pithy one-sentence summary:

House museums function as a form of public history and culture that erases history, attempts to unify fractious social contentions, and is always both a product of and a producers of politics. 

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Gary Okihiro, Island World: A History of Hawai'i and the United States (2008)

Pithy one-sentence summary:

Hawai'i and Hawaiians did not just participate in but were formative to the development of the United States.

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Simon Newman, Parades & the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (1997)

Pithy one-sentence summary:

Festivals, parades, badges, songs, and celebrations all expressed a partisan but popular political culture, through which "ordinary" people participated in politics.

Pithy one-sentence critique:

This book doesn't fare as well against Waldstreicher as it might on its own, though the chapter on political material culture was helpful for me. 

Pithy one-sentence critique of my critique:

This book, with Waldstreicher's, forms an example of every grad student's worst nightmare: is there someone else out there writing your book at the SAME EXACT MOMENT YOU ARE?????

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David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997)

Pithy two-sentence summary:

Parading is politics! Through festive innovations Americans practiced a divisive politics and a unifying nationalism.

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David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry:The Uses of Tradition in the Early 20th Century (1990)

Pithy one-sentence summary:

Early 20th century historical pageantry showcased the belief that history could be made into a dramatic public ritual, through which the residents of a town, by acting out the "right" version of their past, could bring about the transformations of the social and cultural future or at least provide a vision of collective and national, cohesive, identity.

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W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (2005)

Pithy one-sentence summary:

Images exert a power over people, and deserve to have that power and its "social field" of relations attended to.

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Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of US Nation Building, 1770-1870 (2007)

Pithy one-sentence summary:

The tradition of historical accounts of public print culture contributing to American national identity is flawed; public print cultures were fragmented, locally-based, and materialist in ways that singular ideologies had to mask in order to produce a rhetoric of national consensus.