Post-Christmas Reading

Yang Jiang with a statue of Don Quixote, along with Mayor of Madrid Juan Barranco

Nothing learned on Christmas, except that not all of A's relatives get along so well (ta-tum!).

The day after, we ride with Dave and Felicia to Northeast Harbor. I manage to do a little reading during the drive:

De Almeida, M. W. Barbosa. "On Turner on Levi-Strauss" Current Anthropology, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Feb., 1992), pp. 60-63. A strange place to begin Levi-Strauss, perhaps, but actually this spirited defense of Levi-Strauss' logical consistency certainly intrigues with its conjecture that Levi-Strauss predicts the "entropy" of culture. "The use of entropy arguments can be seen as a reaction to the historical optimism based on a deterministic or evolutionist view of history." In other words, Levi-Strauss was a pessimist who could prove his case. Or at least thought he could.

Sanders, Valerie. "Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing." Literature Compass 1/1 (2003–4), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00113.x (weird, huh? Damned if I know what last code means) I dug up this overview for having one example of a syllabus of how to teach life writing. It attempts to be helpful by calling on us to "examine the way in which Victorian life-writers handle the interplay of narrative, memory, and time" but does not quite seem to get to those terms anywher in its hypothetical (and insipid) syllabus. Nevertheless, there were a few titles that looked good, such as E. F. Benson’s Our Family Affairs 1867–1896 (London: Cassell, 1920), which are said to "reveal the domestic unhappiness of the family of Gladstone’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, whose children and wife were all to some extent homosexual or lesbian." You know I just have to have a look to find out how anyone can be homosexual "to some extent." Note to self: just sit down and read James Olney already, dammit.

Litzinger, Ralph A. "Memory Work: Reconstituting the Ethnic in Post-Mao China Ralph A. Litzinger." Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 13, No. 2. (May, 1998), pp. 224-255.
[Stable URL] This was a meaty article; I'll need to review my notes carefully in the next 24 hours (ahem!) and embed into my dissertation the four points at which Litzinger's readings inform what I want to say about Yang Jiang's life and work. One of these is path by which I will return to speak on the statue of Don Quixote on the campus of Qinghua University. Litzinger gives me the inspiration to write read the statue as a place that illustrates "memory work." (see illustration)