History. Study. Grad.

As of today, January 31st at 8am, the graduate student workers of Temple University Graduate Student Association are on strike.

This comes after over a year of negotiations, in which the university administration has continually obfuscated, talked down to us, and refused the spirit of negotiations. We have come in with proposal after proposal, shaving items down to meet them in the middle, while they lecture us about understanding the definition of negotiations and simultaneously resist any real negotiative change. Our contract expired last February.

Our demands have been painted as unreasonable. Greedy. Selfish. And yet the reality is that we have not received a cost of living adjustment in years. Our average pay among grad student workers is $19.5k a year, in a city where it now costs $37.2k to live. We request a pay of $32k. We are asking for healthcare coverage benefits for our dependents, more than 5 days of parental leave and 4 days of bereavement leave—reasonable requests considering the mass disabling event of the global pandemic. What’s more, our protections from overwork are thin and paltry. We only have each other. We only have the union.

Lets start with the biggest one: Bernie dropped us a tweet.

We’ve had state senators and reps on the line like Nikil Saval and Sharif Street, and many more. Members of the PMA union who just won their strike have been by. We are so lucky to feel the solidarity built into a union-made city.

We’ve got the support of the local teamsters.

But Temple has already started looking for scabs. They are planning to cut not just our pay, but also our healthcare, and to force us to pay the tuition we usually receive as part of our work coverage. If you know anyone in TUGSA and you have a few bucks to spare, I cannot stress how important it is to boost not just our strike fund, but individual Venmo’s, ko-fi’s, PayPal’s, CashApp’s, and any and all other support systems.

Lastly, if you’re in Philly with time to spare, come join us at the picket line for our rally today.

And remember: Temple works because we do.

Now THIS is how you perform bardic poetry. No slow, careful reading like the orator is recording an audiobook. Bards and their like were the original TV. You have to be the soundtrack and the stage directions and not just the words.

When this version of Beowulf got written down (and it is a version, because there’s evidence it was passed around, at least in part, orally), the author included the critical first word, which by itself shows you how and when recited poetry played a part in social life:

Hwæt.

In a word: “Yo shut the fuck up and listen, I’m doin’ the thing.” You have to get peoples’ attention and quiet them down so everyone can hear the story.

My friends, do you want to know what it feels like to time travel? Sit in a room with a bunch of other people and hear an epic poem performed the way your ancestors would have seen it performed.

What name to call Aragorn

What name to call Gandalf

What to call their meals. Boromir thinks, if it is eaten at dinnertime, regardless of whether it is the first meal of the day or not, then it is dinner. Sam thinks it isn't proper to call the first meal of the day dinner. Aragorn suggests they combine the two words but now everyone is fighting over whether it should be called breakfast-dinnner or dinner-breakfast. The fight nearly becomes physical

Whether Legolas or Gimli is winning their daily argument with eachother

If hobbits are regular sized and everyone else is really big, or if everyone else is regular sized and hobbits are small

The same as above except with horses and ponies

If Gimli's beard is real or not. This one started as a joke between Merry and Pippin but then Legolas saw how mad it made Gimli and so continues to bring it up

Inter-hobbit fighting about whether it is called pot-ae-toes, pot-ah-toes, or taters

"Can Legolas really talk to trees, or is he just fucking with us?" Aragorn and Gandalf refuse to weigh in on this

Whether the Ent-draught caused Merry and Pippin to grow or if they just did that on their own. This fight is Pippin vs. Everyone Else

Whether the non-hobbits of the Fellowship would be Tooks, Brandybucks, or Bagginses. This argument is unintelligible to most of them, although Gandalf has the knowledge to be offended when Pippin suggests he would be a Took.

"What would happen if someone ate the ring?"

Fights over whether the elves, the dwarves, or the hobbits tell the story of the reclaiming of Erebor most accurately. Even though Gandalf was there, he just shrugs when anyone asks him

Which variety of pipeweed is the best kind. Merry threatened Gimli to a duel over this one

A mythical map of Wales in Tales from the Mabinogion by Margaret Jones, 1980.

I have mentioned on several thesis diary entries that I keep all my notes and informations related to my thesis in a specific notebook. In one particular thesis diary I think I mentioned a few of the spreads I have created, but since I am now a bit more experienced (and almost at the end of this first notebook) I decided to do a specific post. I also got a couple of suggestions to make a specific post so here it is. It's goint to be a long post, so consider yourselves warned. (I will not include photos of the spread since they would make the post even longer, but if there's people who would like to see a few of them I could always make a separate post!)

I'll start by saying that I am getting my degree in history, which of course influences me on creating certain spreads that are not necessarily useful for everyone else. Although this I feel like the majority of these spreads can be either used by anyone or can be modified according to your needs.

The notebook:

For my own thesis notebook, I got this spyral notebook that has in itself three divided parts. This is in a way helpful, but I prefer things that are a bit more costumizable, so a good alternative could be either creating your own dividers when you need them, or using a binder. Both of these options could be a bit better than mine, because they give you a chance to keep everything as organized as possible. I still found my ways to oranize the notebook, but I'll talk about it later. I personally don't like binders because I find them uncomfortable to work in, and I do not like having loose papers everywhere, but it's a very personal things, and I get how functional they can be.

How to keep your notebook organized (and find things quickly):

If you decided to use a binder you can skip this part, but if you have a regular notebook these are things that are helping me to keep everything easy to find.

Big and bold headers at on each page can help you find things quickly, you could also decide to colour code them.

An index. I personally added post it notes at the beginning of each pre-made section of my notebook and wrote the contents as I was creating different spreads. Once I'll be done with the notebook I will add a proper index page to help even more.

Tab notes. These have become my best friends, I got a set of them with little owl drawing at the end of each, and since these illustrations are very different from one another in colour and design, I decided to assign a specific meaning to each one, to help me find important pages quickly. I have many spreads of the same kind scattered in the notebook, with this system I make sure I find everything super quickly.

Colorful dividers, if you are collecting you notes in a binder these are the best thing you can do to keep everything tidy. If you do have a notebook, but start working on it with a clearer plan than I did you could decide to do them yourself in the notebook, to have all the same spreads one near the other.

Types of spreads (I have used so far):

These have no specific order other than what I decide. I wrote them down as they are placed in my notebook, but you should order things in the best way for your work, or according to where your work is bringing you at the moment.

General notes. This is one of the most basic but useful spreads I have been using. As mentioned I have a big header on top of each of these spreads, and I have assigned a specific type of tab to find them quickly. I use these spreads for all the informations and thoughts that have no clear place in my notebook. I like to write the date of when I am writing each thing. In these spreads I have annotated part of my research process, reminders for when I had to go to the archive, important things to keep in mind, to do lists, generic informations on books and articles I wanted to read, and so on. These act like a sort of brain dump. I found it to be very useful to reread these notes every once in a while, and I have highlighted the most important stuff I have written on these spreads.

Thoughts and ideas. This is one of the most important spreads, if not the most important. To write an historical thesis you have to pose questions on an event, and use sources to find the answers (this is a very reductive description but it gives you an idea). In this spread I have annotated all the interesting questions that came to my mind, as well as all the interesting thoughts and reasonments that I had while working on the trial I am researching. To have a specific place to write all of these things down is fundamental, it's a place where all the inspiring things you thought of can be together for you to reread and share them with the professor who is following you during this work.

Specific notes/annotations of articles and books you read. These are very similar to what a normal study notebook looks like for me, but some things to keep in mind are: have the basic informations of the article/book written out (title, author, year of pubblication, where you found it, all the stuff that you'll need to quote it in footnotes, and to look for it again in the future), the page on which you find every piece of information you write down (it will save you a lot of time in your writing process). Finally have your own thoughts and ideas written in a different colours, this way you can tell apart the information you got from the book from your own work.

In my case, since I am also working on documents found in archives I have spefic spreads dedicated to notes regarding those documents. They are more or less similar to the previous spreads, but I prefer to mark them with a differet type of tab, that I am using only for archival sources.

Chapter ideas. Once you have a bit more of a plan on what your thesis will look like having a spread to write down all the chapters you'll have to write can be helpful. This way you can tick off each chapter as you write it (you very seldomly get to write things in order, so this way you have a clear plan in mind).

Sources spreads. I would recommend having a digital version of this, as it's going to be useful while you are writing, but I also like to have things written down by hand. In these spreads I simply wrote down the basic informations of all the sources I indend to use in my thesis. To have all of them in one place is a time saviour, and writing things down as you read them will make the task less overwhealming.

Chronology spreads. This is probably very specific for an historical thesis, but maybe someone could find this helpful. I have a couple of spreads with the basic chronology of the events I am studying. This way if I am in doubt whether a certain interrogation happened before or after other important events I have an easy way to access that information. These are very useful for when I work with archival sources that usually just have dates but no context beyond that.

Characters spreads. Similarly having a simple list of all people that play a role in the events can be so useful. You'll come across the same names over and over, but certain people are very loosely spoken of so this type of spread can help remember about them. It's also useful to write down basic informations, so their age, the city they are from, their profession, what role they have in the events, and so on.

Writing brain dump sections to plan ahead your writing, what is going to be in each chapter, in which order, etc. I personally have a specific notes secion, and then I plan on doing a brain dump for each chapter as I work on it. I write down everything I want to talk about in it, and then I just put a bit of order to my ideas, and create a more structured plan. I feel like having these things written down can help a lot. You'll have to remember less things, and you can tick them off as you go which is very satisfying, but also helps you remember about everything.

These are more or less all the spreads I have created and used so far in my thesis notebook. I also use my bullet journal for planning my work, but I will make a separate post on that.

So anyone who has even glanced at my blog knows that a lot of my work is built around an area of literary theory called ‘monster theory’, which is far from a major theoretical discipline. As such I thought I’d give a little run down on what it is and resources that are good in terms of getting started.

Monster Theory is loosely described as the study of monsters, fictional characters that we (humans) deem monstrous. This is usually rooted in the concept of norm/other, which becomes human/monster. The basis of modern monster theory is built on the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who published a paper in 1996 titled Monster Culture (Seven Theses) which included seven different and overlapping views on what monsters are, why we create them, what they mean and how they fit into both literary canon and our society. These seven theses are (very quickly and loosely);

The Monster’s Body Is A Cultural Body: a monstrous being “is born only at [a] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment.” Meaning a monster created for a work of fiction is generally an embodiment of a certain cultural anxiety or fear occurring in a specific socio-cultural moment. For instance, during the 70s and 80s, during the AIDS crisis in the US, you’ll notice a sharp rise in the number of vampire films (creatures who transmit a kind of ‘death’ through bodily fluids, through a highly sexualised penetrative contact).

The Monster Always Escapes: a monstrous being is, in part, so threatening because it is pervasive. The monster might appear dead, only for the corpse to be missing in the final shots of the film. This builds upon the previous point; a cultural anxiety does not immediately vanish simply because the personified monster of it is slain, issues like disease, poverty, homophobia, racism, ableism will ultimately again rear their ugly heads.

The Monster Is The Harbinger of Category Crisis: monstrous beings refuse “to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’,” and resist any kind of systematic structure. In a culture so obsessed with binary oppositions and classifications, things that refuse classification are often a threat to that very system of classification. If the system is not all-encompassing, it fails altogether. This can cause monsters to shake established systems of understanding culture, identity and knowledge. 

The Monster Dwells At The Gates of Difference: “…the monster is difference made flesh […] monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.” Monstrous beings are, as previously mentioned, a cultural body, which also means generally they take on traits of ostracised members of a culture, and act as stand in’s for fears, phobias and ostracisation of these social groups. For example, in a later work by Cohen, Undead: A Zombie Oriented Ontology, he states of zombies; “…we feel no shame in declaring their bodies repulsive. They eat disgusting food. They possess no coherent language; it all sounds like grunts and moans. They desire everything we possess.” And further notes that the generally accepted method of dispatching them is a gunshot to the head–a war crime against another human being. This same rhetoric could easily be applied to conservative white opinions of immigrants–and in fact, the origin of the word zombie can be traced back to the Haitian slave trade route.

The Monster Polices The Borders Of The Possible: to live in the dynamic the monster is predicated upon (norm/other, human/monster), there must, therefore, be a border between the two. The monster can therefore serve as a warning; transgress the boundaries by which you are human, and become monstrous; “…the monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographical, sexual).” The most popular examples of this theory comes in the form of a Disney film: Beauty and the Beast. The Prince does not extend hospitalities to the old woman seeking aid, acting outside an accepted code of conduct for their society, and is therefore rendered monstrous as a result. While this is a more direct example, the trope is pervasive even among works and genres not featuring the supernatural.

The Monster Is Really A Kind Of Desire: the monstrous is often associated with a kind of transgressive or forbidden action, like say…the fact that female villains will often take on intense temptress roles, this is usually in an attempt to enforce and normalise the opposite behaviour. “The same creatures who terrify and interdict can also evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint.”

The Monster Stands At The Threshold…Of Becoming: This thesis is really only a paragraph and is possibly my favourite piece of writing ever so rather than try and explain it I’ll simply let it stand on it’s own: Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge–and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance towards its expression. They ask us why we have created them.

I am not sure how well they will work for your field, but here are three that I found helpful : 

KNOPF, Doing a Literature Review (2006)

McMENAMIN, Process and Text: Teaching Students to Review the Literature (2006)

RANDOLPH,  A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review (2007)

Okay. So. We could probably have guessed that this tweet was like waving a red flag in front of a bull, but here we are anyway.

(Tagging @artielu​ because I know she enjoys my history smackdowns and this is right in her wheelhouse of interest.)

First: nobody denies that the Alabama bill and similar efforts are absolutely heinous, are designed to be test cases to get Roe v. Wade overturned, and are deliberately gratuitous in their constitutional overreach and general horrible Handmaid’s Tale nature. But for well-meaning liberals, such as above, calling them representative of “medieval cruelty and ignorance” is a) not accurate and b) counterproductive. If we insist on using “the medieval” as a conceptual category inferior to “the modern,” these recent bills bear a complicated, at best, resemblance to medieval canon law and social practice. And there was never, I promise you, any law that prescribed a 99-year jail term for abortionists. So if we want to point out how the modern Republican party is actually much worse than their medieval counterparts, we can do that, but also: trust me, this is thoroughly modern cruelty and ignorance, and we should insist on that distinction.

First, obviously, women’s bodies have always been subject to a social discourse of power, control, gendered anxiety, and attendant responses. This was certainly the case in the medieval era, but our modern interpretations of that discourse can be… iffy, at best. In discussing the feminization of witchcraft in the late 15th century, M.D. Bailey critiques how scholars have tended to take the Malleus Maleficarum, the famous witch-hunting handbook, as representative of a self-evident and endemic medieval and clerical misogyny. In fact, the Malleus was the equivalent of the extreme right wing today, was relatively quickly condemned even by the church itself, and was largely reworked from earlier ecclesiastical anti-sodomy polemics, because the idea of “disordered gender” was certainly one that occupied medieval moralists and theorists. I have discussed the Malleus in other posts, but while it certainly is virulently and systematically misogynist, it also was a work of rhetoric rather than a reflection of historical reality. Medieval misogyny absolutely and obviously existed, and it impacted women’s lives, but we also really need to get rid of The Medieval Era Was Bad For Women, ™, Therefore Everything Was Worse Back Then.

The possibility of magic being used to cause impotence/loss of fertility was another concern, and one of the main anxieties about the practice of witchcraft was that it would bring “sterility” and irregular sexual activity (usually with the devil). However, an extensive corpus of contraceptive and abortifacient knowledge has existed since antiquity, and in tracing the representation of unborn children in medieval theological thought, Danuta Shanzer notes:

My findings suggest that it is overstatement to claim that from the start Christianity considered the fetus a living being from conception. Augustine is a major agonized and agnostic counter-example.

Hence, contrary to right-wing claims that the church has “always” thought that life began at conception (spoiler alert: the church has never once “always” thought the same thing on anything), it was almost never the case in medieval legal or theoretical practice. Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians argued that “ensoulment” or the separation of the fetus into a living being happened at quickening, when the baby could move on its own (which medieval medical treatises had various standards for measuring, but it would be the equivalent of about 20 weeks of pregnancy). Monica Green, a leading medieval medical and gender historian, has examined a vast corpus of obstetric and gynecological Middle English texts, and in “Making Motherhood,” argues:

Texts on women’s medicine might also be concerned to “unmake” or prevent motherhood, either by preventing conception in the first place or expelling a dead foetus that would not emerge spontaneously. Abortion per se was almost never mentioned.

In other words: abortion was not paid attention to in nearly the same way we do today, and while canon law, in theory, prescribed penalties for contraception and abortion, historians have consistently (surprise!) discovered a disconnect between this and secular law and everyday practice. And while some twelfth-century (male) jurists did attempt to equate miscarriage with homicide, and to install it in canon law, these laws were almost never practically used or prosecuted. In Divisions of Labor: Gender, Power, and Later Medieval Childbirth, c. 1200-1500, Rebecca Wynne Jones surveys the extant literature and notes:

In his 2012 book The Criminalization of Abortion in the West, Wolfgang Müller documents how 12th‐century jurists’ increasing tendency to equate violence resulting in miscarriage with homicide was institutionalized in canon law. Though this development led to the widespread criminalization of abortion in ecclesiastical jurisdictions, Müller has little to say about gender relations on the ground. Rather, by highlighting local communities’ reluctance to prosecute, he presents laws that might once have been seen as proof of a medieval “war on women” as legislative enactments whose practical power remained limited.

Once again: medieval ecclesiastical proscriptions against abortion were, at best, sporadically enforced, communities were reluctant to actually prosecute women or to criminalize early-term pregnancy loss, and church law was not identical with secular law, which was the standard ordinary people used and were subject to. This concords with what Fiona Harris-Stoertz has found in her survey of pregnancy and childbirth in twelfth and thirteenth-century French and English law:

It is striking that in these thirteenth-century English texts, no penalty was assigned for the loss of less developed fetuses. This absence flew in the face of high medieval church legislation, which, in theory at least, took all contraception and abortion seriously. John Riddle finds that the idea that early-term abortion is less serious than late-term abortion occurred in the work of Aristotle and appeared occasionally throughout the early Middle Ages, particularly in church penitentials, although it also appeared in the early medieval Visigothic code.

While late-term abortion of potentially viable fetuses was still a crime, secular law still essentially held to quickening as the moment at which a pregnancy could not be terminated. Before that, however – anywhere in the first 4-5 months of pregnancy – it could often be dealt with, if desired, without any penalty. Anne L. McClanan has investigated the material culture of abortion and contraception in the early Byzantine period. And Ireland, which as recently as last year remained one of the last European countries to outlaw abortion, had a medieval hagiography that actively canonized abortionist saints:

Medieval hagiographers told of Irish Catholics par excellence, the saints themselves, performing abortions as well as of “bastards” becoming bishops and saints. In hagiography and the penitentials, virginal status depended more on a woman’s relationship with the church than with a man. To my knowledge, no other country in Christendom, medieval or modern, produced abortionist saints or restored virgins, apart from the nun of Watton. Why Ireland is among the few European countries to maintain severely restrictive policies on reproduction remains an unanswered question, but it clearly cannot be attributed to its medieval Catholicism.

Last part bolded because important. Modern bans on abortion don’t relate to how these notions were conceptualized or used in the past, and they are not holdovers from The Medieval Era ™. They don’t represent medieval concerns or medieval ideas of gender, or at least certainly not in a direct genealogy. Even as late as the seventeenth century, when ideas of childbirth, marriage, and reproduction were more strictly controlled, the period prior to quickening, or the movement of the baby, was still generally not penalized or subject to legal control or coercion. So in sum: while religious moralists and canonical lawyers absolutely did object to abortion (aka right-wing men, the same ones who object to it today, funnily enough), in secular law and daily practice, a pregnancy that was terminated prior to quickening was not subject to practical prosecution or legal punishment, and medieval women had access to a vast corpus of gynecological texts, medical practices, herbal recipes, rituals, and charms intended to accomplish a wide range of fertility goals: conception, contraception, abortion, a healthy pregnancy and delivery, and so forth. I also answered an ask a while ago that discussed all this in detail.

Also: abortion was explicitly mobilized as a wedge issue in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of the religious right in American politics, and that happened not because of abortion, but in resistance to the IRS penalizing them for refusing to racially integrate evangelical schools and colleges. Randall Balmer has written about the history of the “abortion myth”; do yourself a favor and read it. The Southern Baptist Convention campaigned in 1971 for the liberalization of American abortion laws, and hailed the 1973 Roe decision as a win for the rights of the mother. (Oh how the mighty have fallen?) The right wing came together as a political force to resist racial integration, exemplified by their loss in the 1983 Supreme Court case Bob Jones University v. United States. But since it was not a winning political strategy (yet, at least) to fly the flag of “let us be racist in peace,” they, as Balmer discusses, created the “abortion myth” to make themselves look better and to present a narrative of holy/moral concern for the lives of the unborn. The reason abortion is as huge as it is in the present American political landscape owes to modern religious conservatism and extremism, resistance to racial equality, ideological control over women, and other bigotry, and (again) not to medievalism or medieval practices.

Well. I never thought that THAT was a title that I'd be putting on a review, given that, as a medievalist, a lot of my public outreach work involves, specifically, disproving the notion that we're all a bunch of old, straight, rich, white men, but...every once in a while...academia proves me wrong.

Some people on medievalbr might be aware of the works of Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm, a black medievalist who is well known for calling out racism in the academy, especially for her work leading the discussion on the racist use of the term "Anglo Saxon" to describe the inhabitants and period of time in early medieval English history. She has faced a lot of harassment, both from white supremacists outside the field and racists in the field, who get uncomfortable whenever someone comes along to upset a status quo that benefits them

Dr. Rambaran-Olm was recently asked to write a review for an upcoming book, The Bright Ages, by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele, which purports to "refute common misperceptions of the European Middle Ages, showing the beauty and communion that flourished alongside the dark brutality—a brilliant reflection of humanity itself." She did as requested and wrote a lengthy review that criticized aspects of how the book dealt with its subject matter, a review that was then shut down, first for "word count", then for "lack of generosity". (Aka "It was balanced and presented critiques as opposed to being uniformly positive"...which is supposed to be the purpose of a professional academic review, we aren't exactly working according to the kudos system here.)

(The full email correspondence is available on Dr. Rambaran-Olm's twitter, here.)

Dr. Rambaran-Olm has published a review on medium, and, in the final few paragraphs, has this to say, as a measure of exactly what the editors of the publication were concerned about:

The Bright Ages may not exclusively be for white readers, but it certainly is for neoliberal readers who want to believe they are progressive and demand superficial fixes to complex problems and issues. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s any illusion that the book aims to convert white supremacists with this material, nor would any book really be able to achieve that. Still, it’s a safe book for a receptive liberal audience. It’s not a radical book, but that must be accepted at this moment, because the field is not ready for anything particularly radical.

Terrifying.

It should be noted that "read this with a critical eye" should be part and parcel of reading any book on the middle ages. If they wanted their book to get a shred of the respect they seem to believe it merits, they would understand this. This is intended to be a textbook for a general audience, but it doesn't include footnotes, citations, or, apparently, any room for critical thinking, especially from the people of color that it claims to support. She deserves better, and so does the public.

Since coming forward about her experiences, she has faced a lot of harassment from inside the field. Everyone involved on the other end of this has been very mature about the entire thing, blocking reviews from anyone pointing out what's happened. There have been allegations that she is not really a medievalist, that she's not even really black. (If she isn't a medievalist, neither are any of us, and...as someone who's seen her speak in person, I can say that she is most definitely black, as her various photos suggest. It shows how low they're willing to go.)

What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.

Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.