H is for Human

Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2010

Kyenote paper at Conference on H.D. and Feminist Poetics, Lehigh University, September 17-19, 2015. The paper presents vignettes of my experience as a graduate student and young faculty member working on H.D.; it juxtaposes these experiences of emergence to two scenes of "unveiling": Mary's scarf slipping off her head with Kaspar in The Flowering of the Rod in the context of HD's travels to Turkey and Egypt, 1922-23 and Egyptian feminist leader Huda Shaawari's sensational removal of her veil at the Cairo train station in 1923.

The work offered here represents the gist of a volume envisaged in 1980 by the author, who moved on to other projects after retirement from his position as Reference Librarian of Harvard's Littauer Library in 1990. These essays form a coherent book (slightly corrected, and updated to 2013 in the notes by the editor). They were born of the curiosity of an eclectic mind-a scholar-librarian such as existed in the age they treat-and published between 1978 and 1988 in the Harvard Library Bulletin, with one exception, the 1985 essay on Lactantius, published in a Festschrift for a long-time director of the Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies-a periodical and a volume not always readily accessible to all those who might wish to consult them and pursue their suggestive threads and interrelationships in an integrated fashion. The perspectives on questions approached here are often unique, coming from the mind of one able to see things always a little differently from others. In fact, reading Maury D. Feld's work in the various fields he dwelt on from one time to another over his long life frequently changes the way we look at the topics he considered. Feld had a way of turning things over in his mind's eye, to look at them from angles other than those immediately apparent, even to specialists. His mind was, furthermore, quick and deep. His bent and much of his training were philosophical, so he turned everything he wrote on various aspects of history into intellectual and cultural history. Nor did he overlook the social and political contexts; his early work in fact focused on the social science of the military-a fact I had not known before beginning this project, though I had been a friend and colleague of Maury Feld's since 1978, when we met at the New York Conference "Humanism in Rome"-and his understanding of the political interactions of people informed his thinking in every area he touched on (as was appreciated by Giuseppe Lombardi in his 1991 review article cited in n. 20, below and appearing in English as Appendix II, below). It need not be pointed out that the terms «humanist» and «humanism» in the context of Renaissance Italy refer to the scholarly and didactic movement currently accepted as being based on the studia humanitatis of the Classical age.

New Perspectives, 2018

Never content to rest on our laurels, New Perspectives again breaks new ground by publishing not one but two cultural cuts. And what a way to do so-with extracts from Laurent Binet's globally acclaimed novels HHhH and The 7 th Function of Language. Runaway literary successes, bestsellers translated into more than 30 languages and reviewed in the Anglosphere by publications including The Guardian, The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Washington Post, the FT … and now, excerpted in New Perspectives, so for a moment let us rest on our Laurents. HHhH, Binet's debut novel, which won the Prix Goncourt and a host of other awards, tells a story that's been told many times before. Well, really it tells at least three stories that have been told before.

The alphabet of history is a short description of mysterious, insufficiently explained, historical sources and occasions, summarized from the book The Unknown Era of the Megalith. From the appearance of upright man, to archaic Homo sapiens and thus evolutionarily complete, modern Homo sapiens, the development of hominin has had one continuity and evolutionary sequence through several different groups and human species, on different geographical areas and at different time intervals. Numerous oases of humanization have been and remain places of emergence and development of archaic people of multiregional origin. On the letter A is the theory about Atlantis in the Adriatic Sea, in the sea which for the most part, in the not so distant past, was land. Monumental stone blocks, known as stećaks, scattered throughout the Western Balkans and designated as medieval tombstones, are essentially the heritage of an even older, prehistoric culture and as such, are unequivocally artifacts of the two cultures. Anomalies in the solar system, recurring events, and exceptional circumstances on Earth have enabled megalithic construction and made man as builder (creator) of megalithic structures.

Ars & Humanitas

In Nicola Barker’s novel H(A)PPY the individual’s struggle to resist and escape from a virtualized, monitored and uniform world is masterfully reflected typographically. Just as the individual defies this new reality, the text also subverts narrative and typographical norms, inviting readers to partake in a journey of deciphering codes and signs. This article explores the typographical experiments with form, which assist the textual interpretation at the level of other narrative components. It identifies and analyses twenty artifices connected to typographical innovation in the novel in order to expand the possibilities of understanding the novel’s multiple meanings.

2014

Due to its elaborate woodcuts and artificial language, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499, hereafter ‘HP’) has traditionally been presented as a fringe anomaly within the histories of the book and of Italian philology. Other studies have examined the influence of the HP in art and literature, but there has been little study of the role of readers in mediating that influence. This framing of the HP as unreadable visual marvel has impeded consideration of Aldus’ creation as a used text within the wider fabric of humanism. Liane Lefaivre’s conceptualisation of the HP as a creative dream-space for idea generation was a significant step towards foregrounding the text’s readers. This thesis set to testing this hypothesis against the experiences of actual readers as recorded in their marginalia. A world census of annotated copies of the HP located a number of examples of prolific annotation, showing readers making use of the HP for a variety of purposes. Benedetto and Paolo Giovio applied a Plinian model of extractive reading to two copies at Como and Modena, reading the HP in a manner analogous to the Natural History. Ben Jonson read his copy of the 1545 HP as a source for visual elements of stage design. An anonymous second hand in Jonson’s copy read the text as an alchemical allegory, as did the hands in a copy at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. Pope Alexander VII (Fabio Chigi) combed the text for examples of verbal wit, or acutezze, while comparing Poliphilo’s journeys through an architectural dream with his own passages through Rome. Informed by analogy with modern educational media, I have reframed the HP as a ‘humanistic activity book’, in which readers cultivated their faculty of ingegno through ludic engagement with the text.

The Iowa Review

N. Koertge (ed.), New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 2008

Role Model. Because of her publications, her position, even though unpaid, at the American Museum of Natural History, and her teaching in the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole) summer courses, Hyman became a model for young women interested in invertebrate zoology at a time when there were few women professors to serve as role models. As early as 1943 her biography appeared in a book intended to interest girls in careers in science, American Women of Science, by Edna Yost. Although sometimes abrupt with adult visitors who interrupted her work, Hyman always responded to queries from students. In addition, she supported some deserving students financially.

To be a true profession we need to have not only our own science but also our own criteria of quality and that can happen only with critical insight: a risk often vain an rarely awarding. The English edition of the book “Eternity does not live here anymore – a glossary of museum sins” (Zagreb, 2012) is written in a rather self-ironic tone, relaxed and polemical in character and deliberately "naive," as I overtly claim in the Introduction. It is very much intentionally idealistic. As with any criticism, it hurts mostly those whom it neither describes nor concerns and who certainly do not deserve it, and it enrages the others who rightfully recognize themselves in it. I was never very successful in gaining sympathies. It seems to have been, at the time of the publishing, the only book entirely dedicated to the critique of museums. It was always a difficult task to offer a theory that would be equally relevant to the West and the East to stand equally the challenges of desert storm and the tropical rain. In the world of diversity and inequality this critical glossary for some will serve as a reminder of past mistakes, but for others it will be a warning upon the problems, mistakes and dilemma waiting for them. In the meantime, the book was published in Spanish, Russian and Latvian language. I have made it available to all interested readers ( https://www.mnemosophy.com/the-vault ) but academia.edu site is well frequented by the student population which remains my favourite audience. So, I am offering the book in chapters as the readers would be able to deal with the reading more easily, deciding if the rest would interest them at all. Excuses: - Lacking means, the book has remained in Globish, which we, the foreign speakers sustain, but.... - I have been able to offer only the version prior to printing and prior to the last turn of language editing) I greet the benevolent reader! Research Interests: Museum Studies, Heritology, and Mnemosophy