CUNY Academic Commons | brian mcdonald | Activity https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/members/brianmcdonald/activity/ Activity feed for brian mcdonald. Sat, 01 Jan 2050 18:00:18 -0500 https://buddypress.org/?v= en 30 hourly 2 d55fc5a66455d5dba218b3d32a7afe61 brian mcdonald uploaded Shelley after Atheism to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/431705/ Wed, 13 Apr 2016 01:20:10 -0400 This essay by Colin Jager engages Percy Shelley’s avowed atheism, the historical context for his ‘unbelief,’ and its manifestations in his poetry. I found the article on JSTOR while doing research for a professor. While it’s outside of my area of interest, I found it interesting for its readings of Shelley’s poetry qua atheistic poetry and for its…[Read more]

]]> cd380bb8cb53fa2d99ed2615796c3113 brian mcdonald uploaded The Borges Dictionary to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/431704/ Wed, 13 Apr 2016 01:07:06 -0400 This is “The Dictionary of Borges,” by Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes. The two scholars created what amounts to a comprehensive series of annotations for Borges’s oeuvre. Because of the range and obscurity of Borges’s allusions, the dictionary is interesting for its own sake. I found it on the University of Pittsburg’s Borges Center.

]]> 2ad1c3015d72b8bb9d5ed78b07fe0d2c brian mcdonald modified Borges on Metaphor in Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/430844/ Mon, 04 Apr 2016 19:13:00 -0400 5f4777f941478053c19a141458b8bcbd brian mcdonald uploaded Borges on Metaphor to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/430843/ Mon, 04 Apr 2016 19:12:42 -0400

This is a link to a recording of one of Borges’s lectures given at Harvard in 1967/8, this one, as the title suggests, on metaphor. My interest stems from Borges’s theme here, borrowed from the Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones and similar to suggestions that Borges makes elsewhere, that all words are…[Read more]

]]> 9f1915f3cd2d095c91f001b47f8d2d05 brian mcdonald uploaded Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/430023/ Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:20:15 -0400 This recent essay by William S. Allen explores the idea of “negative transcendence” in the work of Maurice Blanchot, paying close attention to his response to Jean Paulhan and Franz Kafka. Allen describes negative transcendence in almost Derridean terms: “it is a chthonic rather than an ethereal transcendence…rather, it returns to immanence rat…[Read more]

]]> 680c66ad14870f6e9c8871e9bbd2a23b brian mcdonald uploaded Beckett and Philosophy to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/428970/ Tue, 15 Mar 2016 16:50:57 -0400 This is a chapter from the Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, written by Peter Fifield. It focuses on the history of Beckett and philosophy and the various ways in which future scholarship might fruitfully approach Beckett’s texts vis-a-vis philosophy. I accessed it through CUNY’s database of Cambridge Companions online.

]]> c66c92d5862c667cced71f358411cdf9 brian mcdonald uploaded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4LDwfKxr-M to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/428968/ Tue, 15 Mar 2016 16:47:33 -0400 This is a 1973 recording of Billie Whitehall’s rendition of “Not I,” the Samuel Beckett play written the year before. Billie Whitehall describes her close collaboration with Beckett in developing and staging what she interprets as the “inner scream,” a disembodied woman’s mouth speaking a fragmented monologue. She gives a wonderful description of…[Read more]

]]> e39c1d8842ef867c459396abcbbca086 brian mcdonald uploaded One of Blake's Plates (from The First Book of Urizen) to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/428445/ Wed, 09 Mar 2016 17:33:28 -0500 This is just one of Blake’s many plate etchings, a process that he developed as a reversal of traditional relief etching and which allowed him to print his poems and etchings together as a uniquely hybrid art form. After recently reading Bataille, who uses Blake’s verse as an epigraph, I realized how impoverished Blake’s poetry can seem when…[Read more]

]]> 64da86a68c9b64fb4ba7a2c7debbc460 brian mcdonald uploaded Henk de Berg on Luhmann's system analysis to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/428444/ Wed, 09 Mar 2016 17:22:43 -0500 This is an essay on the now ubiquitous question of the relationship between context and utterance, approached through the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. In it, de Berg makes the claim that an utterance is meaningless out of context. I found it through Google Scholar (English language material on Luhmann is in short supply) and ultimately JSTOR.

]]> 80fdf15b0b8a96acac94e906e8175dbf brian mcdonald uploaded Rabaté on Beckett's Ethics to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/427919/ Tue, 01 Mar 2016 04:02:14 -0500 This is a chapter from The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett by one of my favorite critics, Jean-Michel Rabaté. The chapter deals with ethics in Beckett as an unreason: “He postulates an irrational imperative that just states the need to keep on saying, living, and creating.” This, Rabaté argues, constitutes an alternative to the darker side o…[Read more]

]]> 861900b87832da3af525d22c5b3502eb brian mcdonald uploaded The Smart Set Contents Page to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/427916/ Tue, 01 Mar 2016 02:04:28 -0500 I accessed this through the Modernist Journals Project. This is the contents page of an issue of the early Twentieth Century literary magazine, The Smart Set. While it was the first American publication to publish F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, it also fed into and helped to create the pulp fiction boom that gave rise to the modern popular…[Read more]

]]> c4c12e303e7d904642aaac75c980fff2 brian mcdonald uploaded Genetic Wake to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/427379/ Mon, 22 Feb 2016 19:11:06 -0500 This is an article by my former mentor Sam Slote on the appropriateness of genetic scholarship for the study of Finnegans Wake. Genetic scholarship often functions on a theoretical framework that relies on post-structuralist understanding of the inherent instability of any text. In the words of Jean-Michel Rabaté: “Therefore the ‘genreader’ will…[Read more]

]]> bb812a9a41cc18713dea15600150408c brian mcdonald uploaded http://catalogue.nli.ie/Search/Results?lookfor=eumaeus&type=AllFields&submit=FIND&filter%5B%5D=digitised%3A%22Digitised%22&filter%5B%5D=authorStr%3A%22Joyce%2C+James%2C+1882-1941%22 to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/427377/ Mon, 22 Feb 2016 19:00:09 -0500 Because it is impossible (and illegal) to download these images, I’ve simply pasted the URL above. The link is directed to the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce collection; the library has very helpfully digitalized a great deal of its extensive manuscripts. The specific images you will see if you scroll down are handwritten drafts of the…[Read more]

]]> d454d3edb4596f79b0b5eda2951cb4d1 brian mcdonald uploaded The Truth is in the Making: Borges and Pragmatism to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/426710/ Sun, 14 Feb 2016 19:40:11 -0500 Continuing the theme of Borges and pragmatism vs. Borges and post-structuralism, I searched Borges and William James on the “Criticism” section of The University of Pittsburg’s “Borges Center.” The site is an open source for Borges scholarship with a large collection of critical articles on Borges in both Spanish and English. The editor is the…[Read more]

]]> 3e0ec34d0b10db00cd79e3d5b6249b5d brian mcdonald uploaded Habermas on the legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/426708/ Sun, 14 Feb 2016 19:18:15 -0500 Through a JSTOR search on Sartre’s relationship to structuralism, I found a more recent (1992) interview with Jurgen Habermas conducted by CUNY’s Richard Wolin. This felicitous find provided me with a useful framework for Sartre’s famous interview in Telos–beyond Sartre’s relationship to structuralism, the interview provides Habermas’s take on…[Read more]

]]> 1ea46dd8fde3fa893b1bf218ec308c6d brian mcdonald uploaded Nietzsche's Marginalia on Emerson to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/426088/ Sun, 07 Feb 2016 19:49:27 -0500 This article by Nietzsche scholar Mason Golden covers Nietzsche’s marginalia on his German language translations of Emerson’s texts. The connection between Nietzsche and Emerson is interesting as a philosophical alignment of Anglo-American pragmatism (or proto-pragmatism) and continental thought. I became interested in the connection when writing…[Read more]

]]> 75be15fcb314c371dbfe305de9c0ed0a brian mcdonald uploaded Einstein's Letter to the London Times, "My Theory" to Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/426082/ Sun, 07 Feb 2016 19:19:15 -0500 This is a transcript of Einstein’s 1919 letter to the public requested and published by The London Times. It concerns his theory of general relativity, which had been published in 1915, but which only became well-known in May of 1919, when scientists such as Arthur Eddington confirmed Einstein’s exactitude in predicting how light would bend around…[Read more]

]]> e7f4a1f16d26cb900014013893c2e895 brian mcdonald joined the group Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English: English 70000 https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/426081/ Sun, 07 Feb 2016 18:30:52 -0500 37a98a8f428b62c21b3a583cf246a084 brian mcdonald's profile was updated https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/426036/ Sat, 06 Feb 2016 02:53:49 -0500 cc7ff1c6787f7003616eb574e14952bb brian mcdonald became a registered member https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/p/423801/ Sat, 09 Jan 2016 17:31:55 -0500