Below is a list of GC English Program students, faculty, and alumni who will be attending the 2017 MLA Conference in Philly, as well as a list of scholars from across CUNY. If you know of anyone who will be there […]

We must have belief and meaning, but language cannot necessarily explain itself on these matters. This way of thinking follows Wittgenstein’s decision that the Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus was a failure and h […]

I asked no other thing,

No other was denied.

I offered Being for it;

The mighty merchant smiled.

Brazil? He twirled a button

Without a glance my way:

But, madam, is there nothing […]

Wittgenstein writes, ““It’s as if we could grasp the whole use of a word at a stroke.” — Well, that is just what we say we do” (§191). Can the mind actually summon all of the uses to which a word might be put a […]

The Association for the study of Literature and the Environment is calling for papers for the upcoming 2017 conference in Detroit, Michigan on “Rust/Resistance: Works of Recovery.” Possible topics include: The […]

In § 119 in the “Philisophical Investigations,” Wittegnstein writes,

“The results of philosophy are the discovery of some piece of plain nonsense and the bumps that the understanding has got by running up agai […]

In this post, I will turn to a Journal entry for Thursday 29th April 1802, a day in which Dorothy details two distinct impressions that she has lying in the fields around Dove cottage. I will focus only on the […]

A month ago, I wrote a blog post on the boy of Winander episode in book five of The Prelude. I’m not fully satisfied with my attempt at interpretation and want to use this blog post to return to that book. I am pa […]

In this response, I read Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal alongside a passage in William’s poem ‘Home at Grasmere.’ The aim is to highlight Dorothy’s and William’s parallel, if differently articulated, attempts t […]

Having just read quickly through the first part of Book the tenth for the first time, I’m going to make this week’s response short. If I had to sum up the theme or subject of the first part of the book, I’d say s […]

The ‘Boy of Winander’ episode is situated in book the fifth of ‘The Prelude,’ amidst a meditation about the instructive value of a child’s early contact with Nature and imaginative literature. Introduci […]

The verse paragraph where Wordsworth recounts taking out someone else’s boat in the First Book of The Prelude is lodged between passages that confidently lay out the manner in which a mind, or minds, grow in h […]