“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, January 21, 2012

Dissertated

Congratulations are due to Rachel Swinkin, who has just finished an excellent dissertation called The Limits of Sympathy, on animals and poetics in the long eighteenth century. I'm her first reader. Finishing can be a weirdly anticlimactic or depressing affair—you get familiar with it if you go on to do other projects, but when you first experience it, you think there must be something wrong. There isn't.

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