I am an english/education major in my junior year and a member of the rowing team. I love studying and learning about societies and time periods through the literature produced in that time period and society.
Hi! I'm Brenna, and I'm a junior English major. I'm like a confused old person when it comes to technology, so I'm not sure why I decided to take a class like this, but it sounded fun at the time (twitter and blogs are fun I guess). When it comes to literature, I'm mostly interested in modern and visual forms of literature like comic books, movies, television, video games, etc. Becoming a comic book writer would be awesome if that was a realistic goal... Oh, and I really have no idea what "digital humanities" means, so this will be interesting.
My name's Michael, though for some strange reason everywhere I go, I end up being called by my full name. I have moved a grand total of eight times, and without fail, people start calling me by my full name. Grew up in Los Angeles, moved to Beijing when I was 8, then Hong Kong when I was 12, then Wichita, Kansas for my last two years of high school.
Starting my third year at TU, Film and Communications double major. I want to make movies, tell stories in a visual medium but part of that is my interest in how people interact; more specifically why people choose to like the things they do and the cycle of how things can become popular and fade away again. So it goes wihtout saying I'm a huge pop-culture junkie. I've seen every movie and TV show you can think of and care way too much about what Kanye is currently up to.
To begin with, I am a very unserious person who tends to take the path of least resistance. This is largely because the types of literature I've gratitated towards. I've stuck with more philospohical reads for the past few years. Within that vein I tend more towards existentialsim, Nietzche of course, I've read a bit of Borges too. My favorites authors are Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. The polarity within their writing, the manic bouncing of the walls of their own brain, that's when I get most excited about literature. I'd be interested to see some ancient philosophical texts be analyzed like the wasteland.
I've attached a Voyant ngram of "Humor, Comedy, and Tragedy" in The Little Review. These topics interest me because I typically consider Modernism to be a hyper-serious artistic movement. The words "comedy" and "tragedy" uphold this concept and "comedy" is used much less frequently, suggesting "tragedy" is more important. "Humor," however, appears just as frequently as "tragedy" and follows a similar pattern.
Based on our discussion of TLR 5.5 (and the "Hades" episode of Ulysses), I don't really know how to read the ngram data. None of these words appear in this issue of The Little Review. This issue has less critical analysis than other issues and art does not typically categorize itself explicitly. The similar trends of "humor" and "tragedy," though, suggests an unexpected relationship that I'd like to know more about. Obviously, whether something is funny or not doesn't rely on using the word "humor," but these trends show that the editors were interested in humor as much as tragedy.
Using the Yifan Hu algorithm, I noticed that the "Irony" node was connected to "Death," "Greatness," and "Poetry." While we discussed how Yeats eulogizes Gregory with a somewhat sarcastic tone and Bloom's irreverant thoughts at the funeral, I did not expect irony to connect to greatness or poetry. Poetry seems to be the only sacrosanct thing in The Little Review. Although the connection likely means that these poems utilize irony, Gephi's presentation suggests that the poetry itself is compromised by its irony similar to death. Having discussed the problematic attitude toward death in class, the connection between these four items encourages a reader to understand the poetry with the same sense of deflation. Furthermore, the irony node overlaps the mediocrity node. Does this mean that irony and mediocrity share more in common that the modernist lead on? I doubt it, and it's more likely TLR used irony to attack mediocrity. Nevertheless, Gephi brings these two topics together in a way that makes me want to re-evaluate their relationship.
When I change the layout to Fructherman Reingold (with the Ego node still focused on irony), irony becomes the central node along with mediocrity and praise. Again, Gephi suggests that irony compromises every topic in TLR. The FR layout heightens the sense of irony even more than the Yifan Hu layout by centralizing it as its topic. After removing irony from the Ego filter, the irony node remained relatively centralized. I noticed, however, that Yeats and Joyce were the only writers connected to irony. Eliot and Pound were not. Eliot is the only one of these four not connected to the greatness node.
I think these layouts reveal some insights into the function of irony in TLR. Gephi definitely encourages a re-reading of this issue and makes me want to be a little more suspicious of terms like Greatness and Poetry in general.
I would need to spend more time reading it, but Pound's "I Vecchii" seems to lament the type of art that has to be filtered through censorship. His poem opens, "They will come no more, / The old men with beautiful manners." One speaker says, "Oh! Abelard," possibly alluding to Pierre Abelard who had a famous love affair with Heloise (according to Wikipedia—this allusion possibly arises in other parts of this poem). This speaker, however, ends abruptly "as if the topic / Were much too abstruse for his comprehension." Pound ends his poem by evoking Voltaire as a figure of free speech.
Searching for "Censorship" through the tag filter lend me to and advertisement in The New Freewoman called "To Overmen." 
This advertisement calls for "Brave Men and Women of independent means" to join an expedition to discover and colonize a state free of censorship. These works are linked by their shared interest in censorship. The advertisement mentions colonization, which was likely a problematic term for Pound. Pound's use of multiple languages suggests an antinational form that incorporates differences instead of focusing on boundaries, which colonization suggests.
Searching the timeline for Pound's other work yields mostly his criticism. One of his works, "The Revolt of Intelligence," criticizes journalism. He argues that journalist set up the appearance (and pretension) of knowing every topic they must cover from Monday to Saturday. As a foil to journalism, which focuses only on the daily events, literature is "concerned with the permanent elements of life; it often bridges the gap from the profound to the trivial by contemporaneous detail." Literature, according to Pound, is superior to journalism because it consumes journalism (the "trivial" and "contemporaneous") and connects it to something significant.
When I used the genre filter and magazine filter on the timeline, I found that most of the content related to World War I. The items cataloged in the timeline have titles like "Fatigue," "Youth and Age," "The Veteran," "Senility," "Decay," and "Whispers of Immortality." Even if these works do not address the war directly, they indirectly suggest a thematic link through topics of death and decay. Using the last two filters suggests that Pound avoided discussing the war (according to our timeline data).
The largest drawback of the timeline is that it is incomplete. If it were near-complete, it would be very useful for researching a specific time period in a magazine's or author's publication. The keywords makes it easy to expand and contract the research field according to my own interests. It also helps to historicize works by showing what else is going on in the magazine's publishing run or the author's other works. The timeline has started to help me make connections with Pound's interest in censorship and literature and other contemporaneous works discussing similar topics.
In searching through the Interactive Timeline, I was unable to come up with any connections to the materials that I brought in for today’s class. While there are a few items tagged for “Imperialism,” they focus primarily on discussing the topic in a strictly European focus, whereas I am more interested in the discourse of American imperialism and World War I, particularly in regards to Native Americans.
The only items available on the Interactive Timeline for the authors that I brought into class were the items that I entered. Rather than speaking to the output of these authors leading up to and during World War I, these results speak to a lack of coverage of their works and Poetry on the Timeline, as a cursory search on the MJP exemplifies that all three authors published in Poetry in the years leading up to and through World War I.
Using the Topic filter, I was able to come across “The Indian” from Owl (May 1919) and “Give Him Room” from Poetry (May 1915). Joseph Crawhall’s painting speaks to the depictions of Native Americans which speak to depictions of Native Americans around World War I as well as the broader theme of nativism in modernist aesthetics. By espousing an allowance for experimentation, Harriet Monroe’s piece serves as an inherent justification for her later discussion of the aesthetics of Native American oral poetry. In spite of the difficulties identifying meaningful relations to other pieces, using the topic filter seems to be the most productive means to seek out connections, especially if the topic is under represented on the Interactive Timeline.
In filtering to all content from Poetry on the Interactive Timeline, the contents of Poetry seem to be solely focused on World War I throughout the war years, not only in the poetry but also the content of the advertisements.
Because of the specificity of the discourse that I was interested in researching today, the Interactive Timeline did not seem to be particularly useful. The primary drawback seems to be that there needs to have been pre-existing interest in the discourse in order for it to be a tool beneficial to an individual’s research agenda. Without any work done by others, the timeline becomes cumbersome in having to troll through all possible avenues rather than being a means to efficiently whittle down results.
Howard Unger's "We Who have Lost"
Wyndham Lewis's "The Ideal Giant"
Ezra Pound's "Mr Styrax"
Here is a link to a hypertext site that doesn't hurt my eyes. http://wasteland.windingway.org/poem I find it very useful and as said it doesn't hurt your eyes and gives you direct sources as hypertext sites hould. I've been referencing this site a lot for my paper, and for it's direct links to the works.
I'm sure people have already found this though but if not here it is!
Here is what I have so far of my map though I think it's pretty much done. Also I claimed that the capital of Hell, Pandemonium and the Island of The Tempest are London/England since I couldn't get over the fact they didn't have their own place and it made sense to me. After all, both end up violent places and liot talks of violence and crim in The Wasteland.
View The Wasteland: A Game of Chess in a larger map