MA Thesis, Michael Bérubé, Pavic

A few people have actually read my dissertation since I made it available online (actually, all theses and dissertations at the University of Cincinnati are now published as .pdfs), so I decided to see if I could rescue my MA Thesis from back in the dark ages (1995) and put that online as well. I lost some of the formatting in the conversion, but “Unfinished Paintings” is now available for anyone who cares to read it. Eight eight year-old stories by a twenty-five year-ole me. Man, I was young back then. Who knows, maybe I'll try and track down my senior honor's thesis and throw that up too. I'm fairly sure the twenty-one year-old me writer would be embarrassing. Of course, ten years from now, I'll probably wonder at the fool who helped write The Unknown.

Partially inspired to do some of this archival work by running across Michael Bérub&eacute'’s blog. Bérub&eacute is one of my favorite progressive thinkers, one of the most productive scholars in English Studies, and he has a keen sense of humor. His blog is a kind of live cultural studies notepad. He's made an impressive effort of making his essays available online. It makes a great deal of sense to me that more people are doing this — online is the logical place for scholarly discourse to take place. Bérub&eacute, who has written in the past about the role of the “public intellectual,” is putting his text where his public is.

If Bérub&eacute hasn't left me with enough reading to get caught up on, there was exciting news last week that Wordcircuits has published a new hypertext by Milorad Pavic, the Serbian author of the print hypertexty novel The Dictionary of the Khazars. The new hypertext is titled The Glass Snail and is described as “a haunting hypertext tale of two people brought together by a shared compulsion.”