Which I heard of only by accident
Frank McCourt grew up there
Transmitted its cultural air
And now I know both facts are in it.
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About Me
- Susan Blum
- Susan Blum teaches anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her interests range from China to the United States, from ethnicity, identity, and nationalism, to multilingualism, to truth and deception, to plagiarism, to the nature of the self, childhood and education, and food and its relationship to culture. She is the author or editor of five books: Portraits of "Primitives": Ordering Human Kinds in the Chinese Nation (Rowman and Littlefield 2001) China Off Center: Mapping the Margins of the Middle Kingdom (co-edited with Lionel M. Jensen) (University of Hawai'i Press, 2002) Lies that Bind: Chinese Truth, Other Truths (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) Making Sense of Language: Readings in Culture and Communication (Oxford University Press, 2009) My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (Cornell University Press, 2009)
2 comments:
Can we leave comments on your profile, professor blum?
A comment on limericks: The limerick is an American invention that was invented as a way of "Americanizing" the Japanese Haiku. I wonder if the form and the beat of the limerick has anything to do with a form or song that was already popular in America. Or to reverse the question: is the Haiku a form of song or a rhythm was popular before the Haiku was standardized? I guess this question is a "what came first? the chicken or the egg" question. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
Em, you raise a good question. I am writing my little Limerick (or, rather, limerick) as a participant in American culture, in which this form is frivolous and eternal. Of course it has a history, but as a user of the form I need not know anything about that history. As a scholar (historian, literary analyst, anthropologist) it would be very helpful for me to know something about its history, but I could not get that simply by interviewing ordinary people. It would put me into the position of needing to locate experts, consult archives, etc.
There is a lot of interesting research on the relationship between "high" and "low" forms of art and literature. Hybridization of art forms seems to move very quickly. I'm not surprised by the connection between limericks and haiku, though I didn't know of it earlier. "Globalization" was not just discovered yesterday....
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