The Loving Hope of Working Groups and Humanist Desiring-Revolutions

In the spirit, not of meta-blogging, but ofdecentralized blogging, I thought I would highlight here some very interesting weblog posts and comments that have been unfolding, intra-textually and intra-otherwise, between two of my favorite new graduate student blogs: wraetlic anddaniadean. I want to do this, partly because these two bloggers [Daniel Remein and Sarah, respectively] have engaged recently in a dialogue across each other’s weblogs that I find fascinating and stimulating, but also because some of what they are thinking and writing about converges nicely with an essay I have been knee-deep in now for about four weeks on the “state of the field” of Anglo-Saxon studies, “Goodbye to All That: The State of My Own Personal Field of Schizoid Anglo-Saxon Studies” [which will be appearing in The Heroic Age, Issue 11, forthcoming any day now], which is also to say: Dan and Sarah are helping me to close in on the completion of what has been for me a very painful essay to write. And without knowing it (I assume), Dan and Sarah have also been hitting on a subject that has been a central preoccupation of my friend and colleague Michael Moore in his work in medieval and later forms of humanism: the importance of personal freedom—a preoccupation that has crept into my own thinking and given me some pause when trying to consider what the chief end of the humanities should be…[Read the rest at In the Middle]