Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

Mary Wollenstonecraft's A Short Residence is beautifully written!  This text reminds me of travel narratives like On the Road by Beat authors such as Jack Kerouac.  I am impressed by the self-reflexivity of Mary and her ability to make connections and to empathize with the 'Other'.  In many ways, this text reads like fieldnotes and/or an ethnography on the various societies and cultures she visits, gender issues, capitalism, the environment, etc.  She makes observations of particulars (individuals) but does not make the mistake of applying particulars to the general (the whole nation).  In many ways, this writing from 1796 is much more relexive than many of the anthropological writings from the early 20th century.

ASR demonstrates the importance of narratives as a literary form to understand the human condition, political and social issues.  Narratives allow us to understand the entwined ensembles of relations and to bind events and past knowledge into a coherent framework.  Narratives are also invaluable in their ability to communicate embodied experiences and to evoke memories, thus producing a re-experiencing of performance and context.

I enjoyed this text much more than Burke's text.  A book theorizing ideas of the sublime just took the beauty of the sublime for me.  The sublime is a whole body experience to me which cannot necessarily be put into words.  As I have mentioned in an e-mail to the class in week 2, there is a tendency as humans to overanalyze and I feel like the sublime is just one of those issues that must be felt and enjoyed, not overanalyzed and overtheorized.  "Who feels it knows".

The sublime at Zao, Yamagata, Japan