This week I’ve been highlighting some of the emails I get from Academia.edu about research papers written about Emily Dickinson and her poetry. Yesterday’s post – along with a link to posts published earlier this week – can be found HERE.
I don’t read all of the papers for which I receive emails. I glance at the titles, decide whether to keep or delete the emails, and depending upon my interest, I either glance at the papers or save the links for later inspection. However, in composing these posts for this week, I discovered something which I hadn’t noticed before: Academia.edu sends the same email over and over again.
For example, this past Monday I highlighted a paper called “Portrait or Picture: Some Thoughts on a Dickinsonian Conundrum”; info on this paper is HERE.
I received an email about this paper on September 2nd – and then again on September 25th. Hmm…I hadn’t noticed that before – getting multiple emails about the same papers. For the paper I highlighted yesterday, I’d received emails on both 9/18 and 9/26 (yep, on the very afternoon of the day I’d published the post).
Late last week I received an email about a paper entitled “Disavowing Elegy: “That Pause of Space” and Emily Dickinson’s Discourse of Mourning” by Cate Mahoney (neither the email nor the article provided info on Ms. Mahoney), and it turns out that this paper had been a featured article in The Emily Dickinson Journal (a publication of the Emily Dickinson International Society) – Volume 24, Number 1, 2015, pp. 52-71. I hadn’t noticed that before either – that past EDIS Journal articles were included in Academia.edu’s emails.
To be honest, I thought the title sounded familiar. I'm a member of the EDIS, and I receive the bulletin regularly – but would I really have recalled an article’s title from 2015? I don’t think so – but I know that at some point in the recent past few months I was reading and/or writing about “the pause of space.”
That phrase comes from a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “In July of 1874, a few weeks after her father’s death, Dickinson responded to a letter of condolence from her frequent correspondent and mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson with the short reply: ‘Your beautiful Hymn, was it not prophetic? It has assisted that Pause of Space which I call ‘Father’ - '”
More from the article:
“The 'Hymn' that Dickinson speaks of is a poem Higginson wrote entitled ‘Decoration,’ which was published earlier in the year and describes the speaker of the poem laying flowers on the grave of one of the nameless Civil War dead. Dickinson ostensibly thanks Higginson for writing the poem because it has helped her with her grief. But the phrase is more complex than that. While it may be inferred that Higginson’s poem helps Dickinson, what she actually says is that the poem has helped her father, or what her father has become: a ‘Pause of Space.’”
I don’t read all of the papers for which I receive emails. I glance at the titles, decide whether to keep or delete the emails, and depending upon my interest, I either glance at the papers or save the links for later inspection. However, in composing these posts for this week, I discovered something which I hadn’t noticed before: Academia.edu sends the same email over and over again.
For example, this past Monday I highlighted a paper called “Portrait or Picture: Some Thoughts on a Dickinsonian Conundrum”; info on this paper is HERE.
I received an email about this paper on September 2nd – and then again on September 25th. Hmm…I hadn’t noticed that before – getting multiple emails about the same papers. For the paper I highlighted yesterday, I’d received emails on both 9/18 and 9/26 (yep, on the very afternoon of the day I’d published the post).
Late last week I received an email about a paper entitled “Disavowing Elegy: “That Pause of Space” and Emily Dickinson’s Discourse of Mourning” by Cate Mahoney (neither the email nor the article provided info on Ms. Mahoney), and it turns out that this paper had been a featured article in The Emily Dickinson Journal (a publication of the Emily Dickinson International Society) – Volume 24, Number 1, 2015, pp. 52-71. I hadn’t noticed that before either – that past EDIS Journal articles were included in Academia.edu’s emails.
To be honest, I thought the title sounded familiar. I'm a member of the EDIS, and I receive the bulletin regularly – but would I really have recalled an article’s title from 2015? I don’t think so – but I know that at some point in the recent past few months I was reading and/or writing about “the pause of space.”
That phrase comes from a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “In July of 1874, a few weeks after her father’s death, Dickinson responded to a letter of condolence from her frequent correspondent and mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson with the short reply: ‘Your beautiful Hymn, was it not prophetic? It has assisted that Pause of Space which I call ‘Father’ - '”
More from the article:
“The 'Hymn' that Dickinson speaks of is a poem Higginson wrote entitled ‘Decoration,’ which was published earlier in the year and describes the speaker of the poem laying flowers on the grave of one of the nameless Civil War dead. Dickinson ostensibly thanks Higginson for writing the poem because it has helped her with her grief. But the phrase is more complex than that. While it may be inferred that Higginson’s poem helps Dickinson, what she actually says is that the poem has helped her father, or what her father has become: a ‘Pause of Space.’”
Now, my feeling of deja vu (in recognizing the phrase “that pause of space”) could be related to some posts I wrote this past April when I focused on Dickinson’s “solitude of space” – that info can be found HERE.
Who knows – maybe so – but “that pause of space” certainly seems very familiar and feels so recent to me.
By the way, that letter to Higginson can be found HERE.
The article from Academia.edu is HERE.
RSS Feed
