Earlier this month NPR ran a piece decrying academic "jargonitis." (What is "jargonitis", you ask? Well....) That in itself is hardly news. The jeremiad against academic language (jargon, theory, "academic writing" altogether) is a familiar extension of the ivory tower vs. real world dichotomy (sorry: idea that two things are different) that shapes so much media coverage of higher … Continue reading Whose Jargon? Or, All of us Creating Teamwork Inventing Opportunities Now
Month: April 2016
Return to Penis Island: Or, the surprising trajectories of early modern population thought (Part 3: Conclusion)
[Earlier episodes: Part 1; Part 2] As we’ve seen, there were a variety of lenses through which to read Neville’s novel, from travel account to political parable to biblical allegory to niche pornography. The Isle of Pines’s close attention to population registered differently depending on the lens. To readers who kept a weather eye on … Continue reading Return to Penis Island: Or, the surprising trajectories of early modern population thought (Part 3: Conclusion)
Interlude: Ask a Sesquecentenarian
Most people who wrote about population in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries took the extreme longevity of the ancients -- some of them, anyway -- as a given. It was, after all, Scripture. There were debates about whether everyone before the Flood had lived for hundreds of years (969, in Methuselah's case), or just … Continue reading Interlude: Ask a Sesquecentenarian
Return to Penis Island: Or, the surprising trajectories of early modern population thought (Part 2)
[Earlier episode: Part 1] The Old Testament was familiar with the likes of George Pine: long-lived, polygamous survivors of disaster who founded new societies in bounteous and conveniently depopulated landscapes. In the Isle of Pines, for his part, Neville described a second Eden, “always clothed in green, and full of pleasant fruits, and variety of … Continue reading Return to Penis Island: Or, the surprising trajectories of early modern population thought (Part 2)
Return to Penis Island: Or, the surprising trajectories of early modern population thought (Part 1)
Henry Neville (1620-94) was a republican political thinker in an era of civil war, regicide, constitutional experimentation, and resurgent monarchy; he translated Machiavelli’s works and traced republicanism’s heritage back to Moses. He is now better known, however, for a short work of faintly pornographic utopian fiction, The Isle of Pines. Couched as a Dutch sea-captain’s … Continue reading Return to Penis Island: Or, the surprising trajectories of early modern population thought (Part 1)
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