Kulturstudier

Today was the day I set aside to flounder around looking for a theoretical model for my Peer Gynt book. It started out really bad, but I think I caught a glimpse of where I need to take things by the end of the day, so I have to count myself satisfied. I've been thinking of this as a cultural studies project, but I really haven't done any reading in recent cultural studies research or theory in a long time. I had spent some time in the library on Tuesday looking for stuff on consumer and tourist culture, plus some art history stuff (the most well known probably being Hal Foster's The Return of the Real). I had skimmed over the big stack of books I brought back with me, and had actually intended to stay home to read today.

E got me up at four o'clock in the morning with a bed wetting episode (yay new washer and dryer! It was so much easier to deal with than it used to be), however, and since I couldn't fall back asleep I started reading, and I didn't like what I saw. I could just tell that none of what I had brought home was going to work for the project, so after taking E to school I went in to my office. I did a bunch of poking around on databases, and what seemed to work the best was to go to the "best" journal in the subject area (Cultural Studies--the only one at level two in the Norwegian ranking system) and do searches in their archive for relevant terms. Bingo! I downloaded eight articles, and two of them have my research radar going "zing!" A scholar named Lawrence Grossberg has come up with an approach to Cultural Studies that builds on the philosophy developed by Deleuze and Guattari. This branch of Cultural Studies is being labeled "Spatial Materialism" and it combines all the things I love: the non-transcendental (or "monist"--a new word for me--basically a rejection of dualism) philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, a focus on space/place questions, and a concern with cultural production of all kinds, including popular culture and stuff we don't even think of as "culture." If I weren't so outrageously tired I would try to explain it some, but my head is about to hit the keyboard out of sheer exhaustion, so I won't even try.

The only other thing I wanted to add before I crash was that I finally got around to asking an IT person to install Zotero on my computer at work. He came late in the day today, so I got about a half hour of playing around with it in before I had to go home. That's some incredibly clever "reference management software" there! I think this may really change the way I work for the better. It will be especially useful in that I'm writing two books that are going to have some bibliographic overlap, and also because it will make it a lot easier to switch between citation styles. The weird thing, though: Zotero works in Firefox. I had received a message last year from the UiO IT folks saying we couldn't use Firefox any more because of security issues. When I brought that up to the guy who came to set up Zotero, he said he'd never heard of that happening, and that Firefox is what they recommend. D'oh. Further evidence of the inscrutability of UiO IT support, I suppose.

Picked up the tickets for Trolljegeren for tomorrow night...