The Memory Clearing House

I’ve been getting e-mails from the LitSciMed coalition (if I may call them that) for a while now and it seems to me that everything they’re doing is made of excellence, so here I am starting a blog and following them on twitter and doing all sorts of other digital things. I hope this will provide a welcome distraction from the task of reading every periodical published between 1890 and 1912, whilst giving me the same self-satisfaction that actual work does.

Those who have stumbled here by accident, I suppose I had better explain. My research interest is in the Science Fiction published in monthlies between the years named above, or thereabouts. Whilst I am interested in the history of sf during this time (it is underreasearched), this project is not ‘about’ sf; rather, it sees it as a useful fracture point between literature, culture and science. My hope is that interrogating this threshold a little will result in some exciting conclusions about how these areas bleed into each other, and the consequences that bleed has for us.

I’m about two months into this project, which will hopefully become a PhD thesis at some point along the way. I’m currently reading The Idler, a truly excellent magazine co-edited by Jerome K. Jerome (he of Three Men in a Boat), and I have already found a few bona fide Sci-Fi stories which I don’t believe have been reprinted since. The first one I found, published in July 1892, is ‘The Memory Clearing House’ by I. Zangwill, a comic tale which in many ways anticipates that film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) with Jim Carrey. Since finding Zangwill’s story is the only thing I’ve done so far which has given me that famous Warm Research Glow (WRG), I am naming this blog after it. It’s also an appropriate title because my own memory is terrible, and I will probably instantly forget anything I find which isn’t written down here.

I haven’t just been on The Idler: I’m also trying to accumulate a critical perspective by reading works on Periodicals (Mussell, Brake, Secord), Science and Society (Latour, Serres, Ben Goldacre), the History of Science (Richard Holmes) and Science Fiction (Moskowitz, Aldiss, Suvin). My immediate project is reviewing two books on popular science in the twentieth century for the journal Media History. I study at KCL under the supervision of Mark Turner. My favourite food is toad in the hole.

It’s possible, as I’ve remarked elsewhere, that all this is leading up to something.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Research Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.