Goodbye & Hello

Hello! Reading the various discussions that are taking place on the message board & blogs has been a fantastic experience. I have so many thoughts swirling around & I hope soon enough to capture them here at length. As for my own situation - I'm currently in a kind of geographical limbo. I am moving to Bristol, UK for a year to undertake a research project that I hope will be funded by the Worldwide University Network (my application is in process). Here's a very brief abstract of my proposal:

A Study of Generic Textures in Augustine's De Civitate Dei (=City of God)

I plan to conduct a thorough analysis of the various literary textures in Augustine's De Civitate Dei. Augustine's work encompasses twenty-two books, integrating the spheres of theology, hagiography, history, anthropology, philosophy, and polemic. Generally this text is treated as a mineral resource by historians and theologians, who extract bits of information from specific chapters. I propose instead to examine the work for its own sake, from the perspective of a literary scholar. An extensive catalog and treatment of the various literary genres represented in De Civitate Dei does not currently exist, and such a study would be the initial phase of my project. The second phase would examine the fortuna of the text in late antiquity. Is the generic flavor of a particular Augustinian passage a factor in how it is used in later historical compendia (e.g. the sixth-century anthology compiled by Eugippius)? With regard to this question, one must consider that late antique authors crossed generic boundaries in innovative ways. Examples include Boethius, whose Consolatio Philosophiae (=Consolation of Philosophy) incorporated narrative, philosophical argument, polemic, and poetry, each to different ends. Hagiographers and chroniclers likewise exploited and combined different genres for literary effect. I would like to examine how various genres used in De Civitate Dei were understood (or misunderstood) within this hotbed of literary development. I am especially interested in how sections of Augustinian polemic are used in later works.

While technologically this project sounds a little mundane, there is a great need for such a study in all fields that use Augustine's vast corpus (fields including philosophy, political science, history, theology, anthropology, literature, linguistics, ethics, and many more). Augustine's City of God is troubling to a lot of people because of its size and thoroughly medieval organization. Books are divided into chapters (which are really more like paragraphs, usually), and Augustine easily slips from one generic texture into another - a discussion of theology may quickly segue into a kind of Christian polemic (e.g. railing against the ridiculousness of pagan gods). One thought I've had is an electronic edition of the text that uses tags to categorize each chapter according to genre (and perhaps other criteria as well). I'm really interested in making ancient/medieval encyclopaedic works accessible both to specialized scholars and the lay-person - more on this in posts to come, but I do think that modernity can learn & admire the advanced cognitive/artistic processes at work in these elaborate caches of information - information ranging (quite literally) from the mundane to the divine.

More to come once I'm settled overseas. I'm looking forward to the wonderful influence foreign scenery seems to have on my writing (both academic & creative), and I look forward to blogging frequently in the coming weeks.