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"Schwartz, Janelle A"
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OurStoryBridge: Engaging Folklore in the Digital Age
Sponsored by the Keene Valley Library, Adirondack Community is an ongoing local story project that collects and organizes audio stories and related photographs from Town of Keene community members through an online platform. Since the project's launch on June 15, 2019, to the time of this article's writing, online access remains free to its over 225 posted stories and 18 curated podcasts, with more being added regularly. After a lifetime of volunteer work, intermingled with heavy family and career responsibilities-including work in the New York State Assembly and the US House of Representatives-as well as early career work as a school librarian and teacher in New York, Huntley found that her energy and skills would best serve our Keene Valley Library by providing fundraising assistance as a volunteer for their Capital Campaign. Like many rural areas across the country, the small towns and hamlets and villages of the Adirondacks (Keene included) suffer a twofold challenge: on the one hand, we continue to experience population declines among the younger generations due, in part, to a perceived lack of opportunities and a very real dearth of civic resources, such as affordable housing, childcare, and reliable internet connectivity. (Owen 2019) Stories were a community affair, told at home after sundown around a wood stove, neighbors sitting in favorite chairs with their lanterns hanging on pegs outside the front door.
Journal Article
“Not without Some Repugnancy, and a Fluctuating Mind”: Trembley’s Polyp and the Practice of Eighteenth-Century Taxonomy
This chapter focuses on a singular vermiform creature, the freshwater hydra or polyp. It provides a discussion of natural history writing to illustrate a kind of lyricism and aesthetic revaluation built into the articulation of empirical study. Discovered in 1740 by Abraham Trembley, the freshwater hydra or polyp displayed an astonishing variety of wormy behaviors, including the capacity to regenerate from cuttings as if it were a plant. Consequently, subsequent studies of Trembley’s investigations into the polyp emphasize this naturalist’s relative obscurity in the history of science against the polyp itself being a celebrated discovery. Trembley’s account of his investigations into the structure and behavior of this creature implores a way of aestheticizing the vermicular that fruitfully combines the more classic repulsion with an inventive appeal to mutability, indeterminacy, and the irrepressibility of the organic.
Book Chapter
“Art Thou but a Worm?” Blake and the Question Concerning Taxonomy
This chapter focuses on William Blake’s textual oeuvre about worms. They range from earthworm, glowworm, silkworm, and tapeworm to the more generic worm and its adjectival derivative, wormy. Understanding the Blakean worm, in its varied and variable applications, suggests a fluidity of form and sense working against reification while yet depending expressly on it. Analyzing the worm as an aesthetic figure made to represent the material consequences of existing in nature, the chapter demonstrates how and why the presentation of worms in Blake’s poetry gives way to a positive aesthetic of decay. The worm sutures the phases of decay and generation in such a way as to call attention to perpetual process as a defining characteristic of life.
Book Chapter
Transitional Tropes: The Nature of Life in European Romantic Thought
This chapter rehearses eighteenth-century natural history studies of the worm as they manifest at once the exhilaration and the anxiety of discovery, particularly as such discoveries produce the inescapable man: worm analogy. Worms are considered as an agent of change integral to and transformative of both matter and mind. The chapter presents a brief history of taxonomy through the lens of the lower organisms to illustrate classification as a tenuous, if not practicable, practice. It then illustrates the worm’s metonymic capacity to identify a culture of thought that secures the substantiveness of the vermicular (developed through the work of both natural philosophers and natural historians) within a vile aesthetic—an aesthetic that gained its fullest expression in writings of the Romantic era.
Book Chapter
A Diet of Worms; or, Frankenstein and the Matter of a Vile Romanticism
This chapter offers a new natural–historical reading of the relationship between Victor Frankentein and his creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818). Worms foreground, rather than oppose, electrical intervention, transmuting decay into a kind of regeneration. Worms in Frankenstein appear in part in their capacity to decompose dead matter and so continue to represent the cycle of decay and generation intrinsic to imagining nature as an organic whole. The chapter also shows how Victor ultimately severs figurations of the worm from their natural–historical precedent, suspending process to transpose vermicular trappings into an exaggerated artifice of the vile: the creature. Frankenstein reimagines the relationship between the organic and the aesthetic in an effort to present materiality as that which is the aesthetic imaginary self.
Book Chapter