Annotation 2

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Testing.

Hi, I like this passage. It is beautifully written.

I see irony in this passage because....

Jane Austen is really mean to Mrs. Bennett here. She is making fun of her.

My thoughts about this passage.

spacing seems off here around the punctuation

spacing seems a little weird here too

Maybe do a quick run through of the rest of the text to check for these.

Is the extra space here from the original?

Beautifully said.

The details lend hilarity to the choice.

What is the cause of predestination in a world like the one Wilde is elaborating for us?

So beautifully said. And so horribly sad in the context of the history of gay rights.

What comfort it would be if it were so easy to determine our futures. How boring also.

This is a slightly perplexing description. For someone who hasn't read story, they may not know what you mean. Also, it might be a spoiler...

This is very, very cool!

This phrasing is a touch awkward. It feels a little elliptical. Is there a way to make it more straightforward?

Great details!

Is there a typo here?

The cabinet photograph is a particular type that was popular in the 19th century. Might be worthy of some research.

The relationship between icognito identities and photographic technology's presumption to verisimilitude is worth exploring perhaps.

This comma seems misplaced. Let's check it and correct or not accordingly.

There seems to be a typo here.

Let's fix this formatting.

Often in this story there is a word after a piece of punctuation like this that isn't capitalized. Is that correct?

This is peculiar phrasing--the subject shifts from third to first person in the same sentence.

Is this also a typo?

You don't need the extra space before the hyphen.

What kind of immersive experience is offered in this paragraph?

What a peculiar way of referring to the confined life we are about to dive headfirst into.

Where else do we see watchtowers in literature?

Seems to be a little typo here.

Seems to be a little typo here.

Seems to be a little typo here.

This in one of the most thorough and enticing headnotes yet! This last sentence, though, is a run-on and could use a little tweaking. It's phrased like a question but seems to be missing its question mark.

The Enclosure Acts turned commonly-used public property into private, effectively privatizing rural industries and making inequality more stark in rural England.

From Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.

It's an archival story!

"Afflatus" is a divine inspiration--a fascinatingly peculiar way to describe her literary motivations.

We tend to think about artists as solo-creators, working away in studios all by themselves, often long into the night. This exhibition reveals an utterly different dimension of artistic production in the Victorian period--as the authors here say, "the collaborative endeavor" that was "Nineteenth-century book production." When looking at the images that accompany this exhibition, I am struck indeed by the multi-sensory experiences these images offer to us. I am struck, for example, by the way that the lady in The Lady of Shalott is both turned partly away from us, but also seems to invite us in to her web, beckoning us to an entwining that may, in the end be ill-advised. Is she going to trap us? Will we mind? Perhaps as with the other paintings and drawings we see in this exhibition, the experience will have the lushness of a pleasurable physical or intellectual encounter. We may be ensnared, but we will be so willingly. It makes me wonder what the Victorians might also have to say about consent.

This passage, while focused on Heathcliff, reveals important details about Catherine and the way the Earnshaw family operates. Brontë's inclusion of the detail that Catherine spits at Heathcliff characterizes her as a savage unruly being who lacks any inkling of empathy. Unfortunately, Catherine remains this way; this is not childish anger. However, Mr. Earnshaw's "blow" at his child equally shows the reader that this family is dysfunctional and Catherine could be behaving in this manner because of the way she was raised. In a passage about familial origins, these details are strikingly relevant to one of the major themes Brontë presents to the reader: to what extent does a person's upbringing affect his or her life and to what extent are we willing to forgive one's actions as being beyond his or her own control.

T.S. Eliot refers to dancers and dancing throughout the Four Quartets. Here, though, he seems to be referring to something that moves either according to a rythm or by rote, as if that movement were choreographed. The idea of predictable movement, though, stands in tension with the predictable unpredictability of all that we do not know. How could we possibly know what our future holds? How could we know what rythm we will dance to tomorrow or the next day or the day we die? Alternatively, if dancing is something we did in the past--something to which the "rending pain of reenactment" is subject--then how do we find a new rythm at all? The problem may not simply be that there is no newness ever--that we are bound to dance the same dance--but that the past itself is always new. The rythm we thought we knew may appear to be something else entirely. So, we've been off-beat this whole time? Or the way we were living our lives is itself not stable, constantly changing as we re-enact it in our memory from the always new perspective of the present.

The poem locates the reader in two temporalities at the same time. Shortly after, the poetic speaker will look forward into a future perhaps. The poem travels through time, unmooring its reader from reality and realism.