Dog days of summer

My "productivity" has slowed down a bit since the beginning of the month. Though I did finish reading a book (Scott Simon's Truly Human), that was actually the result of a sleepless night after an outpatient procedure. I'm working on reading another book, Robert Culp's Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940, reference to which I came across somewhere or other last month. I haven't gotten far into it, but I think it'll be useful to me for thinking about my own project. 

Speaking of that project, I was having a lot of trouble making any progress on it recently, until my wife told me to go the library and try to do something, which I dutifully did. I managed to write about 750 usable words for a new introduction to the paper after clearing my throat for about 2000 words. It's not a complete introduction yet, but I am somewhat satisfied for how I managed to fuse a few streams of thought together to give a better sense of the "so what" of my paper. I've had a lot of trouble with the "so what," but I feel more confident about it now. (I'm sure the voices of doubt will emerge at some point, though.)

I'm also thinking about the undergraduate comparative rhetoric class that I'm supposed to propose as part of my fellowship leave project. As I mentioned earlier, I have been considering using Mary Garrett and Xiaosui Xiao's article about the Opium Wars as a course reading; this made me think about the possibility of focusing the course in terms of something like "rhetorics in contact" in contexts of imperialism, colonialism, semicolonialism, etc., rather than a course where we would just read about ancient rhetorical traditions or "treatises." Of course, the trick in doing a "rhetorics in contact" course would be leading the students through the interpretation of what was coming into contact. The Garrett/Xiao article does a good job of the interpretation; another article I can think of that does something like that is Mary Louise Pratt's article on contact zones. I'll have to see what other examples I might find of this approach, if I decide to take it. Suggestions are welcome!

So my dog days are not a complete loss; I'm getting a bit done, just more slowly and more piecemeal than I'd like. But slow progress is better than no progress, I suppose.