Caroline’s Reviews > Either/Or > Status Update

“The word “hysteria” was always spoken with irony, as if it was too backward and un-feminist to merit discussion. .… Apparently, the thing that had been giving people hysteria was repressive Victorian norms. We didn’t have those norms anymore, so we didn’t have hysteria, either.”

“Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was.” BACK AT IT AGAIN!

“I thought there was something wrong with the way the departments and majors were organized. Why were the different branches of literature categorized by geography and language, while sciences were categorized by the level of abstraction, or by the size of the object of study? Why wasn’t literature classified by word count? Why wasn’t science classified by country?” LET’S GOOOOOOOO