Knowledge is Power: the Internet and the Kenyan Public Sphere.

The Internet will… serve multiple functions as the world’s favourite public library, school classroom and medical database, post office and telephone, marketplace and shopping mall, channel of entertainment, culture and music, daily news resource for headlines, stocks and weather, and heterogeneous global public sphere.(Norris 6

With Skirmish and Capricious Passagings: Ornithological and Poetic Discourse in the Nightingale Poems of Coleridge and Clare.

This paper is an exploration of the relationship between the poetic discourse of Romanticism, and the scientific discourse of ornithology, the emergence of which as a serious scientific discipline took place, according to Paul Lawrence Farber, between 1760 and 1850, thus spanning the lifetimes of High Romanticism’s prophet-figure, William Blake, and its patriarch, William Wordsworth. It is intended as a contribution to the developing field of ecocriticism, which has in recent years offered a new and challenging perspective on the representation and function of the natural world in literary texts in general and Romantic ones in particular, through full length general studies such as Jonathan Bates’s Song of the Earth (2000) and essays with a more specific focus, like John Rowlett’s ‘Ornithological Knowledge and Literary Understanding’ (1999), both of which have contributed much to my own understanding of and approach to my chosen texts

Research Error. How I Came to be Where I am.

The text below reproduces, more or less, a talk I gave during the college’s Research Week in Spring 2003. Although the talk was scripted for the most part, there were a few improvised ‘passages’ – the major one occasioned by a latecomer’s tussle with the door, as I recall. Literally, ‘error’ means wandering and I used the word not just to create a link with William Carlos Williams’ unruly and roaming improvisation, Rome but also to signal my own sense of dissatisfaction, which was the goad for the talk in the first place. Dissatisfaction with the critical ‘voice’ in which I seemed to find myself ensnared after seventeen years purposeful writing and thinking in academia. A voice so clinical – or so it seemed to me – so anodyne and remote from the texts it was speaking about. The nature of these texts is very much to the point, since in working with ‘improvisations’ I was engaging with texts whose impetus and modus operandi fly in the face of many of the traditional pieties of academic discourse. Improvisations – those of Williams, at least – are not considered or consistent. They are often not finished, let alone polished. Subjectivity courses through them with an urgency that bursts syntax like a flash flood will snap a drain. So, should I rein back, refrain from engagements this kind of text altogether? As far as I know, only one other scholar has written in detail about Rome, although a published facsimile edition has been available now for over thirty years. What follows are my first real efforts to address the improvisations in a way that does not routinely betray their poetics but also traverses the communal space that is critical inquiry