Caitlin Stobie's collection of poems, Thin Slices, is an experiment in form, literature, philosophy, science, and nature. In science, thin slicing is a method of preparing samples for observation in ...the field of microscopy, while in psychology, thin slicing refers to the process of the unconscious mind making judgements based on narrow windows of experience. In Stobie's collection, it becomes a literary methodology, too. This short review focusses on how Stobie's intersecting interests in reproductive health, literature and ecology are isolated, magnified, and approximated using poetry as a form of thin slicing.
This discussion is derived from Samuel Weber's current thesis that the humanities today, which also include the study of literature, demand new consideration of the singular, which means that in the ...complex network of cultural memory and cultural transfers it is necessary to keep records of exhaustive mapping of traces - here, of course, "traces of differences" is meant - that continually reestablish the singular manifestation of literature in a certain space and ensure its vitality. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This text is about an ongoing research project about contemporary African literature that circulates outside the infrastructures of the global book market. The researchers involved in the project are ...based at Uppsala University, Sweden, and collaborate closely with librarians at the Nordic Africa Institute where a small collection of ephemeral, often self-published texts is being established. This collection is a part of the book collection at the Nordic Africa Institute’s library, but can be accessed as a sub-collection in the library catalogue. The article is co-authored by one of the researchers and two of the librarians and is organized into two main sections: one is written from the perspective of the researchers who collect and study the material. This section outlines the project, its scope, general research questions and how texts have been collected. The second part is written from the perspective of the librarians, presents some of the possibilities and challenges involved in cataloguing the material and the ways in which it differs from the rest of the library collection.
