I wasn’t struck with anything off the bat to write for the blog this week. It wasn’t until I began thinking about the word “post” that my thoughts began churning. First off, “post” is a great word because it anagrams pretty widely for such a short word.

Secondly, “post” serves both as a word and a prefix. This week we were using it as a prefix mostly but I think the word as a noun lends itself nicely to the notions pointed to by attaching things to the prefix. A post, as in a fencepost, provides a nice mental image suiting for the progression of thought from thing to post-thing. The history of literary studies is not comprised of a single strip of fence ending with a post; rather, it is a series of these fences (being the things) and posts (being the post-things)that create a common fenced in area, literature. No single literary movement is the be-all, end-all of studies because, as a lot of the posts we studied this week show (post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism), the truth is wildly fluid and complex and subjective. It relates to our conversation about historicism in that we are presently partaking in events which become history as soon as they happen. Our present trends which situate us in English studies are going to be another criticism to be considered, another segment of the fence of literary understanding. Perhaps we will have a different term for our current schools of thought, be it fence or post, but it will still not be the ultimate answer.

They played with “post” for a quick second in TT, joking that we are approaching a post-post office society (moment of silence for the art of letter writing and letter receiving). That made me smile.

There’s also the verb “to post,” which is what I am about to do with this here blogpost (<– ooh, see, it's everywhere! Inescapable!).