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“Nicole Grimes, in her finely perceptive book “Brahms’s Elegies” (dedicated to her mother’s memory), cites the concept of reflective nostalgia, as defined by the late literary scholar Svetlana Boym. Unlike restorative nostalgia, which envisions a return to home, reflective nostalgia “delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately,” in Boym’s words. “Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity.” Restorative nostalgia tends toward the reactionary; reflective nostalgia can be fully modern.”

From: Grieving with Brahms

“In the world of Brahms, it is, above all, always late. Light is waning, shadows are growing, silence is encroaching. The topic of lateness and loneliness in Brahms is a familiar one; the adjectives “autumnal” and “elegiac” follow him everywhere. Scholars have tried to parse Brahmsian melancholy in terms biographical, philosophical, and sociopolitical. He was a self-contained man who never married and prized his separateness. He belonged to a generation that saw the irreversible transformation of nature in the age of steam and speed”

From: Grieving with Brahms

“The Structure of Appearance is perhaps Goodman’s main work, although it is less widely known than, for example, Languages of Art. It is, in fact, a heavily revised version of Goodman’s Ph.D. thesis, A Study of Qualities. SA is a constitutional system, which, just like Rudolf Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt, shows how from a basis of primitive objects and a basic relation between those objects all other objects can be obtained by definitions alone. We commented above already on the anti-foundationalist nature of both Carnap’s and Goodman’s constitutional systems. For them, the point of carrying out such a construction was not to provide a foundationalist reduction to some privileged basis (of experience or ontology), but rather to study the nature and logic of constitutional systems as such. In this sense, Goodman’s interest in other “world versions”, such as the languages of art, should be seen as a continuation of his project in SA.”

From: Nelson Goodman (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

“Unlike generating article ideas, I find that planning an article is something that can be done through brute intellectual force. Most articles I have written have been planned out in about one to two hours, by literally just sitting down and forcing myself to think through each step of the argument I wish to make. In other words, using my abstract as a starting point, I force myself to think about each of the premises I need to defend, the counterarguments that are likely to be thrown at me, and my responses to them.

My plans are pretty detailed. For a 10,000 word article, I’ll usually scribble out anywhere between 4 and 10 A4 pages-worth of a plan. I do this mainly because I like the actual writing process to be as mechanical and methodical as possible. Simply a question of filling in the details and smoothing out the edges of the plan.”

From: How I Write for Peer Review

“In his other writings Taine is known for his attempt to provide a scientific account of literature, a project that has led him to be linked to sociological positivists, although there were important differences. In his view, the work of literature was the product of the author’s environment, and an analysis of that environment could yield a perfect understanding of that work; this stands in contrast with the view that the work of literature is the spontaneous creation of genius”

From: Hippolyte Taine – Wikipedia

“I have no tips to offer on making your revision more likely to be accepted. The only thing I do — which I suspect everyone does — is to prepare a separate document with a very detailed response to each of the reviewers’ comments. The goal of this is to show how I have taken onboard everything they have said, and where exactly in the paper I address the point”

From: How I Write for Peer Review

“you should be able to summarise your paper using a fill-in-the-blanks sentence: “Although….Nevertheless…Because”. The first part is a statement of the contrary point(s) of view (the ones you will be opposing in your article); the second part is a statement of your main conclusion(s); and the third part is a list of the reasons, evidence and argumentation you will use to support your conclusion(s). Of course, I will rarely actually write the abstract out in this exact format. But I will use it to structure how I think about the abstract. In essence, I think that if I can’t summarise my paper using the instant thesis generator, I probably don’t have an idea worth pursuing in any more detail. It may need some further percolation.”

From: How I Write for Peer Review