“摘要”
这个月的任务之一是投两个会，今天上午投了一个已经有论文的。这篇论文本来有结构上的问题要改，一直忙别的没动手，结果从周三写到周日(周四只用了碎片时间，但是周一早上发送邮件和傍晚游泳回来的一个多小时看yf的批注，仍在想这个事)摘要摘了五天不说，还把小改变成了结构性大改。如果不是已经发送，恐怕明天爬起来又想重写一稿，没完了。
周四拿着一稿去workshop的时候，Sonia给我们的handout有三个部分，作为一种程式化文体的摘要有哪些部分，两正一负共三个例子，检查自己摘要的模板。跟Cynthia一组互看一稿的时候，时间基本都花在了理解内容上，她不熟我的经典文本，我不熟她的新新文本。回家翻出来Sonia的论文读了，才发现两个范例里面有一篇正是她自己的。
这就很有意思了。对比Sonia的摘要和全文，尽管文章的结构能很好地呼应摘要的结构，但摘要的逻辑显然是更线性的(tunnel structure)。abstract这个词作为名词的意思是a summary of the contents of a book, article, or formal speech。但实际上她的摘要总结的并不是内容，而是思路。作为一种文类，会议论文摘要更贴合abstract这个词的形容词含义existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence.
这也是为什么我盯着Sonia的摘要琢磨了好几天，学了一些表述上的皮毛(eg.如何不在三百字里面不停地重复关键词、如何让descriptive argument更argumentative、最后一句怎么扣题/end strong)，但自己改出来的还是像在谈不同的东西(prayer, transcendent, foreignhood, conversion, linguistic signification, presence)，而不像Sonia在摘要里一点点展开同一个东西(end, unfinishable, incompletion, Ascension, echo, new beginning)。
希望已经投出去的摘要里没有做到的这一点，在下一篇没有论文的摘要里面能做到。十天后due。一般来说，没论文投摘要是惯常的情况，只是我开会不积极写作也不用提纲罢了——苦果我已经尝到了，最近一年总是疯狂修改。
粘一个最近看到的范例
“A life within a life”: Thoreau, Ecopoetics and a Dictionary of the Indian Languages
Michael Jonik, University of Sussex
At the end of hisMaine Woods, Henry David Thoreau adds a brief “Appendix” containing plant and animal names (including Latin nomenclature and common English names), advice for those who would “outfit” an excursion upriver in Maine, and a “List of Indian Words.” The latter list relates primarily to place names or to geographical or topographical features of the Penobscot valley, and signals Thoreau’s diverse yet intense interests in cartography and toponymy, geology and hydrodynamics, botany and zoology, anthropology and Colonial history, and, indeed, philology and poetics. Thoreau had compiled this multilingual list of words from the Abenaki language from a variety of sources, including Sébastien Rasles’sA Dictionary of the Abnaki Language, in North America(which translated Abenaki into French), Willamson’sHistory of Maine,and words he learned directly from hisPenobscot guides (especially Joe Polis) during his three excursions recounted in “Ktaadn,” “Chesuncook,” and “The Allegash and the East Branch.” As such, it as if continues his dialogues with his guides, and further evidences his increasing openness to Native American understandings of the world. He celebrates this new “intimacy” with the natural world that Native American words offer him in his journal on March 5, 1858: “A dictionary of the Indian Languages reveals another and wholly new life to us… It reveals to me a life within a life” (March 5, 1858).
Building on such moments, this presentation will offer an initial exploration of the implications of Thoreau’s inclusion of indigenous languages in his writings, especially his use of Abenaki wordsThe Maine Woods, as well as instances from his journals and selections from his “Indian Notebooks.” My contention is that the increasingly sensitive inclusion of Abenaki words across Thoreau’s three excursions recounted inThe Maine Woodsat the same time indicates a broader shift away from a Romantic tropology of Native Americans as primitive and vanquished in his thinking. Instead, Thoreau uses words as a means to engage a living indigenous population and to discern a more vibrant and intimate relational ontology of plant and animal life previously foreclosed to him – what he calls in “Walking” a “more perfect Indian wisdom”. At the same time, Thoreau’s interleaving of indigenous languages into his writing does not happen separately from that of the Latin taxa or French words that often appear in his texts, but rather together create a dynamic, multilingual palimpsest of his ecopoetical experiences.
To explore this here, I will dialogue with work on Thoreau and Native Americans by Bellin or Sayre;work on his philosophies of life by Cameron or Arsić; work on indigenous languages in early America by Sarah Rivett; and, analogous work on Lydia Maria Child’s inclusion of Abenaki words and customs in Scott Pratt’sNative Pragmatism.
