Annotating “The Lady Shallot” and its associated illustrations this week presented a unique challenge for me in that I struggled to balance and condense all of the many facets of history and culture that surrounded the production of the poem. With the “Lady of Shallot” for example, it was difficult to attempt to condense the cultural context of wood-engraving and mass production, the Pre-Raphaelites’ influence on art and illustration, the societal tensions regarding the emerging women’s rights movement—all seemingly pertinent to Tennyson’s poem and Rosetti and Hunt’s illustrations. It occurs to me that this is perhaps the core struggle of a synchronic mode of analysis: sifting through all of the historical and cultural contexts of a texts production and trying to situate a work within its broader, contemporary culture. Especially when trying to annotate, where the goal is to be as succinct as possible.

Though it challenged me, I think a synchronic mode of analysis will likely be the one I choose for my own work in this course. There is so much depth of knowledge to be generated by looking at text and image in relation to the culture that produced it. I also think I would have an easier time synthesizing my research in insightful ways when I am allowed more room to work with.