Kenna - Chapters 1-2



From Chapter 1, I chose to focus on Hermes. Hermes really caught my eye because I grew up learning about a lot of Greek mythology. I was surprised to find a name I would see while reading in my childhood also in an academic setting. Davis’s discussion of Greek mythology, as well as the serendipity of my relation to it, really tied religion, education and the vast expanse of technology together for me. Not only was Hermes in the books I read as a child, he was also in movies like Hercules, and in informational movies I watched in my high school mythology class. These stories permeate popular culture so thoroughly even today, despite the religious undertones, oftentimes seen as less than logical. But each Hermes could not be more different. Davis describes him as wearing “a host of guises” (6). The Hermes I could understand and digest, the one described in children’s books, is so vastly different from the Disney Hermes, which differs from the Hermes I knew in high school, which differs from Davis’s Hermes. To better understand this fact, I took a closer look at some of Hermes’s different representations: https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780199997329/student/materials/chapter12/rep_art/


From Chapter 2, I chose the word ‘electricity’. On page 36, Davis describes the word as entering “the English tongue in a 1650 translation of a treatise on the healing properties of magnets by Jan Baptist van Helmont, a Flemish physician and Rosicrucian who worked on the borderline between natural magic and modern chemistry”. I chose this particular artifact because words themselves are very important to me. I love to write and I am meticulously intentional in the words I use. I wanted to look a little more into ‘electricity’ as Davis’s repetition of the word throughout the chapter is monumental. I was fascinated to find that etymology online (https://www.etymonline.com/word/electric) displayed more of the technical definitions. There was little to no reference to electricity outside of electrical currents, no nod to any softer science interpretations of electricity such as a feeling, the “image of the romantic spirit itself” (40) Davis mentions.

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