[Air-l] unrelated deaths

[jeremy hunsinger]

well on monday, as on most mondays an any given day for that matter, 
the world was different.  This monday was significant because we had 
over the weekend lost Maurice Blanchot(in Le Monde) and Robert K. 
Merton(in NYT), whose work may seem unfamiliar to some until you read 
it.  both of these authors have lent significant marks of their 
existence to contemporary world, and while I'm not one for hero worship 
or nostalgia, I do believe in giving people their due and these two 
have much due, or so I claim,  in both the past and future of internet 
research but both in significantly different ways. In short, I've seen 
them cited in people's work that are on this list, so I thought I'd let 
people know if they had not yet heard.

on another note, i wouldn't have known of this except for the internet. 
  I heard of Merton from Kieren Healy's blog out of arizona before the 
nyt obit. and Blanchot from Multitudes, which is a french list in 
relation to its academic journal.