Spring "Break"

Alas, I may well weep with sighs deep
For I have no manner of company
To help me on my journey and me to keep
And also my writing is full unready
--Everyman

      Reading stuff for Rhetoric as Cultural Studies class makes me rethink again and again the implicit discussion at hand: How does Rhetoric fit into English studies? Cary Nelson asked the question in a different way, but the implications are the same. "The Linguisticallity of Cultural Studies" asks what place "language" has in Cultural Studies. Because Cultural Studies is one of those strange interdepartmental (non departmental?) disciplines, he is asking what I am asking: Why does Literature have to mean written, cannonized texts that we analyze via "critical theory? Why do we have two separate classes for "Lit crit" and "Rhetorical criticism"? If we are going to the trouble to acknowledge that our (and here I am identifying myself with the Lit people) objects of study are alwaysalready coded into a hierarchy of legitimization for anOther's purpose, and that we want to tease out those codes of legitimization--if we take all of that as our basic assumption of contemporary Lit Crit, then why the hell aren't we doing Rhetorical studies? Isn't it true that embedded in texts, discourses, genres and whole fields of communication, are "instructions to 'the audience how they are to respond and what sensations to experience'"? Isn't that Rhetoric Or am I stupid? (That was T Rosteck (233 At the Intersection , quoting E Black's "The Sentimental Style" (78)). Have I been using "Rhetoric" wrong?
      Ernest J Wrage findsthat we should, and here I'm being a "rhetorician," study "not only the conditions of the creatoins of ideas but allso the conditions of their reception" (Qtd in Rosteck 231). That the texts the audience make upon reception are themselves worth studying; that culture around a text, that contributed both to its inception and its reception should be examined. That Orwell was working from a Marxist perspective in an increasingly (and to him, frighteningly) Socialist England is important, but we must also examine who he was, how he got to pulish 1984 , who the publisher was, how it was recieved in the public, the discourses that surrounded its reception, other major political events happening both globally and locally, and finally, the literary tradition that shaped his text. What other anti-totalitarianism texts came out that year? By who? What were the universities teaching? What did the newspapers look like? How could the proles of his story be comapared to his readers? To those unable to read his story? (An important point).
      Further, am I giving too much agency to Orwell (and friends)? Too much intentionality? Am I falling into that Neo-Aristotelean trap of focusing on the success (or lack) of rhetorical production? If not examining success as my object, then what? Did I forget how often these are taught? Referenced? Turned into bad movies? If there is equal power in the reception as in the creation---what questions should I be asking? And how can I answer these, when most of the people who originally received the text are dead? I can't just use official, public documents. Those are fine, but not enough; what was silenced? Why have some of the dystopian fictions been appropriated to the English department, but not others? And where do they appear, when they are used?
      See. I'm just confusing myself now. In order to (re)fuse Literature and Rhetoric, we'd have to come up with new methodologies, new "legitimate" forms of proof for our readings of the text in question. And I haven't seen one yet, not even in cultural studies, where rhetoric is allowed to play with literture (but usually doesn't).
      And so Thursday begins Spring "Break." I'm planning on studying for the Comps all week, at the coffee shop, reminding myself of what I have, supposedly forgotten, or learning that which I never knew.
      Same thing.

The syllables were there, the ones that sang like poison in an open wound. They said "cut your hair" with the scissors in the kitchen. The scar manifests white, like we knew it would, right down the middle of the division. They said "go to bed" and forget about the bills in your pocket. The shiny backs of the books in question reflect like mouse eyes underneath the futon.

My mouse does not trot.