Chapter 2, or, Amy Re-re-revisits Burke

Chapter 2 of the dissertation is currently titled "Burke's Dystopian Imagination." Last summer, I presented a paper at the Triennial KB conference on a panel with His Most Awesomest Jack Selzer, who, along with Ann George, wrote the Totally Rad Kenneth Burke in the 1930s. After Kate's Really Cool Burke video project presentation, Dr Selzer gave me a few notes on my presentation, the key one being that if I was going to do it right, I'd need a whole book--i.e. 10 pages of conference presentation didn't do justice to the thing (his word) I was noticing about Burke.

When I was "given the opportunity" (their words) to rethink my dissertation, I immediately thought of Selzer's advice. At this point, however, moving to a historical, archival dissertation (NOT MY STRENGTH) would have meant another 18 months at Purdue, without funding, so I changed it up and went with the plan I'm now following. Still, I was left with an entire chapter--upwards of 50 pages--to do something like what I imagined before: a review of Burke's general social philosophy throughout his corpus, hopefully linking the subtle changes, as George and Selzer do, to his changing localities, his "circles" of influence.

The result? I'm stuck on page seven, nowhere near even beginning to quote Counter-Statement. I'm stuck where I was when I wrote the Burke presentation the first time: outlining my assumptions about what counts as dystopian literature, what makes something a dystopian argument. Because I can't show how KB is dystopian until I do that, but I also can't explain what I mean by "dystopian" until I can use Burke's terms.

Ouroboros. The snake eating its own tail. Consummation has never looked so complex.

The Rhetoric of Fan Studies: PCA/ACA 2009, Draft 1

The Popular and the Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan studies (v2.2) Comments welcome!

Popular and Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan Studies
Presented at PCA/ACA National Conference 2009
April 9, 2009
New Orleans, LA

I hid in the closet of fandom for years. My Master's degree was survived mainly by secretive late night forays into fic and vid and art and dubs--consuming fanworks to relax after Derrida. But why did I have to be so secretive? Fandom has always had some social stigma, perhaps best exemplified by the Simpson's character Comic Book Guy: a fat slob living at home, sad and lonely, too immersed in his fantasy worlds to attempt the performance of Normal that the rest of us partake in. Today I want to talk about that stigma, how it appears in academic conversations, and ways that we might legitimate the study of fandom(s) without resorting to "the popular" as our justification. Specifically, I want to suggest there are significant tensions in the language of fan studies: First, there is an unacknowledged dissonance in our language about fandom that stems from the difference between popularity and fanaticism. Second, there is a tension created by the language of popularity that categorizes fandom as somehow both “mass” and “unique,” both mainstream and eccentric. What results from these tensions is first a sense that a fandom is a legitimate object of study only for what it can show us about mass media, consumption, identity formation and the like. But in this assumption, the fans themselves and the products of fandom are still somewhat trivial (if not downright silly) and will disappear once the object of that fanaticism is no longer in the public eye.

Fandom is nothing new--and I'm even talking pre-Trek here, long before a person like Comic Book Guy could even exist and subsist within a society. Fiction in confluence with a middle class and industrial-print culture seems to create fandom as it grows, with the Pamela fandom of the 1740s as our earliest archived example. I’ll talk about the importance of archiving as legitimation later, but for now let us just say that fan studies might be said to be as old as the first critics of The Novel in general, those who spoke of silly little girls too busy reading to do their proper (house)work. In her book Consuming Pleasures Jennifer Pool Hayward examines fandom through the lens of serial production--and we might say that fandom is necessarily drawn to serial texts, if we were to make such broad generalizations. In tracing Dickens fandom, Hayward examines the pleasures of consuming a serial text, giving value to such a study by invoking a Marxist critique: Fandom in the past is important because it can show us cultural modes of production, movements of ideologies, and creation and maintenance of hegemony, particularly of the gendered sort.

My concern today is not with the studies of fans in the past, for many of these give value to the fandom by pointing to, not surprisingly, the permanence, artistry, and worthiness of the original text. Popularity and “mass“ audiences often characterize these fan works, which are not noted for their own intrinsic value as fan texts, but for what they can show us about the spirit of the age in which they were created. Aside, perhaps, from Joseph Andrews and his parody Shamela, no one I've met or read in "early" fan studies refers to a fan-writer by name or an exemplary fan-work by its title. By merging “popular” with “fanaticism,” we can study fandom as an interesting, but temporary phenomenon that emerges from the texts they reference. I wish to suggest that, at least in the digital era, fandom is not as dependent on the text it adores, but has created itself to be a nearly independent system of knowledge creating and knowledge sharing that can sustain itself across multiple, transient media events.

I am limiting my discussion to the fandom of the late 1990s through today because, true to our assumptions about the fickle nature of popularity, earlier fan works have been lost to us. The transience of fan works and fandom in general is part of what makes it a difficult object to study. The lack of an archive or a canon that can serve as what Latour and Woolgar call “immutable mobiles,“ those documents that serve as a foundation of knowledge for a community and serve as constitutional documents that create the community from nothingness gives us no common base from which to speak, doubtlessly causes some of the disjuncture we feel in fan studies. Further, when popular culture became an object of study, it became so within a Marxist-Foucauldian framework of ideological control. In this case, what is popular is what is hegemonic, and what is hegemonic tends to be without value in academia, unless it is to analyze the ways in which a text is hegemonic (and therefore uncritical, manipulative, and bad). Horkheimer and Adorno (as well as countless pop psychologists and after school specials) tell us that popular media are dumbing us down, working to institutionalize us by entertainment, and, in general, is for uneducated fools whose attention flits to whatever shiny object the producers flash at us. While we here at the PCA attempt to argue against that, some of that language and its values tend to seep into our language anyway, and we begin to assume that fandom is synonymous with consumption and all that is new.

This language appears, however rationalized, in many fandom studies. Cornel Sandvoss provides the most complete critique of such language in his introduction to Fans: The Mirror of Consumption: “The Balance between structure and agency is…crucial to the academic analysis of fandom….In [many] approaches fandom is interpreted as a consequence of mass culture needing to compensate for a lack of intimacy, community and identity” (2). Further, Sandvoss questions the definition of fandom as identity formation, and instead provides his own, which I borrow, for the most part, here: “I define fandom as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text” (8). As his examples, Sandvoss points to Joli Jenson for her examination of the language used in common parlance and in some academic writings. In “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization” Jenson reminds us of the psychological and medical explanations of fan-ish behavior--a pathology, an unfulfilled relationship, a Freudian error in the fan‘s upbringing (9). The scholarly accounts, however were few and far between when Jenson wrote in 1992, and the criticisms tend not to be from media scholars. Still, the language of pathology or deviance that Jenson cleverly pulls from multiple sources has remained in our language, even as fans came to describe themselves in the summer of 2007 as pirates (see post 4/15/08: The Symbolic and the Virtual Event, to be presented at NCA 2009).

Of course, Henry Jenkins remains our key scholar in fandom. In Textual Poachers and later in Convergence Culture, Jenkins emphasizes the unique aspect of certain fandoms, what Sandvoss calls an “assumed uniqueness” that characterizes most fan studies. Jenkins might be the first to treat online fan works as legitimate objects of study; he cites the URLs of specific works and larger communities with the same academic rigor that the rest of us give to Dickens and Shakespeare. Like many fan scholars, Jenkins emphasizes the subversivness of fandom without acknowledging the tension between fanaticism and subversion, between “mass” media and counter-culture.
Several volumes of fan studies have emerged in recent years, and like Jenkins, they remain enthusiastic about the potential scholarly work available to fandom scholars, but continue to use language that celebrates the ex-centricity of fandom, emphasizes the subversiveness of fan works, and mark fandom as Other. The introduction to Rhiannon Bury’s Cyberspaces of Their Own notes the connection of fandom to oral culture and domestic storytelling that skews fandom demographics toward the female gender. The book surveys and analyzes certain communities that the author notes are dominated by women and tries to explain the need for and the pleasure in such activities. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, the editors (including Sandvoss), dedicate the introductory chapter to “Why Study Fans?“ The editors try to summarize “three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades” to come up with their answers, which include the subversive nature of fandom, the economic power of fandom that has television producers salivating for our attention, fandom as a mirror for what Bourdieu calls “habitus,“ and, more currently, fandom as “a cultural practice tied to specific forms of social and economic organization” (8-9). Neither Bury nor the authors of Fandom are too concerned with the connection of fandom to “popularity;” instead, these studies mark fans as an object (and as such, necessarily Others the fans) to be studied for what we can learn about larger cultural movements or human nature in general.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with Othering fans this way; fans themselves embrace this designation in their t-shirts, in their icons, in their posts that include some kind of self-disclosure. Whether we Other fans as subversive agents against mass culture or dismiss them as blind, adoring audiences, fans and fandom will and have survived in one form or another. In fact, “survival” of fandom may be one way we can begin to think of fan works as more than temporary manifestations of a fad. The connection of fandom to “popular” culture hinders us here--how can something be both popular and permanent?

The unstated criticism is that fan works, as non-legitimated narratives, exist only within a localized community and then only briefly. In the days of zines and snail mail fic and vid exchanges, few copies were made, and even fewer were available to outside readers. Without the backing of a publisher or producer, fan works tend to first shine brightly then fade from our consciousness. Without an (published) anthology to catalogue them, fanworks do not have a canon for academic study. Imagine trying to teach a class on fandom that focuses on the fan-produced texts themselves--what to include? The "textbook" as Bernadette Longo reminds us in Spurious Coin, is a legitimating tool in academia--a guide for what to teach, why to teach it, and what is teachable. Likewise, anthologies symbolically inscribe a field and guide scholars towards what is acceptable, even good, text. Despite the growing number of fan-scholars, scholar-fans, and scholars of fandom, we have no central, legitimated field. So where might we look, if we were to teach such a class or (God forbid?) create such a field?

First, we would probably find key authors in fandom--most likely those that write across many fandoms or those who are the most read. Perhaps the most celebrated fic (and some would argue, fic writer) in slash fandom comes from Speranza. “Written by the Victors” is, as one fan put it “what fanfic should be.” The 330K file is a long fic, coming in at several thousand words. More importantly, Speranza gives us a new genre that represents the core desires of fandom: to make the fandom world more present, more real, more encompassing, and to change that world as we see fit. “Victors” or the “VictorsVerse” tells a fairly standard Stargate: Atlantis story, an imagined universe where the crew on Atlantis officially split from Earth and form their own culture--a culture that allows for explorations into otherwise improbable romantic plots that facilitate slash relationships. In Victors, however, Speranza does not provide the standard narrative, but tells the story through quotes from books on the history of the Atlantis expedition. Of course, these books are not any more real than Atlantis itself, but Speranza’s authoritative academic voice makes these excerpts believable. An incident that would have perhaps been a chapter of a long fanfic is thus described through a quote from “Tina Eber,” author of the book The Atlantis Chronicles, Volume 2, page 37:

While we will never know for sure what happened on the evening of 17 January 5 A.T, we can make several educated guesses. It is probable, despite William Summerville's analysis in "The SGC's Real Target?" (Journal Of Political Diplomacy, OUP: 2010), that John Sheppard was the object of the attack. It is likely that Armitage planned to ambush or otherwise surprise Sheppard; Armitage's military record, as well as her preference for knives, shows a distinct predilection for stealth. It is also likely that McKay stumbled upon or otherwise interrupted her approach; it is unlikely that he would have sustained the degree of injury Royce witnessed if Sheppard had been in the fight. Royce's description accords with McKay having made a brave, if clumsy, grab for the knife while Sheppard's back was literally or metaphorically turned; it is not unreasonable to speculate that his injuries were sustained almost immediately as Armitage tried to ward him off. (“Victors” Book 3).

“Victors” has spawned a “VictorsVerse” that features both standard fan works and styles similar to what Speranza has done. What is important about this particular fic is the response it has elicited from the community: it has been bookmarked on Delicious by a thousand people, recommended in multiple fandoms, and, in general, recognized as one of the best scifi fics ever.
The fact that so many fans recognize Speranza (by her several online nicknames) as a key writer for the community is another way, I think, fandom can be seen as more permanent than other aspects of popular culture. Victors has captured the attention of the fan community as a whole--not just SGA fans. And any fan entering the SGA fandom will be recommended (recc’d) this story. "Victors," and other similar iconic fics, show the start of a canon for Stargate fandom and fandom as a whole.

Of course, the problem with fandom, even one as wide as the Stargate fandoms, is that it is tied to an original text, and once that original text disappears from the public eye, we would expect--assuming a close tie between the popular and the fanatic--the fandom to die as well. And in some ways this is true; enthusiasm for a given text dials down as new texts enter the media stream and our consumer consciousnesses.

Sandvoss’s definition of “sustained interaction” with a text only applies while the fandom is in vogue. In his definition both in the introduction and later in his book, fandom is still highly transient; it is the fan that remains the same. When interest dies, the fandom dies. But in many cases, most notably, the Buffyverse, Due South, and Star Trek, the original text is several years (if not decades) dead, while the fandom surges on. The ease of file bootlegging and DVD boxed sets allows for new fans to join, and many fans follow each other from one fandom to the next, creating relationships that extend beyond a single fandom. And jumping into an older fandom is easy, as I found out last summer when I consumed the whole of Due South in about a week. For example, using recommendation lists, newcomers can easily locate the most proliferous members and the most celebrated fan texts of that fandom. Major authors begin to emerge after a few minutes of research: Cassandra Clare, SuEric, Speranza, and Aristide, top may lists if quality writers

And most of their works in fact can be found with relative ease, thanks to an almost fevered effort to catalogue, categorize, and archive the fics of a fandom. Websites like the LiveJournal-hosted “dsficfinders” allows users to request help finding such works--all an inquiring fan has to do is describe what they remember about a favorite fic, and the community responds with suggestions within 24 hours--usually within an hour or two. Fans can even describe elements they want to read in a story, and the community will recommend the best version they know.

In Harry Potter fandom, Fictionalley features an overwhelming archive of fan works. Larger, multiple fandom sites such as fan fiction.net and mediaminer.org host thousands upon thousands of fic and art and poetry and snippets of conversation that would have, in the days of mimeographs and mailing lists, long been rotting in a landfill.

When LiveJournal purged several dozen communities in the summer of 2007, fans were outraged for the loss of years of conversations, “inscribed” proof of their lives and communities. The fics could be replaced (and they were, since many fans stored their favorites on separate thumb drives or email accounts), but the textual evidence, the immutable mobiles that made the fandom more than just a momentary enthusiasm, was gone. Using archives (and now, carefully backed-up archives) allows a fandom to subsist long after the object of its attention has faded from the public eye.

The inscription of fandom into texts and archives suggests that associating fan studies with popular culture may be, for now, a mistake. As “pop culture studies” grows, it will, probably, throw off some of the assumptions of transience and frivolity, and maybe even “mass.” Fandom is not, and cannot be both a part of mass media--that is, a part of the “mainstream” and part of the ex-centric, and it is time we stop looking at fandom as such. I’ve only begun to list here some of the processes that are now helping fandom become more permanent, more legitimate, and hopefully others can add those I am not aware of. Comments, like in fandom, are always welcome.

____________________________

Bury, Rhiannon. Cyberspaces of Their Own. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005.
Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
“Introduction: Why Study Fans?” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. Eds Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Joli, Jensen. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London: Routledge, 1992.
Latour, Bruno. “Drawing Things Together.” Representation in Scientific Practice. Eds Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 19-68. Reprinted at www.bruno-latour.fr. 9 April 2009. 4 April 2009.
Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.
Speranza. “Written By The Victors.” 2007. Accessed 9 April 2009. See also “VictorsVerse Art and Artifacts.” Accessed 9 April 2009.

Prospectus, version 1.0

Well, here it is. Attempt #1. This is the introductory statement/rationale, which will eventually become part of the introduction to the dissertation. The rest of the plan can be found on this blog back in October 2008, but I'll be revising that in coming days and weeks.
Suggestions welcome.

The title of the final book of the Christian Bible, John of Patmos' [GREEK FORM GOES HERE] has been translated as "Revelation", but the Greek "Apocalypse" has passed into our vernacular as a synonym for catastrophic endings and destruction. Apocalyptic literature is far older than even the New Testament's Book of Revelation; the apocalyptic books of Enoch, Daniel, Isaiah ......[Baruch?] reveal to their ancient Hebrew listeners the truth of their current situation, a transcendent truth beyond simple predictions of the fall of a civilization, the truth of the nature of history itself.
The lofty goal of apocalyptic literature, the goal of enlightening and revealing, has been subsumed in recent decades by a more (perhaps profitable) concrete purpose of positing possible, albeit dark, futures. The apocalyptic genre has moved from sacred literature to popular fiction, and not without accompanying aesthetic and rhetorical shifts. Whereas once the genre "QUOTE FROM COLLINS," the utopian and dystopian literature produced since the Enlightenment (itself a revelatory moment) lacks a godhead to direct history; instead, human agency and the science of causality together determine whether human civilization continues or falls. Since Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, a teleological sense of history has ruled the fictions--we know we are going somewhere, progressing to some fulfillment of human potential, either ultimately good or horrifically bad. The speculative fiction of the mid-twentieth century was decidedly leaning toward the latter.
These dystopian--or anti-utopian, as some say--fictions, while still firmly within the apocalyptic tradition, Something about fear/pity and tragedy as well. Like the great Greek tragedies, these narratives seem to hold a permanent place in our collective consciousnesses that we wouldn't expect from pulp "science fiction." Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Lord of the Flies are listed on most junior high and high school curricula and feature heavily in Advanced Placement English classes [CITE], and dystopian narratives comprise much of science fiction television and film today. A "dystopian impulse" QUOTE BOOKER. This impulse to explore the end, and, in exploring, reveal and predict it, Quote RABKIN. Human seem to have a need to foresee the end; perhaps as a survival instinct, perhaps as morbid curiosity.
Understandably, most studies of dystopian fiction focus on explicating the particular philosophies and social systems each text proposes; comparisons to Marx's vision, examination of power a la Foucault, reworking of "the human" from Heidegger to Haraway. Frederick Jameson's recent work Archeologies of the Future, much anticipated among utopian studies scholars, offers a predictably Marxist analysis of utopianism, often blurring real utopian projects, formal texts proposing utopian communities, and utopian fictions such as Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis into one, uniform idea. M. Keith Booker's two studies on dystopian fiction provide a good introduction the the genre, but also focuses mainly on the social systems proposed within the texts. Seeing dystopian fiction as literature seems to be a problem among most critics; Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction begins with a disclaimer--he will not be including "didactic fiction" such as Orwell's 1984 in his study because it is too obvious in structure.
Dystopian fiction has often been included in other genre studies, as part of science fiction, fantasy, or both.--something about todorov's genre study and rabkin's--why they don't give us enough, but their overall understand of genre is good. To study the genre of dystopian fiction as literature, we would want to understand how it works, its purpose, its structures, and its rhetorical impacts. Early dystopian fiction such as 1984 and Brave New World have clear directives and proposals for their audiences, but how those arguments are made palatable to a reading audience has not been examined in depth. What, we might ask, is the pleasure of a text mired in death, fear, and loss?
Return to ancient western rhet. Deliberative genre. Kenneth Burke is good for this because his scholarship focuses on social change through text, literature as "equipment for living" and the ameliorative qualities of symbolic action. Burke gives us a language for literature as rhetoric, for aesthetics as persuasion, for heroes as avenues for identification.

Rabkin, The Fantastic, Chapters 4-6

Rabkin's definition of Sci fi: "One definition that seems to encompass the diverse works we havem entioned is this: a work belongs in the genre of science fiction if its narrative world is at least somewhat different fromo ur own, and if that difference is apparent against the background of an organized body of knowledge" (119). This definition includes dystopian fiction of all types, then, not just technologic ones--"body of knowledge" here might include social knowledge, religious knowledge, or ecological knowledge (although that, too, borders on the scientific). Rabkin further notes that this definition is dependent upon a sense of "difference" and the audience's perspective. Rabkin even goes so far as to posit a prescription: "A good work of science fiction makes one and only one assumption about its narrative world that violates our knowledge about our own world and then extrapolates the whole narrative world from that difference" (121). For me, the key word here is "extrapolates"--this is what good dystopian fiction does: it extrapolates one element, and leaves the rest untouched, so as to allow for reader identification and recognition.

I have some trouble with Rabkin's "reversal"; at times there is a complete reversal, but many works that are fantastic (i.e. Doctor Who) are serial in nature, and it is hard to imagine continual reversals--after all, once we accept that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, it becomes a normal part of the narrative, a joke that the reader is "in on" and can appreciate the non-shock value when new characters seem surprised. This is not fantastic for anyone but the confused human who keeps running around the edges of the blue box; nor is there anything fantastic about the Stargate, after the first movie. What is reversed in Stargate the series? What is reversed in ;the 200+ episodes of Doctor Who? If I answer nothing, then I'd be saying they aren't fantastic. Unless...this is why there always must be a moment of exposition to new or minor characters, so that we can once more bereminded that htis is a reversal. Where, then, does the identification lie?

Rabkin later (144) distinguishes Utopias (or, "approval") and Dystopias ("disapproval") and divides each into subgenres based on their reliance on either "contemporary perspectives" or "Organized body of knowledge" (one leading, of course, to "fantasy" and one leading to "science fiction"). He further divides each of these into either "extrapolation" or "reversal"--and then gives examples of each. I heartily disagree with his placement of "We" under the "reversal-knowledge" box of dystopian fiction, for I feel there is far more extrapolation at work than reversal, and that that extrapolation is a critique of "contemporary perspectives." It is not so much that OneState is a world where imagination is bad (a reversal) than this ban on imagination is an extrapolation of Stalinist Russia (which is when/where this book was written). If Bellamy's Looking Backward is an extrapolation of Victorian social policies into an ambiguous (at best) utopia where the sick are criminals and criminals are sick, how is We's "illness of imagination" any different?

Rabkin's further chart of circles(147) upon overlapping circles (which place dystopias INSIDE utopias....which i heartily disagree with) only serves to point out that classifying genres by category is a difficult and, in the end, not very helpful cause. Of course, his chart helps me to see why I call some things "true" dystopias--and while there isn't a space for post-apocalyptic fiction, I can imagine another circle for that. It also helps to show the releationship between Sartreian (word?) satire and dystopian fiction--both are "disapprovals" (I'm digging this word)--or in Burke, "stylized, strategic responses"--but are different narratively and aesthetically. More importantly, they are different rhetorically, featuring a different audience, a different purpose (exigence), and very different constraints (publishing-wise).

"In addition to showing new relatinships among works that use the fantastic to similar degrees, inspection of each display alone may well be profitable. For example, works in areas 4 and 7 seem to assume that man will change under the operation of science, while works in areas 6 and 9 seem to assume that society will change under the operation of man. This contrast suggests two hypotheses: 1) science fiction writers feel man is ultimately subject to powers beyond his control, while 2) satirists feelt hat men are always responsible for their actions." (149). Hence the inherent struggle in dystopian fiction for agency over structural determinism. Of course, this is always a question when we begin to speak of change, as Burke notes in P&C. Is it the Scene that makes the Agent, or the Agent who makes the Scene? Dystopian writers tend to feel that man has a choice up to a point--and that point was passed long before the start of their stories.
Of course, Rabkin is the one who set up this chart, and so it is not a "natural" chart like the table of the elements--it shows us Rabkin's assumptions instead of some natural property of the genre. And he begins with the assumption that these three genres (science fiction, utopian fiction, and satire) *are* three seperate genres, and he separates them according to his own understanding of the fantastic. He is asking the "essence" question--is text A essentially science fiction? And if so, what is the essence of scifi? Instead, we should take a more rhetorical approach: in what cases under what conditions does text A count as a member of genre X?

Satire, it seems to me, is a rhetorical mode, not a genre--a way of stylizing an argument, a way of arguing, like "deliberative" or "forensic" and carries with it certain topoi (just as "deliberative" always--according to Aristotle--has some discussion of "the good", satire always carries with it some discussion of benefits and the good of society, but reverses the logical means of arguing.)
After reminding us that the Victorian attitude toward technology informs most texts, and all scifi texts, Rabkin fastforwards to the 20th Century's complex attitude toward science in general, and technology specificially. "In the twentieth century all utopian schemes have included technology, and it is only sicne the emergence of the psychic monolith of The Bomb taht utopias are required to include, as wells did wtih this ruleing elite of humanists, a safeguard against technology gone astray" (155). I'm not sure we can locate The Bomb as the shift from a utopian-in-general attitude to the "dystopian impulse" Booker finds, but it is a good marker, and we can say that by the time of The Bomb, the shift had definitely happened.

"If the fantastic is indeed a basic mode of human knowing, then we should be able to see related and parallel developments in non-narrative materials (190). A way of knowing that is non-scientific draws us into Lyotard's questions of post-modern epistemology. And I must again ask: What do we do with post modern dystopias like "The Dispossessed", which does not clearly reverse anything, but reverses reversals and leaves us disorented. And what to do with the non-programatic medium of American film? What do we do about The Matrix (the place)? The film does not give us an answer but to Wait for The One. Agency is deprived, and we become voyeurs into a horrific landscape, but nothing more. The reversals in The Matrix displace us without allowing us to emerge from the theatre and re-orient. It reverses not the narrative of the film, but the grounds of our own reality, and lets us flounder around this construct as the minor characters we are--but now we are horrifically aware of our own status. This is in opposition to the satirical mode of arguing, to the traditional utopian mode of argument, in that it not only assumes that the Scene determines the act, but that the Scene has been determined by some outside force far greater than ourselves. There *is* no argument beyond a simple revelation (Welcome to the desert of the Real), no equipment for living. It's Stylized, but not strategic.

Rabkin, The fantastic in literature

Rabkin, Eric. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976
Chapter 1
"Talking plants--and (Komodo) dragons for that matter-- are not inherently fantastic; they become so when seen from a certain perspective. The fantastic does more than extend experience; the fantastic contradicts perspectives" (4)

Star Trek time travel episodes to the 20th C does the opposite--the fantasy there is that we ever thought in such primitive ways as we now do. For a member of the Enterprise to enjoy 20th C scifi, then, they must "suspend their disbelief" in order to "be rewarded by a delightful fantasy. Those who aren't willing to follow the signs in the text will throw down the book in distaste. Unless one participates sympathetically in the ground rules of the narrative world, no occurrence in that world can make sense--or even non-sense." (4)

Rabkin distinguishes three non-normal occurrences in literature: The Un-expected, the dis-expected and the anti-expected. (8-10). The Unexpected is literally not expected, but is not in breaking with the rules of the novel or the reader's own world. The dis-expected are "those elements which the text had diverted one from thinking about but which, it later turns out, are in perfect keeping with the ground rules of the narrative. Jokes depend on the dis-expected" (9). And the anti-expected is most closely aligned with fantasy, and are the 180 degree reversal of the ground rules (i.e. in Gulliver's Travels, we are given a scientific, adventurer's opening monologue--enmeshing us in the Enlightenment world view--but then there are tiny little people!) But "because so many of our perspectives enter a narrative with us...fiction often conflates the anti-expected and the dis-expected" (12).

"We have then three classes of signal for the fantastic: signals of the characters....signals of the narrator...and signals of the implied author (such as the narrative structures of Borges and Moorcock" (24).

For Rabkin, Fantasy is a genre, but "the fantastic" is a literary function of the reversal of the ground rules for a given diegesis. Can I do the same with "Dystopian fiction" and the dystopian impulse Booker describes? If so, what is that function? It's a rhetorical function, not aesthetic or plot-dependent, that's for sure.
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What is fantastic about dystopian fiction? The fantastic happens when the hero/ine has that moment of recognition, of "enlightenment" (apt word, amylea!), and becomes able to see that his/her own world is *wrong*--and begins to desire to change what seems to be a utopia. Dystopian fiction depends no shifting perspectives, past and future, cause and effect--a recognition of the present as evil, of--to quote myself--the bait *as* bait, and not a yummy and convenient worm.

Chapter 2

The Fantastic and Escape

[Burke speaks of "escapist" literature in P&C--but he wants to note how we label literature, what motives that reveals, what interpretations are embedded in that naming]

Rabkin reminds us that "escapist" literature usually refers to lit that society perceives as having little value, as aiding the reader in a "general evasion of responsibilities" (43). What is interesting about this naming, for me at least, is that it marks genre not as a matter of form, but of effect.

Rabkin, of course, believes this label has two misconceptions: "First, that 'seriousness' is better than 'escape'; second, that escape is an indiscriminate rejection of order" (44). I would add that "order" is necessarily the goal--for many dystopian fictions wish to avoid order at all costs (especially those of the totalitarian persuasion). In that case, escape and the evasion of responsibility (but not response-ability) that goes with it are the intended effect upon the reader--a symbolic act of evading order (by reading to escape) that hopefully bleeds over into similar disruptive acts (what Badiou calls an intervention?) in Real Life.

"Escape in literature is a fantastic reversal, and therefore not a surrender to chaos" (45). The "escape" is an escape from the schemas of our mind, our "ground rules" of the universe. Further, "in the literature of the fantastic, escape is the mans of exploration of an unknown land, a land which is the underside of the mind of man" (45). Therefore, even the worst case scenario can have order--it's simply our world in negatives. More importantly, as Rabkin implies, is that the reader can recognize these aspects, can become educated, can be comforted by knowing that his own world is equally structured (or rather, inversely structured)--a sense of Justice emerges.

Rabkin then traipses off into structuralist land by reviewing Propp's thesis that all fairy tales have the same deep structure--this I do not disagree with, although as a Burkeian I'd point out that they seem to have the same structure because of how we name the similarities, and I'm more interested in why we wish to be able to name these disparate examples as "the same." And why "the same" is a good thing, a comfort. Still, I can't help but see a similar structure in both "fairy tales" and "dystopian fiction" (both of which Rabkin would categorize under "the fantastic in literature"); in both, there is a moment of recognition that leads the hero to a journey, traveling across an unfamiliar landscape where some all knowing villain is waiting and watching. But unlike in fairy tales, the dystopian protagonist is not rescued, does not learn his/her lesson. It is as though Hansel and Gretel get eaten after all, as though no prince awakens Sleeping Beauty and she is suspended in the void of sleep forever.

Fairy tales represent "a controlled world" (56), and this world is "an escape from our own, but, as with Poe, an escape through a diametric, fantastic reversal, so that the narrative world actually explores the underside of our conscious world. This world of escape is a controlled world, controlled not by the archfiend within us, but by the conventions of the fantastic genre itself" (57). Here I'd pull out the Lex Rhet from Burke--the form itself is a fulfillment of desire, the form itself acts as a response to the chaos represented within that form. As such, the genre works best when we are familiar with it, when we know what to expect, what to desire, how to respond fittingly.

The rigid form of fairy tales works not because of some cosmic alignment (the golden ratio) but because it is easily recognizable. It's very existence is proof of order, and thus a comfort. As Rabkin writes, "By making a fantastic reversal of the rules of our world and offering an ordered world, fears of maturation can be met and symbolically tamed" (59). Likewise, by making a fantastic reversal of social order, ecologic order, technologic order, we should expect a symbolic taming of fears of The End. This, indeed is what Utopian fiction does. But dystopian fiction does not tame the fears, does not symbolically temper the chaos, but encourages it.

Dystopian fiction does not end happily ever after because a return to the present order is not the goal. Escape is not the goal, but a heightened presence, an awareness of the here and now and of responsibility. The moral of the story is not borne of the mores of a community (as with fairytales) but emerges from fears of those very hierarchies and assumptions. Dystopian fiction doesn't reverse the ground rules, it amplifies them so that we can see them more clearly. It make the fish aware of water, it makes the trout differentiate bait from food.

"In some fashion, escape literature always presents the reader with a world secretly yearned for. If that world is merely the too-good-to-be-hoped-for accumulation of the dis-expected, as in pornography, it may reveal much about the writer and/or reader, but will not serve to give either a new perspective on the mental constraints from which they seek escape. However, if the escape world is based on a fantastic reversal, then, as with the fairy tale, that escape need not be a descent into triviality but a message of psychological consolation" (73).

But I'm not sure triviality is the correct word here. For much "work" is accomplished in slash and fanfic in general, which one can read as "too good to be hoped for accumulation of the dis-expected" (in that the scenarios of fic are within the realm of reality, but highly unlikely and sometimes against the ground rules set up--"canon")--work for both the author and the reader. But perhaps Rabkin is correct that this work is not quite enough--could that be the driving desire behind fandom? That no amount of writing, reading, picture rendering, discussing, role playing, can ease the desire to make the dis-expected the norm? That we cannot overthrow the ground rules of our society by simply playing with a text, now matter how many pages or hours we spend? Rabkin wants fantasy texts to be "psychologically useful" (73)--but useful for what? In what context? For whom? What "order" must this reinforce? Slash is the reversal, the "queering" of order anyway--so I doubt it'd be psychologically useful in the way Rabkin imagines.

Toward Helhaven: Burke's Dystopian Imagination

AmyLea Clemons. "Toward Helhaven: Burke's Dystopian Imagination." Presented at the Seventh Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society. Villanova University, Radnor, PA. June 29-July 2, 2008.

"On the other hand, though I have, for several months, been compulsively clipping news stories about pollution, in the long run any kind of complaining becomes a damned bore" (Burke, Hellhaven 56).

"Toward Helhaven (misspelled in your program--but that's my fault): Three Stages of a Vision" appeared in the early 1970s, declaring that "Some give a decent life on Earth ten years, some thirty, some at most a hundred" (62). Here we are in 2008, though--and while watching CNN might convince us that we are now living in Burke's technological and ecological wasteland, we have not yet had to leave the planet. Dystopian or anti-utopian fictions such as Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, LeGuin's The Dispossessed, and Atwood's Oryx and Crake begin with a satirical critique of the author's current conditions and extrapolate the situation into the future, weaving together narrative, satire, and argument to create powerful texts that, in the end, are not about some future hero or heroine, but about the reader in his or her present. In the 1930s and 40s the genre emerged and flourished; Hitler's march across Europe, the US's flailing then recovering economy, new forays into technology, and the horrors of the eventual world wide war led many writers to put pen to paper and imagine the worst case scenario. But Burke's comment that I began this presentation with holds true: in the long run, these warnings fall flat, they become too generic, predictable, and no longer rhetorically effective. A damned bore, which brings us no closer to preventing apocalypse than before.

In the same essay that Burke declares these complaints "boring," he offers his own dystopian vision of ecological collapse, overwhelming technology, and constant surveillance. This hellhaven satire, however, could be seen as yet another complaint--ineffectual, unenlightening, and even trite--if we do not consider Burke's understanding of rhetoric and social change. The rest of this presentation will highlight Burke's dystopian imaginings as they are threaded through CounterStatement and Permanence and Change, and point to how these works emphasize Burke's inherent hope in human Acts and Agency.

First, let me outline some of my assumptions about dystopian fiction. Dystopian fiction is persuasive in a very particular way: It attempts to move the reader to action by presenting an extrapolation of the current situation (Eric Rabkin Nowhere Else). Dystopian fiction--particularly that of the 1930s to 1950s--has a regular form and plot structure; while the particularities of these structures are up for debate, few deny that dystopian fictions are highly "generic" and easy to recognize for their formal elements, tropes, and appeals (Darko Suvin and Gary Wolfe have both posited logical structures for the genre). More particularly, I argue, dystopian fiction's structure has an awareness of its readers and the tendencies of reading humans to identify with, engage with, and emotionally invest in certain plot structures and hero archetypes. As such, dystopian fictions (both in literature and film) feature heavily on space and context (for readers to recognize similarities) and attempt to provide a hero that all can identify with. What is important for me is that even as I describe here these structures and assumptions, I find myself struggling to avoid Burkeian terminology because there are few who are able to describe the workings of dystopian fiction as Burke does. It is not just that Burke provides us with terms for analysis, however; but that the connection between Burke and dystopianist thought goes both ways: That is, I do not want to "use" Burke to analyze dystopian fiction, but to show how what M. Keith Booker calls a "dystopian impulse"--the impulse to warn and to extrapolate to a worse case scenario is already a part of Burke's system.

As early as CounterStatement, Burke shows a particular attention to what Wayne Booth calls "didactic" fiction--his opening statements on "pamphleteering" and its relationship to "pure" art and "proletariat" literature can easily be applied to utopian and the emerging genre of dystopian fiction. In discussing censorship (always a "dystopian" issue), Burke compares Plato's Republic to Aristotle's Poetics, declaring that the censorship in The Republic requires a "one-to-one ratio between art and society" (xii)--a direct correlation between what is imagined and what comes to be. Burke, unsurprisingly, links this Platonic fear of mimesis to the totalitarianism of the 20th century. Burke continues down this dystopian path as he describes how "liberal" art, acting as a lightening rod (as Aristotle suggests in the Poetics) can quell the fears of the day, becoming a release valve. The fear he describes is recognizably dystopian: "The sort of fear I had in mind, for example, concerned the attitude toward the ‘promises’ of applied science. More and more people, in recent years, are coming to realize that technology can be as ominous as it is promising. Such fear, if properly rationalized, is but the kind of discretion a society should have with regard to all new powers" (xiii). Burke’s dystopianism appears here, as he first applauds those rational enough to fear, then warns us to pay attention to the fears, all the while assuming reason will prevail against both mass panic and blind scientific pursuit. Once aware of the faults, the logical human will respond rationally and evade danger.

Later, Burke more clearly aligns himself with the arguments of dystopian fiction when he argues through Gide that "society might well be benefited from a disintegrating art, which converts each simplicity into a complexity, which ruins the possibility of ready hierarchies, which concerns itself with the problematical, the experimental, and thus by implication, works corrosively upon those expansionistic certainties preparing the way for our social cataclysms. An art may be of value purely through preventing a society from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly, itself (105). Many dystopian fictions draw their dystopian "energies" (again, Booker's word) from the extent to which they become too much of something--too capitalist, too egalitarian, too controlled, too masculine, too religious...etc. More importantly, Burke's Lexicon Rhetoricae gives us a hermeneutic for analyzing the rhetoric of literature. Even here, we see Burke's concern for identification and reader participation--both of which are essential to the mechanics of dystopian literature. In describing the Symbol and the emotions or associations it may arouse in a reader, Burke notes that "Often, to 'charge' his work Symbolically, a writer strains to imagine some excessive horror, not because he is especially addicted to such imaginings, but because the prevalence of similar but less extreme symbols has impaired their effectiveness" (164) His following discussion of the proletariat novel utilizes the terms of the Lexicon to show the relationship between "aesthetic" devices and rhetorical ones, connecting again reading, action, and social change.

Permanence and Change

, of course, is concerned with humans as social beings, but what Burke again emphasizes, particularly in Part I, is the relationship between interpretation and action. It is not simply that societies change or, in a more Marxist screen, that conflicting classes eventually lead to a synthesis of two opposing groups. For Burke, there must be a critical moment when the situation is interpreted--when, to continue Burke's opening metaphor, the trout recognizes the bait as bait and swims the other direction. Unlike the simple yet noble trout, however, "We not only interpret the character of events (manifesting in our responses all the gradations of fear, apprehension, misgiving, expectation, assurance for which there are rough behavioristic counterparts in animals)--we may also interpret our interpretations" (6). A dystopian trout would write about the horrors of bait, and other trout would respond in kind--the more horrific that bait-story, the more likely other trout are to avoid shiny lures. Burke continues to expect the (albeit flawed) human mind to first recognize, then interpret, criticize, and finally Act. While there may be some jumping around between the interpretative and critical stages, the form remains basically stable, with "any educated action" being one that has been "abstracted" (pc 105)--that is, put into a schema of interpretation. What is worrisome to Burke is that trained incapacity will prevent us from completing these steps, and, by implication, prevent us from amelioration.

Further in Permanence and Change, Burke refers to the "technological psychosis" which we see echoed in the tradition of technological dystopias such as 1984, Vonnegut's Player Piano, the Terminator series, and Burke's own Helhaven. Like most of the technological dystopias, Burke's fears seem centered on the man/machine divide, and he asserts that "man is essentially human, however earnestly he may attempt to reshape his psychological patterns in obedience to the patterns of his machines" (PC 63). Later he asks "How many people today are rotting in either useless toil or in dismal worklessness because of certain technological successes?" (101).

In general, dystopian arguments may be seen as a particular case of what Burke refers to as a danger-response (150)--an interpretation of a stimulus (in this case, a situation) as dangerous which leads to action. However, unlike the heat of fire or the pain of disease, abstracted stimuli may not lead to an immediate or ameliorative response: "We do not persuade a man to avoid danger. We can only persuade him that a given situation is dangerous and that he is using the wrong means of avoiding it" (150). Dystopian scenarios name that danger, and are, as the chapter titled "permanence and change" suggest, secular prophecies, new orientations toward the present and toward history in toto. Burke further suggests that even new discoveries can quickly become dystopic landscapes: "Such is the case with those elaborate regimens of social diet which we build up by a slowly selective process until certain ills gain prominence and authority enough to grow self sustaining or creative. These ills become powers in themselves, leading us on to still further interests, all farther and farther afield from our original patterns of humane gratification" (182). Even here, Burke's instinct seems to be to warn, to extrapolate, and to predict an unwelcome social condition.

What does it mean that Burke has (apparently) this occupational psychosis? These connections are obvious to me, because I spend most of my time thinking about apocalypse. For some reason, I am preconditioned--and, it seems to me Burke is preconditioned--by the linguistic texture in which I find myself, embedded in a set of terms and relationships that allows me to ascribe meaning (and thus cause and effect) to a given situation, to a given interpretation of a situation. The dystopian motive--that is, that which moves us to prevent dystopic situations--includes assumptions about motive, rhetoric, and human progress in general. While I've only managed to highlight Burke's dystopian imagination in two of his books here, the impulse to analyze and persuade by extrapolating to a worse case scenario remains central in most of Burke's work. In his own words, this appears to be his "attitude towards history"--and it is, despite the warnings of failure and totalitarianism, essentially a comic one, oriented toward hope. I will end with Burke's own satiric prayer: Envoi: Nocturne With Noise:

Spring springs among us, on this sod,

Spring vs. Total Fall

And may there be some kind of God,

that He have mercy on us technologic all.

Works Cited Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. ---. Permanence and Change: AN Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. --- "Toward Helhaven: A Vision in Three Stages." On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows, 1967-1984. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 54-65. Works Referenced Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Rabkin, Eric. "Introduction". The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.

The End of the World: Prelim studying

The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.

Introduction: Rabkin

"The modern popular literature of the end of the world continues humanity's permanent questioning of its place and its permanent quest for a reason to exist. We forever reimagine the pligrimage in and out of history, seeking the well at the world's end, to drink the knowledge the gods withheld from Adam" (vii). Rabkin connects the apocalyptic impulse in art to the existentialist quest--how, though, does the resulting art provide that knowledge, enact that quest, create that history for its readers? What do the books *do*, not what do they explore or explain. How do they work on their readers to either provide an answer or to provide an echoing feeling of nothingness?

"When the world ends, what really ends is not all of creation but--only--the world as we know it" (viii). And the "as we know it" includes, most importantly, all thsoe little acts of human creation--art, literature, the buildings of cities, the social hierarchies of communities. This is what we despair at in dystopian fictio: The loss of the humanities, the death of the liberal arts. For without these, we are absent from the universe; we might as well have not existed, if not for the trace of being left in our creations. Fahrenheit 451 is most explicit about this, in making each person a book and a book each person. And what of the dystopian books themselves? They fortell of their own destruction, they warn of the loss of their warnings. They stand between Us and their own destruction.

Ch 1: Gary K Wolfe. The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End

"As in most post-holocaust fiction, the 'end of the world' means the end of a way of life, a configuration of attitudes, perhaps a system of beliefs--but not the actual destruction of the planet or its population" (1). This, I think, is the difference between dystopian and post-apocalyptic fictions--in dystopian fiction, the world has ended as we know it, but humans flourish (perhaps too much!). In post-apocalyptic fiction, most of the world's population is gone, humanity itself has disappeared not just in the attitudes, values, and beliefs we now hold, but in body as well.

The BSG effect: "Although in one sense the very notion of beginning a narrtative wtih a climactic holocaust seems perverse, especially if the underlying tone of the novel is going to be optimisitc, such a fantsy is very much in keeping with tradition of millenarian thought" (3). What is missing here is a close reading of a text that can show *how* the texts create desire, how they persuade, create identifications with readers, what they argue, what answers they provide. What is the role of revelation? What is the mechanism of that optimism, that hope? (Note: Optimism--opt= eye, to see. Theory. To envision. To make present symbolically).

What is the pleasure of the text for the READER?

"On the simple level of narrative action, the prospect of a depopulated world in which humanity is reduced to a more elemental struggle with nature provides a convenient arena [TOPOI???] for the sort of heroic action that is constrained in the corporate, technological world that we know" (4). Wolfe goes on to describe other benefits this topoi provides the *writer*, but does not discuss the pleasure(s) for the reader. Yes, we all enjoy a good heroic story with clear cut good and evil, a simple story of pure survival, but I think the dystopian texts are more narratively complex than that, when we examine them through Brooks' idea of the arabesque nature of plots. It's not just the plot that matters, but the story--not the events that occur, but how they're told--that matters. It's the "stylized" part of Burke's "strategic answers, stylized answers" that gives us the equipment for living, that persuades us that this equipment is the right equipment. In other words, the flashback, the revelation, the backstory, is more important than the subsequent events. BSG is interesting not because we want to see them reach earth, but because we are given a future without a past, and a story that slowly reveals that past, piece by piece, episode by episode.

Ch 4 W. Warren Wagar "Round Trips to Doomsday."

"With the exception of a few modern men of science, writes Mircea Eliade, 'humanity has never believed in a difinitive end of the universe'....Ends that lead to fresh beginnings and further ends appear regularly in science fiction, reflecting some of the most characteristic anxieties and ideological paradigms of late industrial culture" (73). Jameson echoes this connection to late capitalism in his Archaeologies of the Future--certainly our socio-economic situation contributes to our attitudes toward history (it's our terministic screen)--but literary texts emerge from more than just an economic position.

This chapter would be helpful to explore BSG: All this has happened before and all this will happen again.

Ch 5 Brian Stableford "Man-made Catastrophes."

This chapter briefly addresses causality and links to Christian eschatology--I need to look at it further.

Ch. 6 W.W. Wagar "The Rebellion of Nature."

For comparing traditional literary natural apocalypses with Doctor Who's "Utopia"--what do both say about the nature of nature? Of history? Of our organizing of time? Of humanity's understanding of the infinite? Of Time?

Prelim notes: Buber I

Buber, Martin. "Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour." On the Bible. Ede. Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.

Buber begins with an anecdote-like paragraph about those times we all face wherein we recognize a *moment*--that this moment will change everything, the (as Badiou might say) horizon of an event. At this moment there are two basic impulses: first, to "cherish the until-now-unsuspected certainty of thus being able to particpate on the ground of becoming" (to seize the day and make change); or to "banish all such impulses and resolve... not to let himself be fooled--not by the situation, which is just an embroilment, and not by himself, who is just a man come to grief; for everything is linked invincibly with everything else, and there is nowhere a break where he can take hold" (172). Again, I turn to Badiou--how does something new emerge? How do we break with the state of the situation, with the continual movement of "history" in order to form a future? Is human agency (here, "choice"--173) part of that break, or are humans just incidental? What is history?

"How shall we manage to escape from the dilemma whose discursive expression is the old philosophiucal quarrel between indeterministic and deterministic views of the world?" (173). Indeed, this old quarrel seems to be what dystopian fiction addresses--the genre as a whole seeks to provide a response to that quarrel (to "put in his oar" in Burke's words), and the early pieces, at least, fall on the side of choice, making that implication by their very publication, their readership, their circulation. Later, "postmodern" dystopian fictions are less certain of their own agency, their ability to incite choice by increasing awareness. Buber states this for me: "....philosophy does justice to the life experience in which the moment of benginning the action is illumined by the awareness of freedom, and the moment of having acted is overshadowed by the knowledge of necessity" (173).

Buber next asks several questions "Does a historica; hour ever experience its real limits otherwise than through undertaking to overstep those limits it is familiar with? Does the future establish itself ever anew or is it inescapably destined?" (173)--again, these are the questions that dystopian fiction addresses, and answers with many different answers. Then again, it's "equipment for living", not holy scripture, so that's not surprising. These two options--breaking with history (choice) or following a predetermined progression in faith are visible in the two kinds of apocalyptic writings in the Bible--those of "the prophets in the ages of the kings of Judah and Israel" and those of "the apocalyptic writings of Jewish and Jewish-Christian coinage in the age of late Helenism and its decline" (174). Human understanding of history and our role in it has changed dramatically, giving rise to these two options, this crisis of agency--the divide between the "prophetic" and the "apocalyptic" (174).

Jeremiah is his key OT example--Buber explains that twenty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, before the exile, God spoke to him to reveal the change that was to come. Jeremiah becomes the prophet, the "announcer" (Nabi/navi)(175). In Jeremiah, God is seen as a potter who "works on the historical shapes and desitines of human nations" (176) but humans still have freedom to either act in accordance with his will or to turn from the plan. Jeremiah, as the announcer, reads the situation before him, and plans his speeches accordingly--sometimes he tells them to turn from evil for they will be saved, at other times he proclaims a coming storm, an inevitable catastrophe (176). In either case, "no end is set to the real working power of the dialogue between divinity and mankind, within whichcomapssion can answer man's turning of his whole being back to God" (176). The time table is open, there is no sense of entellechy. "Dialogue" is key here--the conversation is ongoing, not one prophecy (fiction) mapped out already. Put simply, "The task of the genuine prophet was not to predict but to confront man with the alternatives of decision" (177).

Buber cites one important "mixed form" (hybrid genre) between the prophetic and the apocalyptic--that of the "anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile" who appears in Isaiah. "Among the prophets he was the man who had to announce world history and herald it as divinely predestined. In place of the dialogue between god andf people he brings the comfort of the One preparing redemption to those He wants to redeem; God speaks here not only having foreknown but also having foretold what now takes place in history--the revolutionary changes in the life of hte nations and the liberation fo Israel conummated in it" (178). In this new genre, there is "the unheard-of new character of the historical situation" (179).

We begin with the Fourth Book of Ezra, in which "the speaker pretends to be living as amember of the king's house in exile just after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans", yet the book was clearly written in the first century CE: "The actual historical-biographical situation of the speaker is deliberately replaced by an alien scene taken over as analogous to his own" (180). Here we get further contrasts between the fiction-writer (the writer of apocalypses) and the prophet--the prophet "addresses persons who should hear him" while the "apocalyptic writer has no audience turned toward him; he speaks into his notebook. he does not really speak, he only writes; he does not write down the speech, he just writes his thoughts--he writes a book" (180). In the apocalyptic writings, "there exists for him [the writer] no possibility of a change in the direction of historical destiny that could proceed from man, or be effected or coeffected by man. The prophetic principle of the turning is not simply denied in its individual form, but aturning on the part of the communithy is no longer even thought of" (182). Here I should connect communual turning, communal atoning to Girard's sacrificial atonement and the role of tragedy. Somehow.

Connections: "There is, of course, an optimistic modern apocalyptic, the chief example of which is Marx's view of the future. This has erroneously been ascribed a prophetic origin....Here in place of the power superior to the world that effects the transition, an immanent dialectic has appeared" (183). Yes, yes it has.

---

Further contrasts: "Prophecy originates in the hour of the highest strength and fruitfullness of the Eastern spirit, the apocalyptic out of the decadence of its cultures and religions" (183).

The new Prelim List, or, How Amy Dies by Grad School

After going through my notes from my two meetings with Sandy Goodhart, I have successfully composed the following sort-of final prelim outline.

Topic areas, the major things the prelim will cover:

The rhetorical tradition of discourse on social change, including: dystopia as topoi, places from which to speak, a recurring position for a recurring concern. Aristotle's Rhetoric,
Plato's Republic and the tradition of rhetoric and utopia/dystopia. Burke's
dystopian/utopian musings, his assumptions about agency and symoblic action
leading to (or away from?) utopia

The literary tradition of apocalyptic or prophetic fiction: Judeo-Christian apocalyptic fiction and its rhetorical structures. Dystopia as tragedy for the postmodern era (including a critique of humanism and human agency)

Current transformations of that tradition and its relationship to PoMo's critique of causality, order, and master narratives: Dystopian film's adaptations of more the written fictions as problematic, particularly in conjunction with agency (The Matrix,
Blade Runner, Terminator series)


Yeah, no prob. Cough.

Reading List
Aristotle's On Rhetoric
Plato's The Republic
More's Utopia
Bacon's New Atlantis
Derrida's "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy"
Various essays by Eric Rabkin
Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
Buber: Paths in Utopia; and Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour
Linda Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism
Lyotard's The PostModern Condition
Jameison's Archaeologies of the Future
Burke: "On HellHaven", Permanence and Change, Phil of Lit Form, the Motives
trilogy
Blanchot's "Literature and the right to death"
Dostoyevski's Notes from Underground
Rousseau's Walden Two
Theatre of the Abusrd: Works from Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, Camus
M Keith Booker's Field Guide to Dystopian Fiction and The Dystopian Impulse in
Modern Literature
The popular dystopias of the 30s and 40s: Brave New World, We, 1984, Fahrenheit
451
The next generation of dystopian fiction (50s-70s): Lord of the Flies,
Clockwork Orange, Player Piano, He,She,It, The Dispossessed
The "postmodern" dystopias: Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep (and many other Dick novels), Gibson's first trilogy
(Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), Feed, maybe Discworld
The Films: Filmic versions of the traditional dystopias, Terminator series (and
tv show), Blade Runner, some of the really bad ones like "The Island", Minority
Report, I am Legend, Enemy of the State (oh, let's just list all the Will Smith
films, shall we?)....and any others?


Yep. I'm a dead woman.

Amy's new Reading List

My focus feild is dystopias.

dystopia as topoi
Jewish/christian apoc;
tragedy's critique humanism;
dystopia as replacing tragedy

Buber--I and Thou
Ari
Plato
Formalism: Brooks/Ross Chambers/S. Chapman/Todorov's book on the fantastic/Propp
Violence and sacred--sacrificial crisis
Levi-Strauss's rejection of structuralist reading of literature
Eric Rankin?
Derrida's on Apocalyptic Time
Bernard Knox--Oedipus at Thebes
Cedric Whitman: Sophoclean Humanism
Causality: two kinds of prophetic: Buber: the apocalyptic, the prophetic and the historical --from On the Bible/ ed H Bloom



Primary texts
Kafka
Beckett
Ianesco
More's Utopia; Bacon
1984--novel, movie 1 movie 2
Brave New World
Fahrenheit 451
Rousseau
Dispossessed--LeGuin
Dostoyevski
Camus--The possessed
Notes from the Underground
We-Zamyatin
countermovement by Russians--1840s: What is to be done? "The Double"
Dostoyevski: counterdystopian--begins with a dystopia.
Jacob's Ladder--three realities: Vietnam; in bed wakes up in another life; Never left the dystopia
Robert Ludlam--Bourne Identity/ George Lucas--THX

Relationship to ancient rhet?
Relationship to tragedy?
Is a genre?

The Final Semester * **

*Hopefully
**Oh God, please

Amy's schedule for her final semester of classes ever. Mom, you might want to scrapbook this.

Monday
At coffee shop till 3:30
4:30-5:20 Teaching in WTHR 214
Evening: Prepping for rest of week of teaching

Tuesday: The Day of Hell
1:30-2:45 Dickens in HEAV 102
3:00-3:45 home to eat and breathe
4:30-5:20 Teaching in HEAV 109
5:30-5:45 Grab something from Oasis to eat
6:00-9:00 Rhet theory in BRNG 1232

Wednesday
Office hours 3:30-4:30
4:30-5:30 Conferences in HEAV 223

Thursday
1:30-2:45 Dickens in HEAV 102
Home till 3:45
4:30-5:20 Teaching in HEAV 109

Friday
Conferencing with students in HEAV 223 or online

Back to Lit Crit

Theory is theory is theory. Text is textual and contextual and contingent on the medium which texturizes it. Even mimetic representation is rhetorical in nature.

Damn, I've missed literary studies.

That's not to say that my time over in Beering with the Communications Department was bad. No. It was very helpful, indeed, for schematizing, compartmentalizing, disciplining (Burkeian pun intended), and revitalizing my interest in interdisciplinary work.

But I've missed this. The textuality of text, the echoing voice of another author in my head. Piecing together the argument from someone else's words, getting close, closer, closest to the text. Adaptation, mastery, pathos, consubstantiality. The pleasure of the text. The text of pleasure.

Summer of Insanity, 2007

I was telling Kate about the Summer of Insanity 2004, and she noted that this summer could be a repeat--the intense reading schedule, the lack of teaching or course work, the long hours spent with fanfic. Of course, last time around, I was alone, in an apartment in downtown Boston, just me and my laptop going crazy together. This time, I've got People and a Cat.
While I haven't finished grading yet (sigh), I feel like I'm already on break. Tonight I'm going to read Doctor Who fics--my god i havent read these in weeks i'm so far behind so many chapters so little moonlight--until my eyes burn, then sleep with the Kit until guilt washes over me and I eventually grade.
To kick off the summer, I went through this blog and tagged ("Labeled," but we all know that Blogger stole the idea for this particular ability from LiveJournal's "Tags" function) everything. So now, if you only want to read my stuff about Burke or rhetoric or (geez, why?) my poetry, just find one of the posts that has that tag, click on the tag name, and you'll be taken to a page full of what you want to read. On Demand Journal Reading.
I'm rereading Burke. We'll be starting with Counter-Statement and working our way through to the Symbolic (ordering it on Amazon). Look for flashes of insight here all summer long.

Insight flashes are not guaranteed by author.
Book List, working
Burke:
Motives Trio
Counter-Statement
LSA
PLF
ATH
P&C
Essay on 'HellHaven'
KB in the 20th C
Addressing PoMo (Biesecker)
Plato's Republic
Peter Brooks Reading for the Plot
V Propp: Book Story elements/Dramatis Personae
Girard: Deceit, Desire, the Novel
Watt: The Rise of the Novel
Nancy Armstrong: Desire and Domestic blah and The New One that's not any different
M Keith Booker's Field Guide to Dystopian FIction (overview of the Marxist, Foucauldian and PoMo theory that informs dystopian fiction)
Levi-Strauss on Structure of folkstories and myth
Derrida: "La Loi Du Genre"

Still need recommendations for:
[Desire for end/death of narrative]--zizec, lacan? teleology/entellechy
Epic Structure-- The Hero(ine), Causality, connection to rhetoric? Blanchot?
Apocalyptic tradition
AGENCY in/through literature
Connection to Tragedy?

In the Lab

I've been sitting here since before 9 a.m. It's now 1:19, and I've been typing almost constantly. At least I'm not alone.
To my left sits Tony and some Literature Masters Student whose name I never remember. She's been here since 10, and now has a giant block of text that rivals my own Giant Block of Text of Doom.
Of Doom.
Jaci sits on my right, also furiously typing, despite the fact that she has four days instead of four hours to finish her project. Her book pile keeps growing as she runs to the Library. Right now she's working on a block quote that will doubtlessly help her reach the page minumum.
The Nerdy Trio of Jeremy Tirrell, Ryan Weber, and Nathaniel Rivers (accompanied by their fourth, Paul Lynch) have arrived and have taken over the left side of the lab with their masculine presence and PoMo jokes about Aristotle's enthymeme which are funny to perhaps 100 people in the entire nation. I'm one of them.
Tony's got a Works Cited List that looks longer than my list for my prelims.
And I'm on page seven, a little more than 2/3 through my paper due at 5. It's 1:27, and I'm hoping to finish before 4:30, hop on the bus, cook dinner, and enjoy 3 hours of SciFi Friday in peace.
Before doing it all again tomorrow with Morgan. In this same lab.
Damn.

Semester-ness

T.S. Eliot may have measured his life in teaspoons, but mine is measured in semesters. I didn't realize just how semester-driven my life was until I started trashing some stuff in my old (paper) files. In trying to figure out what YEAR these were from, I referenced what SEMESTER I took the class in.
Of particular interest was a cheap, Walmart, pink, falling apart notebook I'd tossed on the shelf apparently half-heartedly. From my first semester at NEU, my first semester as a real live adult, my first semester in grad school. The notebook begins just after my birthday--I'd had a legal pad up until then. I don't remember writing any of the stuff in this notebook, which is interesting. So, some stuff by someone apparently named Amylea Clemons...from 7 semesters ago.

Untitled, 10/24/2003 (Fairly certain Kari's mother was the inspiration, but I don't know what the hell it's about
)
She constructs just like me
--in the basement, in the sawdust--
in the bold strokes of science and observation.
Where it is dark, she shaves and splits
the single light hallowing the center.
There are nodes here to smooth
walls that need rebuilding; sketches of the inside
show the need--we drink the milk from our cereal bowls--
so she slides under the sharp edge to complete it in emptying.
I have eternal papercuts from sleeping with the book
We say: A witty ending goes here. But not without
careful measurement

Untitled, writen while reading Marianne Moore, as is obvious by its diction
"Nothing like" is a certain negation
So Whole! So sure of its emptiness!
Not at all "Something like"--
which is something like a hesitation--
"Nothing like" is made with cement,
creates media of content sighs.
It is not, therefore it is.

I wonder: That's all.
We want a predicate for it, for purpose
"Observations" under a microscope
I will not hit my friends
I will not shake the table
I will not know my father in his rants
The press loved that sort of thing
they love it: How do you sort out
the charming eccentric from the genius?

That crust was there last century,
but it did not permeate everything
(like quotations around your own words)
invisible and inaudible
and then it falters, letters are added,
and No becomes Some,
Necessary Fictions become
Necessary Fictions.


November 1 (title or date? Or both? Written during a Yeats phase)
There's a space between the words
that indicates time's wake
The roughened guitar twangs through
electricity say only "Me-mor-y"
It's beautiful, it's brutal, it's a tall candle
flickering on a board in the lake
His vision of her causing him to think quickly
sharpening his grief on grass blades

December is the slowest month, waiting for
that precious birth to shake our fears
All Souls' has pierced the air with cold
wreath and cranberry sauce
William is not here; Lucille has gone,
Woodrow sleeps; I have no tears for them
Today they move more thickly upon the earth
among the costumed bodies and faces

Today they walk in those flares arranged
to call to them, on which to say a prayer
The good catholics inhaling wick-smoke
whisper cannons for me, aloft
And frozen in the system of the hours,
always, alreayd, almost there
Unable to move from the crook of the gears
rotated to repeat, I was born in.

To remember is too much for tired synapses
too used to routing around that Thing
It's like stiffling a yawn, though: eventually
your jaw aches, and head throbs and out
Comes the suppressed with its reliefs and its
givings-in to sleep or embarrassment
There's time enough, he says from below, for dwelling
thanatopsically. This one day where all the spectres are about.

11/2/2003 Haiku
Snickers' wrappers
oh what a beautiful shade
my foot in the lamp

In the margin of notes on Kierkeggard and HD
Hope, she wrote for him
and hope he brought home
in the length of his hair
having seen his father live and die
and live again
returning younger and with more
fire in his hands than any previous incarnation
thirteen labors for him to perform
now that hope has descended and the soulless deed
(he must drink from chipped teach cups) shut down
the grand experiment: He must return!
Wash the jacket that went to hell with him
build a new room
raise his master from his mounting sleep

He must cut his hair

He must fall in love
must clear the decadent rubble
and find the leftover parts
he must keep going
must hold the gravity at bay
create a way to find the old world under the new
he must reread it to her
without crying for himself

It's not that they can't coexist
but he is the type who must have one or the Other
And the Other has been killed

He beings with cutting his hair

Untitled During a William Carlos Williams phase, so it must be Semester Fall 2003
Put down your smooth affect
and quit kidding us.
We know you only walk like that
when you're ready to flee
So much depends
Upon the stride of your gait.
I read something about
New Wave Romanticism
What to do about it, and these visions I have?
Where I try not to be sleepy and
simply stumble one day into a week
I have a tendency to pull to the right
when not paying attention
Repeatedly someone approaches the throttle
then backs away from the solar flares
I have imagined myself at that bar
desperate and tripped up on football
God and Pour Patria Mori
Then skipping, singing some punk anthem
with real spirit I toss change in the air
not rocks at the hill climbers
I placed a jar in tennessee
just to see if poets will follow me
and they DO and we LOPED on
I can see for miles and miles
which is good because that's
where we're headed.

Untitled Same page
With the lights on, it's fading
Here we are, in these containers
I feel stupid and unmade here
There we are having facelifts
Always spinning
Always willing to be undone
I forget what it tastes like
and this too makes you smile


Right, so, from this we can conclude that how I write depends upon (a red wheelbarrow) which poet I'm reading. Given that all I read lately is Theory, 19th century novels, and Bad Fan Fiction (soon to be an academic discipline), it's no wonder I can't seem to write more than a line or two. Well, I can write quite a bit, but it all sounds like it was written by dead French guys...

Things that don't suck so much

During Finals week, we tend to hyperbolize. The scope of the universe shrinks, and the real Theory of Everthing seems to have something to do with our paper on Jane Austen and the Wagon Wheel (that's a joke for Emily Allen). To remind myself that this is just school, I've compiled a list of things that don't suck.
Things that don't suck

My cat, Kit. Yes, that's right. She's a "KitCat" because she's so sweet. And because thats the name of the Familiar on Charmed, who was also grey. As I write my papers, she leans her head on the edge of the laptop, on the blank area by the mouse. And purrs.

Coffee. Coffee good. Today I had a (guess!?) Venti Iced Almond Latte (Vial) from the drive thru Starbucks out at the new shopping center on Creasy Lane. Yeah, a long way to drive, but I did it in my old Wit sweatshirt and pj bottoms, so who can complain? Also good: ERC's house blend. And ERC's espresso. And ERC's teas--happy yerba matte.

Harry Potter. Specifically, HP fanfiction. It's a good thing there are more than 270,000 fics on fanfiction.net, because I'm insatiable. Even assuming the 3% rule (97% of fanfiction is written by 14 year old girls who can't spell or create a plot), that leaves us with 8,100 good fics. Get reading.

Bad movies, good friends. Dana has arranged for a bad movie night, like the one we held this summer. The feature will be Attack of the Bimbos, which Dana and Reuben are giving to AmERICa (Amanda and Eric) as a Christmas present. I will do a review of the Film here. Maybe. If I ever stop laughing.

The Recycle Bin. I finally ran out of space on my thumbdrive, and decided that instead of buying a new one (cause they're so expensive?) I'd delete some obsolete files. After getting rid of things labeled "misc notes" that no longer mean anything, and removing some strange icons that got downloaded when I did my disability studies paper, and combining some notes into one file, I managed to clear 10,000 KBs. This will still not be enough for me to download all my students' papers, though, so I guess I'm hitting Best Buy tomorrow. The point was, it was exciting to remove unwanted files, and to remove that which means nothing. Too bad it's not easy to do that with the rest of life.

Jeremy Tirrell. Not a joke. Why? Because he was supposed to remove all Drupal websites from Fall 2005 last week, and he didn't. Why is this good? Because all of the files from my Rhetoric of Science class are still online for download. Why is this good? Because I went looking for the ones I had printed out, and I was missing not only pages, but the names of the authors. Jeremy's lack of time saved me a good three hours on Google Scholar, which also does not suck.

Sleep. Sleep does not suck, so I'm told. It is now 1:27 EST (damn Indiana legislature!), and despite being mostly finished with my work, I am up blogging. The cat is, of course, asleep, and yet somehow looking annoyed that I am not laying down so she can inhabit her space on my neck. My insomnia keeps her up too--all the tossing and turning means she has to keep changing positions. When she gets into a deep sleep, she twitches and growls...just like her mommy.

And finally, Animal Planet. Not just because it is an entire channel devoted to things furry, feathery, and fin-ny (yeah, FinFeatherFur), but because they don't have any of those annoying Paid Programs. Ever. All night long, there is something "real" on Animal Planet. Sure, it might be the Eukaneuba Tournament of Champions from 1998, but at least there's a droning voice. The History Channel has the nerve to go off from 4:00 to 7:00. Bastards.

And that's as close as I'll ever get to Christmas cheer. Bah Humbug, and Happpy Kwanzaa to all.

"Dead" Week

It's Dead Week again, that period of time between coursework and finals when everything seems to fall apart at once: computers, papers, bodies. Perhaps renaming the week would prevent this, as well as prevent the constant zombie jokes.
Then again, we all love zombies, almost as much as we love pirates.
The insomnia from hell has returned. Some of you may think, "Well, that's good! You can get a lot of your work done!" Fools. You obviuosly have not had such insomnia before.
The thing about insomnia, as is said in Fight Club is that you're never actually asleep, and you're never really awake. It's this theta-alpha wave crest you ride as you watch the sun rise and set around you. The television glows an electronic, sterile blue, and even my cat seems to be annoyed that I won't just stay still in one position and sleep. Work? Yeah, right. Zombies have eaten my brain. Everything looks like it was shot using a soft lens.
The kids over at the Libertarian Socialists are on their third week without food, and some are in the hospital. Dead Week, indeed. The eternal semester collapses on us, like time dilation gone wrong, everything necessary squeezed into a few days, hyper-concentrated. Who says that 16 weeks is the perfect amount of time to ingest, digest, and assimilate content? What if some of us need 17 weeks? Or less? The artificial barriers are created by holidays that none of us understand anymore. No one really wants to go home for the holidays, not here in the grad lab.
There's a reason we went to grad school. And it had only a little to do with intellectual curiosity.
Of course, you say, "You could have been working on these papers all semester!" True. I could also organize my clothing by color, and give exact change to the cashier at Starbucks. Possible, but not probable. It's not in our natures.
Alas, we find the edge of time again. And it is December 12th. X-files lied.

CFP: Crazy Frakin People

On Thursday last, I joined the MLA. To join this prestigious organization, one must pay $30 (as a graduate student) and hit "send."
Not hyperbole.
I also signed up for the National Communication Association's listserv. The result is that between 4 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Monday I received nearly 200 emails from various academic organizations. And two from someone trying to sell me Viagra.
The mess in my inbox servs (sic) to remind me that while dissemination has become easier, communication has not. I blog, Kari blogs, Lou blogs, we all blog, but the text has no "rhetorical life" (Jeanne Fahnestock). I could put in a plea here for just about any cause, I could write about clowns eating Kashi cereal, I could make non-sense rhymes and call it poetry, but it wouldn't be rhetorical. There would be "rhetoricity" but without audience, without feedback, it isn't rhetoric.
The CFPs pile up, repeat themselves, hail the same acamedics in the same institutions. Is it any surprise that I can find at least three Purdue English Graduate Students at any conference in the States? We say the same things, we give our same Schpiels (needs caps), we parade our same (usually Burkeian) theories to the same crowds. Over and over and over. We cite the same authors, read the same "hot" new books, leap on the same academic bandwagon--same routine, different hotels, differnt cities. Different "organizations" set aside for "different" purposes that all seem about the same to me.
Which is why I got two CFPs--one from the MLA, one from some regional rhetorical studies confernece--on "the backlash" against feminism. The same backlash I've been hearing about since 1995. Let's cite Eve Sedgewick. Let's quote Judith Butler. Let's say the same old things in a different town with newer representative texts. The
"backlash" in graphic novels. The backlash in blogging. The backlash in text messaging. Pick a text, any text, apply theory, eat some gourmet cheese, go home.
I'm not complaining that what we do is pointless. No, I think there are quite a few points that arise at said conferences, new ideas, new relationships forged, new side projects to think about. I love the sharing atmosphere. What bothers me is the sheer volume of CFPs, of conferences, of journals. The proliferation of texts makes it seem like we're going somewhere, but we still keep retreating back to the same old sources. I can go to any MLA conference and, upon hearing the thesis statement of a paper, know exactly how the paper will read, what points will be made, what evidence cited. Emily is right in saying that the Q&A afterwards is why people really go to conferences. Because everything before that is just review.
How many conferences do we need? How many panels can we have before we stretch ourselves too thin? Is there any sense of "expertise" any more?
I better be careful before someone turns my questions into a conference theme. Then again, someone probably already has.

Reversion: Control and Mastery

Yes, I have been absently absent digitally. Note to self: Never schedule major presentations and papers to be due during midterms and your birthday.

In our Victorian Literature class, Emily Allen was surprised at the lack of ability to do a close reading among graduate students. I flashed back to my first close reading ever, on Blake's poem about the chimney sweep. My reading was pedantic, but at least it was a close reading: I interpreted the adjectives used, the line breaks, the form of the poem, and its allusions.
I'd never even consider that as a valide essay now.
We have become so immersed in "cultural studies" in the loosest sense of the term that we have forgotten the main methods of our field. Even the great scholars in literary theory spend so much time contextualizing that their "close readings" seem to be simply quotations with a nod toward the reader: Look at this quote. We all know how to read it. Now let's see how Dickens' financial situation influenced his use of the word "miser" here.
This is not a close reading. Instead, the sort of close reading and mastery over the text that the New Critics provided us with has been shunted aside; perhaps because we are loathe to remember the ideology from which close reading emerged. The "empirical" feel to close reading and the New Critics' attempts to scientize literary studies makes us very uncomfortable. And so close reading becomes one technique among many, and not the primary goal of an interpretation.
I won't say whether this is right or wrong in general (as a rhetorician, I cannot speak for the literary critics), but to me this feels irresponsible. As Professor Burleson so naively says in my communication studies class, the point of literary studies is to "understand" (another word we hesitate on) the work in front of us. And that means a certain mastery over, control over, the text itself which we in this postmodern non-arboreal, anti-hierarchical context cringe at. We say we are doing a "violence" to a text when we "mark" it (Bartholomae, Ways of Reading introduction and Derrida, Acts of Literature). The instant we comment on it, the text is no longer "the" text--it mutates and becomes something else, Derrida says. This may be true: My marks on Wordsworth's "Prelude" have made it very different from the original text. And I certainly intend to do a violence to it by leaving my own mark upon the history of that text and its various meanings.
But I do this through what I call a "rhetorical" analysis--and rhetorical analysis is not afraid of close reading. Rhetorical analysis seeks to master the text and its life in the real world. Rhetorical analysis looks at possible intent, possible effects, possible meanings: it is forceful and assumptive, and until recently was unapologetic about making statements such as "Women are drawn to softer colors; therefore, O'Keefe's painting is aimed toward the feminine understanding." We make assumptions about the meaning of an italicized word, about the use of a comma, about the need for a border around an advertisement based on the commonplaces of our given society. It's Aristotelian, it's Burkiean, it's whitemale.
Other than the types of questions asked, a "close reading" done for literary studies is no different from one done in rhetorical studies. I wonder why our students--and, it seems, grad students--do not seem to have the procedures embedded in their brains. (Of course, I didn't have those in there until I took Lamar's Intro to Lit and Sue's Mass Media class in the same semester and began noticing overlaps). Do we fear so much to master a text that we have abandoned the notion of getting "close" to a text?
I sound like a conservative East Coast literature person, I know. But cultural studies is not a method for getting at a text's meaning--it's a method of getting at a text's culture, it's ideologies, it's seeds and progeny. We have only one method of attempting to understand meaning, and that's through close reading. It may be a reversion of sorts, but it doesn't have to be. You can still use the methods of close reading and assert a multiplicity of views at once. You can make the large assumptions that rhetorical theory requires (thanks so much, Aristotle et al) and still acknowledge that for any given culture or individual, these readings might not be the same. There doesn't have to be an air of empirical certainty to your reading; nor is it avoidable to do the violence to the text that Derrida describes (in fact, he doesn't lament that we do this violence--I'd argue he simply points it out).
The mixed methodologies of cultural studies (in its formal sense) allows us to use whatever we can get our hands on in order to explain a given rhetorical situation. To do so, we examine texts and their interaction with the context in which they are created. We must read the texts a culture produces just as much as we should the research economics, ecololgy, material conditions, interpersonal relationships, etc that were available in that time. If the time is a present time, we should empirically research the attitudes towards an idea, towards a text, towards a statement and catalogue for future generations our understandings of this data. How do people feel about dystopian films? What explanations are commonly given for reading 1984? And then, what about Brave New World's construction, content, or style might be appealing to high school teachers so that it ends up on syllabi? How does the text argue for change, and how does that argument reflect the conditions in which Huxley was writing? What other treatises were available that same year, and how were those formally constructed? What genre conventions are present in these novels, and how do those conventions transfer to film? How is the hero represented, and how do audiences feel about that hero when they actually are reading? Close reading mixes with historical research and can blend in empirical, qualitative, attitudinal studies. (And it will).
Literature meets rhetoric in the text itself. A true rhetorical theory of fiction (sorry Booth, you didn't go far enough) would combine all of the elements above. And I believe that literature studies needs rhetorical studies right now (and perhaps vice versa), as we make the so-called "ethical turn" in literary theory. The ethical turn is concerned with the text's relationship to the reader and how much the text imposes upon the reader's values and selfhood. How can we possibly understand that without understanding how to read, and how a text is carefully constructed affectively (toward affect)?
As I read attempts at close readings, I keep thinking that if these critics had knowledge of rhetorical theory and methods they wouldn't be working so hard to make claims about "style". What is missing from close reading is a mastery of reading as an act that takes place in time and space. Burke's methods of criticism--if we can call them methods--seem to me the perfect blend of the literary and the rhetorical senses of close reading. He examines not only what happens as a reader reads, but looks at other uses of the metaphors in question over the lifetime of the author. He looks at how a sentence moves the reader from one idea to the next--how ideas get transformed and speculates, based on contextual information why an author would write such a transformation. He imagines what a reader "learns" or gains from a text as to why some texts become canonical or popular. He theorizes the connection between author and reader as one taking place in an undefined space that both share--shared values, common vocabulary, communal traditions and rituals that make two seem like one. And only then does he (begin to) consider larger social movements.
Literary studies tends to do this backward: the context is selected and then applied to the text. Good studies look at the give and take between text and context, but rarely do we see the close attention to each individual word and punctuation that Burke would have us do. His reading of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is considered masterful by literary critics (traditional!) and rhetorical critics alike because it is such a close reaidng, not only of the text, but of the texts surrounding Keats at that time.
In order to write my dissertation, I am going to have to argue for a Burkeian methodology for literary studies. Few, if any, have tried to extrapolate what that methodology might look like, had Burke ever set a literary "program" as he did a rhetorical one. And I will use dystopian fiction as an exemplar to make this argument, showing how texts--especially modern ones--inflitrate so many areas of culture (and, of course, that it is important to study the arguments these texts make) that it is necessary to adopt a different approach to literature. Mastery of a text doesn't just mean exploring a context. It doesn't just mean doing a close reading. Mastery involves all those moves that Burke makes in his readings of literature that few have been able to replicate since then.
The question is, can I do it?

Reversion

six shots of espresso later and i'm still yawning
dawn is no closer than the last repeat of the cd
--can i call it a daydream when it's still night--
bloody cardinals and inky jays and muddy hawks
skirt the edges of the heavy parts of the air
that settled just above here last night
it's weighted with water to drown out the pain

musty carpets and bathrobes smell like before
(before i left for eastern pastures)
our insubstantial consubstantial murmurings at dinner
--we can call it immediate for now--
mixed elves wtih oily corn, love with silk shirts
the stones we leaped in the fog, in a waltz
reeked old dampness from the creek and the dew

elastic in my veins is like (mutatis mutandis)
when love was so easy (sine qua non)