La Loi du Genre: L'etat des Etats Unis

Is a blog a genre? Are there genres of blogs? If so, what follows should be a breach of genre, should create its own category by its presence. It's presence marks my absence, though, that I am not telling you this in person.


Derrida on Blanchot on Dostoyevski on Rousseau...
I am not learned; I am not ignorant
I had to acknowledge that I was not capable of forming a story recit [....]I had lost the sense of the recit story.
Who was being questioned? Who was answering? One became the other. The words spoke by themselves

He is absent to himself in this telling. The story has no end. The part is larger than the whole.

The single member of the genre must then also contain the whole of the genre? To do so is to do a violence, a violation, a penetration of the whole. Such violence is present in sacrifice: Jesus stands for many, Jesus is the exemplar which illuminates the logic of the exemplar.
What would J Denny say?
See the sun slivers sickle inside
See the burdened burning to the snow
Cinders ash as they're sinking inside
Of a hollowed mind caught in the flow

(Or, "Amy reaffirms her Burkeian position")
"What is at stake, in effect, is exemplarity" (227). Each exemplar (repetition) has a relationship to the universal Law or Genre it is an example of. In rhetoric, we take this for granted, that the exemplar is a member of the genre, that it can tell us something about both the larger category and the other members of the category. X is like Y, both of which are members of category Z is a condition of logos itself. Without this principle, I could not argue anything's existence, for if it existed already, I wouldn't need to argue for it. Why does it all make me dream of derrivations in trig?

Derrida relates these to the mathematical set theories. For Jacques, "the law of the law of genre [....]is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy" (227). In set theory, the law of the law of genre requires a "sort of participation without belonging." It is, as Sandy says, the infinite within the finite. This is possible because "the trait that marks membership" (the line between the genres) "inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internatl pocket larger than the whole." Like the crust of bread, that which marks the boundaries of being are neither part of the being nor NOT part of the being.

Sandy goes further to say that the only moment where the one can stand for--contain--the whole is in sacrificial substitution. Substitution is a moment of violence or trauma.

But this violence is only symbolic, it is not a real pain. Must our symbols be so symbolic that they displace the real violence, real harm done by humans? I cannot ignore the war. Ad Bellum Purificandum--to purify war is to make it only symbollic, Kenneth Burke says. The only way to eliminate war is to purify it by doing harm in text, not life. But to privilege the symbol ignores that we have yet to purify it; to call reading a "violence to the text" is to equate the purified violence with the real violence, which, because of the negation that purity creates, denies the pain of the victims. That is, when we say that re-interpretation is symbolic violence to the original text and we say that violence is happening in Iraq, the two types of violence take on the traits of the other; the symbolic violence is more violent for its resemblance to the bloodshed, and the violence of the "war on terror" is less violent for its comparison to reading.

Ad Bellum Purificandum Toward the purification of war. Burke is a theorist of hope; he can still imagine social change, he believes there are essences, even if our langauge will never let us know them. Even if purification (nullification) is not possible, the "toward" part is. Bin Laden, who enacted real violence, has now taken to the symbolic violence of hate speech on video tape. We do no better when we hate (kill) our enemies. The law of the law of genre states that the very divisions by which we create categories of "friend" and "enemy" are themselves impure--there is a principle of contamination behind the idea of division. Burke says the same, in different words. There is no absolute Other (outside of the divine, I would add), everything can return to the molten center.

In terms of science, we all know that the "solidity" of an object is really quite shaky: at what point do the molecules of the table end and the ones of my hand begin? Are there not electrons that cross between us, shared bits of the universe that make up both me and it? Just because our nerves can't sense the exchange doesn't mean it doesn't occur; I drink the same water as my enemies, and that water--the hydrogen and the oxygen--interact in "my" cells, create my dna, then are redispersed into the air, where they are picked up by others. The lines are so fine, and the physicists keep finding smaller particles, ad infinitum, so that electrons are made of quarks, and quarks are made of strings and strings make up the universe when they move.

Demarcation, then, of one genre of literature to the next is like finding up and down quarks. Isn't it enough that we have found the differences between atoms? Between parts of atoms? Now we must further differentiate...for why? Why agonize over the difference between "the novel" and "comic prose epic"? Why argue the differences among "science fiction" and "speculative fiction" and "dystopian fiction" and "utopian fiction" and "fantasy"? Who gives a damn?

We all give a damn, not just because of our occupational psychosis, but because it helps us give value to the world. And value helps us make decisions, helps us act. Hope, therefore, lies in differentiation, because hope is the possibility of action.

Derrida says "Il n'y a rien de hors-text" --outside the text there is Nothingness, or there is nothing other than text. For Derrida, the lines of "text" and "context" are too fluid to matter, making meaning indeterminate. This makes me uneasy; if I want hope, I have to reject the "therefore" of Derrida's theses. Yes, differentiation is a futile task because we cannot know where the pure essence is, but we still act as though we can, we still base value judgements as though there were easy lines of demarcation, and we, as humans, know no other way. Burke takes this assumption as his starting point; he recognizes the problem of ontology, of Being and Time, of sub-stance, ("Substance-free living! Join Alpha Chi Omega!"), but also notices that this lack of demarcation does not prevent us from hurting (or helping) one another, either physicaly or symbolically. In fact, we do a whole lot based on our belief in a demarcation that doesn't exist, and we use those lines of difference as evidence, as logos. Burke wants us all to be comically Derridian, recognizing the constructedness of our terms, and yet not assume there is no meaning. After all, meaning happens all the time. Meaning helps us elect officials, pass laws, execute inmates, go to war, cut welfare, etc. Meaning--even outside the judiciary, even in "literature"--in texts determines our culture, our Attitude, which is latent action.

A non literary poem

Derrida says literature, that which illuminates textuality and referentiality, does not include poems. So here is a poem about the body of texts we signify as "belonging to" Derrida, that which he "signed" (qu'il a signe?), and yet this poem points to its own textuality.
So HA.
Ce ci n'est pas une texte

Have you ever seen yourself on a bus or subway or streetcorner
not just something like you, but you in all your problematic glory
and seen your own eyes reveal the despeartion you thought
your laughter hid?

the gasps come then
even as you open the mailbox
not from the lack of checks or possibility of bills
but because the past was present

Before the law, in front of and in a previous time to
prior to and the foundation of
the Law that makes us make sense of the swarm of la vie
the "il faut que" and the "interdit"
La loi est interdit: it is prohibition itself and is prohibted
It is behind us, we are before it, and cannot bow down
because we are outside it--all are outlaws qui est hors de la loi.

That guy with the dyed red hair thought he was
defying some law, but the law is not present
it is only re-presented by people, who are voices for a silent mark
If I could have deferred that moment, I would have.
He is desirable because he cannot ever be had; he represents desire.

Il faut que
we notice that faut and fault and fall are all alike
When we kill the father, he is more present
when we killed Jesus, he became holy
and only by being alive can we be dead, says Jacques
no violence in killing, for the dead are more present
but it hurts, and pain is the root of all ethics

If to end "ci falt" is to "finish although incomplete"
then the only completeness to be found
can be found in those that do not declare finis
All stories are prematurely ended.

It's turtles all the way down
it's desire of desire, to have the need to need
that I see in that girl with the sparkling eyes
his violet glasses are from 1999,
a reflection and defelction I wanted to pass through

There is nothing in between us but colored glass
I am before the you I've created for me
and cannot reach you through the layers of la glace
Je n'ai pas le droit to melt the ice
Je n'ai pas le fort to touch the sacred

At ERC, again

In Amy's 106 class, Role playing: Interview practice.
Jake to Ed: What's your passion [gesures with hands]
Ed: Drugs.


It's hard to miss Boston
when the air is wet like this
and the pipes are exposed
on the ceiling of the coffee shop.

I have a palimpsest of buses
of brick-walled dim rooms
of expressivist photography, of harmonies,
each layer denies the other
each sip stops my breath like the first.

I would have kissed him,
you, if not for the trench coat's smoothness
against my gloves.
I would have enshrined you there,
poised, suspeneded by the quarter note triplets.

Il n'y a pas de hors-text.
Il n'y a pas de l'or text.
Il n'y a que mon text.
La texte, c'est moi.
Et personne ne lis cette texte la.

The Longest Post in the world: Armstrong Part 2

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Run Nancy, Run! (The Novel)

On Nancy Armstrong's "Introduction: The Politics of Domesticating Culture, Then and Now." Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Poitical History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. 3-27.
Amylea's Part I.
Some initial qustions from the first page: Why is it called "domestic" fiction? How did it get that name? Does signifying it as "domestic" only add to the created and assumed distance between "literature" (male) and "popular fiction" (that is, "low" and female)? Even as Armstrong writes to illuminate the power of domestic fiction, she must differentiate it from the privileged term because we have no other way of talking about it, of singling it out for discussion without demoting it.
Of course, this is not her fault. It is, in fact, what she is writing against. Can criticism be a form of social action? Burke would say so, and I think he'd call this type of lit crit "poetry."

     Armstrong ("Nan"? Nance?) wants to connect fiction and desire: "Most fiction, which represented identity in terms of region, sect, or faction, could not very well affirm the universality of any particular form of desire. In contrast, domestic fiction unfolded the operations of human desire as if they were independent of political history. And this helped to create the illusion that desire was entirely subjective and therefore essentially different from the politically encodable forms of behavior to which desire gave rise" (9, emphasis added). In other words, the unprivileged form of fiction, domestic fiction, inscribes desire. As it is the unprivileged term, despite all its power as fiction, it becomes an invisible actor. Domestic fiction ("chick lit"?), in order to talk about desire at all, must separate it from the legitimated forms of commentary--the political, civil, social. As the two further diverged, we ended up with a "two kingdom theory" of desire: The novels changed social behavior, but could not be seen as actors; instead, mores for those behaviors were created seemingly without a history, without a past. Their source was unspeakable, and thus could not be named as the source. Having no past, the mores took greater hold; they seemed eternal (no origin means no ending?), true. And thus, despite the subversive, representative anecdotal nature of the novels, domestic fiction became "unliterary" and unnoticed.

Until now.

      Armstrong gives a different social history of the novel than Watt--instead of saying that social conditions gave rise to the novel, she implies (from a Foucauldian standpoint) that both the social conditions and the novel are in a web of power, pushing and pulling each other, mutually mutable. While the history of the male novel is the one privileged, it has been priviledged after the fact. Both forms were at work, and they are more difficult to extrude from one another--unless one simply looks at the gender of the author. Armstrong uses the idea of "cultural hegemony" to find her way outside the text (a major cultural studies problem). How, we must ask, did the hegemony of that day and this day create our current ideas about desire? How do the novels inscribe and create desire? How do they temper it, domesticate it, turn that subversive human need to possess into something socially acceptable, socially stabilizing (marriage, the "Cinderalla" complex of needing to find the perfect man to have a good life). The idea that "love" (not desire) is the ultimate goal? That class, money, status do not mean as much as "true love"?

Oh barf. Just in time for Singles' Awareness Day (a.k.a. "Saint" Valentine's Day).

What I think Armstrong will miss, based on her overview of her methodology and Foucauldian association, is how the texts themselves create desire--the rhetorical dimension of the texts. Burke describes how the plot and "argument" of a novel (actually, of any good "poetry") lead us to desire. We are assimilated (consubstantiated) into the text's form, recognize it, become part of it. As the texts progresses, we become aware of the construction, and we want to know the end. We almost know the end, we chant along with it, racing toward the conclusion. First, then, next. Even as the novel speaks of desire, gives us a representative anecdote of how to desire, what appropriate desire is, it causes us to desire. And that parallel construction of form/content and effect is especially good rhetoric.
But I doubt Armstrong will go that far.
To Be Continued....

Chili's, sushi, and "love" in the English department

Last year Anna said there was no love in our English department at Northeastern. I vowed that the next place I settled (as close as I ever get to "settled") would have love. With, like, people and everything.
Alors, c'est vrai.
Next weekend is Fun with Sushi. mmmmmmmm Raw FISH.
I suppose I should start in on my reading. Derrida is kicking my absent/present ass. If writing's goal is to make us absent enough to ourselves so that we can represent ourselves, then....something about the internet and the "presence" indicated by avatars, "instant" messaging, and the less present world of cyberspace text goes here. Can we say internet writing is different (differAnt?) simply because it purports to be less present (space) and more present (time)? Or does that not matter because writing in books or on paper is equally ephemeral: it can be burned, or lost or fade?
Is all self representation a type of absence? And aren't we always representing ourselves? (A self? A "selph," as Burke would say?) So even when I go out to Chili's with my friends, am I not absent to myself? Perhaps that's what we like. Too much presence is a bad thing. Madeline L'Engle wrote that most humans can't handle too much reality. Real reality would fry us.
Fry....mmmmmm eggs.

Your Hair Should Be Purple

Intense, thoughtful, and unconventional. You're always philosophizing and inspiring others with your insights.

What's Your Funky Inner Hair Color?

Cool. Now I know what to buy for next weekend.

You Are Japanese Food

Strange yet delicious. Contrary to popular belief, you're not always eaten raw.

What Kind of Food Are You?

Duh.

Your Hidden Talent

You have the natural talent of rocking the boat, thwarting the system. And while this may not seem big, it can be. It's people like you who serve as the catalysts to major cultural changes. You're just a bit behind the scenes, so no one really notices.

What's Your Hidden Talent?

Right. So this fabulous dissertation I'm going to write on rhetoric and subversive/dystopian fiction...that's going to be my contribution. Woo. Hoo.
I need to go protest something somewhere.

Watt Part 2

The link above has nothing to do with Ian Watt, novels, or the 18th Century. It does, however, take you to the online edition of The Bloody Theatre, or, the Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians, Who Baptized Only Upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Saviour, From the Time of Christ to the Year A.D. 1660 Complied Ffrom Various Authentic Chronicles, Memorials, and Testimonies. Nice title.

     As for Watt: I have a few thoughts which do not go together, and probably never will. First, I can't help but notice how similiar his argument is to that of Kenneth Burke. Both of them find that "both the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen as parallel manifestations of larger change" (Watt 31)--For "manifestations," insert "symptoms" and you have Burke's idea of literature as arising from a particular Scene, as a "stylized and strategic response" to that scene. What Burke would emphasize about ALL writing ("poetry" he says) is that it is rhetorical in that it tries to create identifications and identity. When Watt talks about "the various technical characteristics" of the novel, of the "stylistic [classical] tradition of fiction" that the novel does not have, of the novel's "break [...] with the accepted canons of prose style" (27-29), he is forgetting that those very stylistic changes are rhetorical changes. If literature is a stylized response, a change in style is a change in argument. It is not enough to simply state that "the" novel breaks with traditional style; we must now identify that style and what it does. Style, as much as content, determines reception and Attitude changes in the audience.

     Which is why it is important to rethink Watt's statement on the novel's structure: "What is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably follows from this: the poverty of the novel's formal conventions would seem to the the price it must pay for its realism" (13). There are MANY problems with this statement. To begin with, let me point to all of the economics metaphors Watt uses: "poverty," "price to pay," later, "cost of," etc. While I realize that writing is a commodity, the language of impovershment seems inappropriate for some reason--I guess I'll work that out later.

      More importantly, however, is his claim that the novel does not quite meet the standards of tragedy. While the novel form is "freer" in a sense, over time it has become formalized. In fact, if I remember correctly, some of the Formalists claimed that there is little difference between Greek and novel plot lines. There is more variance allowed, but that variance is still held to conventions. In fact, as I have argued to death, dystopian and utopian novels have a fairly fixed structure that has only begun to be experimented with. There are stock characters, predictable tragic heroes, journeys home, etc. I'm not sure why Watt thinks there is no form to the novel: Pamela and Moll Flanders are both about the struggles of a pretty girl and her ability to work through those struggles using her wits (Moll being a phystical actor, Pamela working symbolically). Both meet some older woman who is corrupt and helps them see inside the cagey world of working women. Both learn lessons about deception. They may take different approaches, but both end up in the same damn place: at home, with a husband and a child, happily ever after. In the end, the women reading the novel are no different than Moll or Pamela: they do not need to go out and experience this themselves because Moll and Pam have shown that no matter what we do, we all end up alike. And that's a comfort. And it's a form. How else could we have a tragic novel?

Take that.

      The epistilary form of Pamela (and lots of others) lends itself to Kenneth Burke's idea of identification and consubstantiality. The best rhetoric--the only rhetoric--depends on the rhetor's ability to create an identification between himself and his audience. Because writing lacks the immediacy of speech (shut up Derria), because the speaker is absent, identification must be got by other means than mere presence and proximity. The temporal realism of Pamela allows us to move with her (as Richardson's mouthpiece), to be connected to her in time, if not space. While it makes for strange reading if you think about it too hard, the temporal proximity makes up for the lack of action. Pamela is about words, about argumentation, about a woman's ability to speak when silenced, symbolically act when unable to effect change elsewhere. Because of this, not much "happens," but due to the presence the text purports, we do not feel the drag of mere conversation between made up people. It's like a soap opera (or Battlestar Galactica, or InuYasha)--the speech matters only because we are already connected to the speakers.

      Why is Watt's framework still present after nearly 50 years? Why do we still feel the need to at least read it, if not address it? Even I, not knowing anything about the field, felt drawn to his book. First, I think, he is the first person to take the novel seriously, as a work of art. Secondly, he, like Burke, seems to be ahead of his time, in attributing cultural factors to the novel's rise (whether or not he got it right doesn't matter to me as much as the fact that he does not give the Romantic argument of "spontaneous overflow of emotion" for invention). His argument is difficult to breach; he argues that causality as a topoi is ever present in the novel, and this is the very topoi he uses (novels were caused by X, Y, Z). If you accept one part of his argument, you feel compelled by the rest. In linking philosophy to literature, he adds to his ethos and logos. His pathos is lacking, but it usually is in this type of writing.

      In the end, however, Watt gives us a starting place, something to hold onto as a master narrative. The Romantic narratives still hold today; we should not be surprised that this one is equally compelling. Watt's text acts as an island to stand on in the ocean of data, the sea of text and context. It is an organizing principle where there were none before. In creating his framework, he has accomplished a monumental, albeit probably incomplete, task: he's managed to give us a leg to stand on. To not address that leg as we add others would be to try to build a building from the top down. Even if the newer theories and criticism end up undoing Watt, they must first return to Watt to, as Burke says, return the terms to the molten center, where terms are at play and ideas are indefinite (pun intended).

      As for the Martyrs Mirror: Is it literature? Gerald's language seems to imply that it is, at least, somewhat fictive, somewhat in a "story" mode. That, however, does not literature make, according to Derrida. Burke, however, says that any symbolic performance is "poetry" when it does something, when it responds to something. Which stance shall I take?

What, then, shall we do?

Blogthings--Amy's post Derrida fun

      I hadn't intended on reading this much Derrida...EVER. Not that I hate Derrida, as some do. I find his ideas...sparky. Little flashes of light behind my eyes. I latch onto the singular moments I understand. Then I go back, and reread and reread. Reading Derrida requires enacting his ideas--recognizing that writing allows us to return, to re-mark, re-iterate. And one MUST return to writing, or it is not real writing; if something is perfectly clear, one cannot call it "writing"--there is no need. All writing, then, attempts to reveal even as it conceals. Literature is "literature" because it illuminates this relationship.
     It also illumniates the relationship of general to specific, of genre to member of genre--whole to part. It points out its own conventions and the necessity of those conventions; otherwise, we would not be able to read the text. But the conventions are repetitions for which there is no original; there is no "ubertext" which taught us all how to read a certain genre. As much as we want to call 1984 the prototype dystopia, it is only one member of a group, which we can only recognize as a group and not singularly. We could not, that is, have "learned" to read a genre from some original text--because we never would have been able to read that text in the first place. Therefore, to call Pamela the first "novel" is a ridiculous distinction; there is no first novel; they are all copies (with, of course, slight variations) of some other structure. No novel is entirely within the "novel" genre, either. There is no pure example of a genre, only hybrids; our social relations encourage us to name these as genre members, for ease of discussion.
     Where does that leave Miller, then? Miller says we recognize genres based on their actions. This does not seem contrary to Derrida, more like a supplement (if I am allowed to use that word in such a way). If Derrida (and Burke! They overlap so much!) wants to say that there is no pure genre, Miller will take the more pragmatic (BURKE) angle, by asking us to consider the fact that we do name genres, despite their impurities (Burke says that purity is barely possible, and if it is possible, is a destruction of essence). How can we do so, with so many "constellations" of forms shifting and changing? What is a good way to talk about these things that we use, but cannot define an essence of? Like Burke, (and lots of other rhetoricians), Miller points to the effect; like the wind, which we cannot see, genres are not quite visible to us except by what they do. It's the doing that matters here, not the essence, or our overall Western inability to discuss essence and being. We still must act.
     The dystopian (topian?) novel is a hybrid genre. If it were merely a "novel" we would call it so; however, we feel the need to include that adjective, to point to a difference. How is it different? What is the social action that changes? It is, at least, more subversive than the "regular" novel (although I would argue that as a genre, novels are fairly subversive in themselves). But Burke said that most revolutionary rhetoric is conservative...is dystopian fiction conservative? I want to say no, because of how 1984 came to me, how it came to symbolize everything that Hum and Monty and (oh god) Derek were doing in their little punky universe in high school. How Marx inflitrated our (their?)attempts to break the hegemony of Ashland so unsuccessfully that it just about drove them mad. And Orwell, to me, seemed to be describing the extremes of what I was seeing; total control, absolute hegemony, the need to hide subversion underground. The feeling of being in "lock down." Reading Orwell was a subversion; he wanted the text to be revolutionary--that much you can feel--and even if it did turn out to be, as Burke predicts, conservative, the act of reading something known as revolutionary is itself a subversion. I'm not saying this well. It doesn't matter what actions 1984 leads to in this case; it's the act of reading that is subversive, that is a change in attitude. Even if the resulting actions only maintain the current status quo, they are still revolutionary.
     Pamela on the other hand, or other novels, do not have this same call to action within them. They may lead to action due to the representative anecdote, and reading them may be seen as subversive (not really any more, but in the 18th century it was), but the novels do not call attention to the social situation in the same way. The defamiliarizing aspects that "science fiction" is defined by allow for a social transformation rhetoric. This defamiliarization, this hidden-yet-obvious commentary on the dangers of the present is what makes the adjective "dystopian" necessary.
     Is Moll Flanders subversive? Yes and no. As Burke says, that which seems subversive is often actually conservative. This is why the ending matters (entelechy!); if Moll had been caught and punished for "real," the subversion would have failed. The representative anecdote would tell us that "even if theiving and other non-social activities are fun for awhile and lead to good things, there is eventually a consequence. Do not desire this life, young ladies, for Moll only ends up in a bad situation." That Moll escapes and lives without consequences means that the representative anecdote is exactly as DeFoe states in his thesis: Sometimes you have to steal to make a living. Society sucks; there is no choice. Good job, DeFoe!
     However, we must look not only at the representative anecdote, but how the text is actually read--there may be an "obvious" anecdote for us, but for the original readers (and later readers...) a different "moral" may appear. The fact that Moll was so popular makes me immediately question its subversive abilities: If attitudes were indeed changed (if the Pentad shifted due to the Act of reading), and there were so many attitudes to be changed, why was there no middle class uprising? Why did young ladies not take to theiving? The critics of the day feared this outcome, but it did not happen. Why not? What prevents someone from acting on the (proposed) attitude change?
     Why do violent video games not lead to violent children?
     Here is the question of rhetoric. To be effective, one must have a very tight mimesis, a strong mimetic desire, the desire for complete identification. You must lose yourself and become the speaking/writing Other for there to be a resulting Act. What Moll failed to do, and what video games fail to do for most children/teens is create this identification. While I am engrossed in the action of Moll (wheee theiving), I am not able to identify with her, due to the time and context change. Her own readers were not themselves in her condition (or they couldn't have afforded the novel)--a revealed/concealed distance is present, one rhetoricians are always trying to overcome.
     It is the problem of communication in general: We cannot speak as the angels. Angels have perfect communication, no trace, no reiteration, no remarking. No doubt. Lucky angels. We, however, always have the problem of the Other, who we want to be like, who we can imitate, but never become so wholly as to (commune)icate.
     This is where Gerald would say something about Christianity--where he has said something about Christianity. What did Jesus do that we could not? As the Son of the Logos, he was able to become part of us completely, and yet remain human enough for sacrifice. Jesus was the Other and himself all at once. As Gerald said, because of this, Christianity's main job is to "seek the distinction of radical inclusion."
     And I still am not sure how to do that.

     Enough heavy stuff.

You Are a Soy Latte

At your best, you are: free spirited, down to earth, and relaxed At your worst, you are: dogmatic and picky You drink coffee when: you need a pick me up, and green tea isn't cutting it Your caffeine addiction level: medium

What Kind of Coffee Are You?

Medium???????? MEDIUM? Not EVEN!

Your Personality Profile

You are dignified, spiritual, and wise. Always unsatisfied, you constantly try to better yourself. You are also a seeker of knowledge and often buried in books. You tend to be philosophical, looking for the big picture in life. You dream of inner peace for yourself, your friends, and the world. A good friend, you always give of yourself first.

The World's Shortest Personality Test

Um. Hmm. So much for not having compassion. They're close, I suppose. Not bad for an internet quiz.

What would Burke say about this?

Um.

Hmm.

Blogging the Novel--Hunter, part 1

Some thoughts on J. Paul Hunter's "The novel and social/cultural history," to be revisited later

I enjoyed Hunter's piece, probably because it's the first cultural studies like item I've read in a while. His concerns are my concerns, his assumptions are my assumptions...but I, of course, have this little Burke in my head (the Parliament of Voices seems to be ruled by one short rhetorician...)

Hunter begins with the assumption that "Novels [...] explicitly render manners, habits, customs, and beliefs that differ from culture to cutlure, and they depend heavily on the particulars of time and place" (10). As I noted in my Watt entry, both time and place are essential to the argumentative force of the text. But what is it that novels argue for?

Hunter also states that the early novels are readable "even if you know nothing of the history of their time and place, but often conflicts in the plot--and subtle differences between different characters--derive from the interpretations of desires, needs, and values that are culturally based" (10). I would argue that it is not subtle at all--that those particulars of the place are essential for the defamiliarization aspect of the rhetoric of fiction. That those who read the novels without the same understandings as the audience of the original context are reading an entirely different novel, and that novel has an entirely different rhetorical effect. In fact, it may no longer be a "novel" at all, for the readers in the new context. Because the novel bases its identifications in the particular, not the universal, the consubstantiality among author/narrator and reader changes as time and place change.

In other words, 1984 may not be a dystopian novel any more. Texts within a genre can be re-ordered as their function within a culture shifts. This is one of the wonderful things about the printed text; as Derrida points out, texts now outlive their contexts--writing anticipates death. Pamela no longer incites young women to social subversion. Pamela is now so legitimated within the academy that it cannot have the same representative anecdote. I'm not even sure if there is a representative anecdote for 21st century readers, unless those readers are aware of Pamela's context.

While Hunter never uses Burkeian phrases, I find Burkeian ideas throughout (big surprise). When he states that our view of the 18th century was once "appealing for its escapism in the midst of World War I" he acknowledges the Symbolic Action of the narratives we create.

Blogging the novel--Watt, part 1

Note that this is not "Blogging a Novel"

I made the mistake of twitching at the name of Jane Austen in my very first "Rise of the Novel" class. It has become so second nature that I don't even notice that I do it anymore. At Bluffton, this would have awarded me the same sort of chidding, yet light hearted look Mrs. Cleaver gave the Beav when he got into trouble. "Oh, you silly boy," or something, followed by a knowing shake of the head.
Instead, Emily Allen jumped on me and claimed she would reform me.
Oops.

For the record, I will state that I do not hate the 18th Century (whatever that may mean) as much as I hate William Wordsworth. In fact, all the revolutions make it loads of fun for a rhetorician of subversive moments like me. And while I would not read Jane Austen's work in a bubble bath, I would read various cultural criticism of it while in downward dog position (an excellent reading position, as the blood flows to your head).

In the Summer of Insanity (2004) I ran across several references to Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel. I checked it out and read, I think, the first chapter before returning to Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It did, however, raise several dystopian questions in my mind, and some problems with genre studies in general. Emily has given us a precis of the first two chapters of Watt's book, and I found myself writing very similar notes to what can be found in the tiny black notebook from the SOI2004.

Particularly, I was working through the problem of "topia" in general. What does it mean to have a genre (here I am thinking of a multifaceted "u/dystopian" genre that combines both versions) defined by its attention to place? Watt says that the novel, in general is special because it pays particular attention to time and space. But the "topian" fictions take this aspect of the novel and make it a main component of the plot.

Watt also says that the novel is concerned with linking "past and current events through temporality and causality" (Allen paraphrasing Watt). Causality is an important word here, as I have mentioned in my "Star Wars" blog. The idea that actions X and Y lead to consequence Z are essential to the topian rhetorics; without a notion of an individual's ability to effect change, the topian novel has no argument.

And "individual" is important, as Watt notes, to novels in general as well. Instead of some universal human, novels tend to particularize their characters. But here we have a problem of causality when thinking about dystopian fictions, which are almost exclusively concerned with the individual's ability to remain a unique person in the face of a totalitarian regime. Did this concern with originality come from the novel as a genre itself, or the cause a more complex mixture of changes in beliefs about humanity in general? That is, are the fear of the unindividuated masses depicted by dystopian fiction and the novel's concern with the individual both "symptoms of" (as Burke would say) some larger movement? How do they feed into one another so that by the late 1930s Huxley can write about the Alphas and the Betas (etc) and their monotonous routines with such fear?

What is important from this (yeah, like I was going to answer those questions above) is that with the novel's "rise," characters in fiction were given added Agency (whee Burke). But Watt is not a cultural-rhetorical theorist. He only begins to think about the possible effects not only on individual readers, but on the fabric of their society. When he states that the "pirated" versions of the novel had little to do with the rise of the novel as a genre, he is missing a very big point. Just as pirated and fan-subbed versions of anime have driven that genre as well as shaped it, I would imagine that the pirated versions of novels eventually shaped the novels being written.

And what of the serialized nature of the novel? That the so-called middle class readers of the novel could only read in increments is especially important to the fanfiction movement. (Amy's question of the decade: Were novels the new epic? And if so, have we supplanted it again with another genre?)

And for the love of the now demonized Johnny Damon, "Britain" was not so isolated, Watt! Moll Flanders proves that! You can't talk about the origins and sources of the novel without considering FRANCE. Il faut qu'on le souvienne!

Il faut que je continue ce blog apres ma classe du roman.

Everyone else is doing it

Kari's blog features her results from bluepyramid.com's famous internet quizes. (Does Quizzes have two Zs?) I'm a copy cat. At least I'm not like Danielle, who found out she's like the Webster's Dictionary. A dictionary. Not even the OED, but the sucky generic American one. Poor girl.

You're The Sound and the Fury!

by William Faulkner

Strong-willed but deeply confused, you are trying to come to grips
with a major crisis in your life. You can see many different perspectives on the issue, but you're mostly overwhelmed with despair at what you've lost. People often have a hard time understanding you, but they have some vague sense that you must be brilliant anyway. Ultimately, you signify nothing.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I Signify Nothing. Yeah, that's about right.

You're an Octopus!

Thoughtful and reflective, you always appear to have tilted your
head slightly to one side. You like stretching out your languorous body wherever
you can, but not everything is always relaxed. You wear your emotions on your
sleeve and have a terrible poker face. And when you feel most threatened, you start
writing things down furiously. If there's a sucker born every minute, there's one
of you born roughly every day.


Take the Animal Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I do tilt my head to one side, but I'm going for the "inquisitive puppy" look, not the "blubbery octopus" look.

You're Connecticut!

You have a great deal to do with whales and, when an observer squints,
even look a little like one. Even though you don't play hockey anymore, you've got an
icy personality and prefer social climbing to most other activities. If you live in a
small town, you're absurdly wealthy, and if you live in a big city, you're probably
stuck in a dead-end factory job. For some reason, you call cities "fords".
GM can't be pleased about that.


Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

A whale? I thought I was an octopus? Social climbing? Only up the ivory towers....

Know thyself: Go to tickle.com

"Reading Moll Flanders": The Semester from Hell Ends!

Long an Amy and Kari euphemism for taking a nap, "Reading Moll Flanders" has acutally become a real activity. With, like, action.
Even literature I hate has its moments. And I don't "hate" Moll Flanders the way I cringe at some of the Romantics. It's just not a fun read; the dialogue is not marked by quotation marks, the plot is moralistic, and even the exciting action packed moments are written in the same, 17th century prose style. "She watered the Plants with Awesome grace and Fluency" and "He then, with his Stile of Manners befitting a Gentleman of the highest class, Ignited a Nuclear Warhead, of which there were many in the Parish. Cries were heard throughout the Great City until Dawn approacheth as God had wont to do" are placed in the same sentence phrasing, with the same asides one might imagine in Ladies Home Journal.
But, that being said, there are some lovely phrases which spark my Imagination (damn you Coleridge) into bad poetry, as I am bred unto. Or something like that. So here's Amylea the Great's "Thoughts upon rereading Moll Flanders during Kwanzaa"
Canto 1 (because every poet needs to write something in cantos at some point): The Fall of Rhetoric
Give the lye to all those Arguments
of women,
cabbages, and diamond rings
Let seeping trees weep all fall into the clay
russet as early day break
and let winter lightening
bend the frozen sap.
Give the lye to all those Persuasions
downstream where bodies make bodies clean
Infinite cantatum, Solarum rex est
Unto the fires commit my words

Canto 2: Re-union
Bare loss was not so much
a matter of my attention
as was the loss of his Person
whom I loved to distraction,
to a wild, airy way of Discourse
that has no signification in it.
Come, do not strive to stand up
on your own two fleshy legs
Let my cold hands do the walking
for us both across the sand:
There are no more bridges to cross,
no more houses or fields to burn
No Stands to leap from as the earth turns
from the sun.

Canto 3: Inflamed

Where Love's the case,
The Doctor's an Ass.

He asked me to sing them a Song
At which I scoffed and said my singing Days were over
But I continued on, melancholy, silent, dull and retired
finding myself a snare at my hands.
In the flood lighting, singing one quarter
off the pitch, one quarter in the mud,
I speak as backward as he does
with that unhearable growl gagging
him before his offense reaches me.

He represented these dangers in
the motions of his outward seeking hands
and heightened my imagination
with elves and wands and kings
and I followed his eyes
seeing myself with no Friend
left loose to the world
a mere cast off Whore
Out of that Town
alone with the Maddest, Gayest thing alive
whose snarls stop just in his throat
to the point of burning his tongue.

No Doctor could illusion me well
No Priest entice me from that hell.

Complexity, Chaos and Catastrophe

Book: The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Mark Taylor.

Amy's Thoughts: Oh, for the love of all angst.

I've been trying to read this book all day. It culminated with a call to dear old Dad, who kindly explained chaos theory to me. Which I get. I really do. It's based in two premises: All systems have an inherent order and that any change to any part of the system, no matter how small, can cause huge, giant, catastrophic effects. (This is different from the so called "Catastrophe theory" which has something to do with nonlinear systems wherein resulting values make "quantum leaps" for certain given initial values plugged into an equation.)
And I get that within these systems, we cannot account for individual behavior, but the whole we can explain.
The idea of "Complexity" seems to blend the two, asking us to reconsider the second part of premises of chaos theory; instead of a single change introjected into a system, Taylor posits a series of overarching social changes that build up. The system remains stable, self-conserving, constant until a quantum moment where the critical mass of "newness" creates a change.
For Taylor, this newness began appearing in 1968. A lot happened that year. Chaos theory was invented (discovered? Articulated?). Derrida got massively popular. Some bad stuff went down in the South. More bad stuff happened in Vietnam. People began figuring out that the structures of structuralism could be a little scary in their oppositions. For Taylor, the "leap" (my words) happened in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Literal barriers between oppositions (east/west, communism/capitalism) were torn down brick by brick. And hovering in the background (or perhaps the cause? or the effect?) were new communication systems just ready to change us all. CNN, for one. The Internet was made public. And the happy, categorizing grids of structuralism got bent into the wire frames for fractals that are unpredictable. Yeah. And my generation was just learning long division and cursive writing. We're a new breed alright. We've got a new sense of communication, networking, persuasion, movement of individuals. We are fluid, as is our information (and our sense of what counts as information).
This is the new paradigm of theory? This is replacing poststructuralism? Isn't it a bit too utopian? My generation is still controlled by binary oppositions; it's stuck in our language. And what the hell does this have to do with Burke?
I could make some connections. Burke likes systems. The Grammar is his ultimate critical system for understanding human motives. But within that system of human motives, which we can describe as consisting of Act, Agent, Agency, Scene, and Purpose, we cannot predict the action of an individual, only use the terms of the system to describe what happened after the fact. We can show how the system of the "Human Barnyard" requires patterns of behavior as a whole, but cannot predict the movements of any one "wordling." Burke reminds us that language matters; his discussion of behaviorism reminds us that humans, unlike animals, choose options based on our understanding of the world as filtered through language (also a system, and much harder to break).
But, if we take the idea of systems seriously (which postmodernists would rather not), we can say that average persons will respond to stimulous X within the system in a given way, because we have seen it before. And we can even probably say that we know the limitations of the system, how much change it can hold before it collapses under the newness. The predictablility of this can lead us to create very effective rhetoric.
But isn't the purpose of rhetoric to incite change? To move a people? To do something new? Perhaps (and this is the dystopian/utopian problem) the system must have some amount of newness/change--perhaps the system is ready for such a movement, and even requires it (think of Matrix: Reloaded here). That to preserve our current democracy, we must have revolutionary, dystopian rhetoric, which reminds us just how bad things could get.
Burke says as much, when he says such rhetorics are largely conservative. What is being conserved is the system as it is now. We don't want a revolution; we want to maintain equillibrium.
And not all systems are chaotic, Dad points out. But that type of determinism, totalitarianism is too much for a humanist like me. I want to believe that I have the choice to move, even if it is within the system, even if the system requires it.
And where does that leave us Christians? Free Will? The Eschaton, where all systems everywhere collapse, unless you consider that right now we are in the largest, most complex system ever, moving according to Her/His equation, looping from beginning to end to beginning again until the ultimate moment of complexity arises, and S/He leads us to that next quantum leap into a new system.

Then what?


It doesn't say what happens after the thousand years, after the new heaven and new earth. "After," is, after all, a human idea based on a linear understanding of time. time feels linear; i won't get any sleep tonight.

What does this have to do with Burke and fanfiction and multiple interpretatins? Of laycriticism? Of rhetoric, and representative anecdotes and symbolic action and stylized, strategic responses to situations?

I don't know.

If you know, please post a comment! Or, you know, write my paper for me! Your Choice! Free will served up daily on unwiredmascot.blogspot.com!

Waiting for Studii

Back in the day, we used to make the plural of "Student" be "Studii." I think it had something to do with how we felt that "Biesecker-Mast" should be pluralized as "Biesecker-Masti." Both conversations were spawned (pun intended) from our concern over the plural of "penis."

None of which has anything to do with this teaching journal post.

I just finished grading 2/3 of my (remaining) class's verbal/visual portrait. While the visual portraits tend to be pretty good (at least they are talking about the person) the verbal portraits are all over the place. Some are like news articles, some like a diary. Some quote too extensively, some are all paraphrase. What did I DO?!

Because I'm pretty sure their abysmal performance is my fault. And it all boils down to how they see themselves (positioning) as part of this project.

When I said I wanted a "portrait," I initially talked about a verbal portrait putting into words those things you would capture on film. I suppose I should have been less metaphorical. I should have said, "This means a good argument in this genre includes X, Y, Z."

But how many times did I tell them that I need to "See" the person? That I need to intimately "know" the informant? To "show don't tell"? Did I only imagine that I got those things across? Did I ever look into their eyes to see if it was sinking in?

I can't remember.

And now I'm waiting for the last stragglers to email me their critical bibliographies. Some were holding out for me to push them back yet another few days, but I insisted this was it. And yet, this is a genre I know how to speak to; despite being a horrible bibliography writer myself, I know how to talk about this kind of audience, purpose and style. I'm comfortable with the language, with the expectations. I'd work with them forever on this if I could.

But, alas, I cannot. Time gusts swiftly past something about inspiration, imagination, the autumn wind and dying leaves as metaphor goes here I must not fail this class....

I will spend time tomorrow working on "issue identfication" with them. Although that seems more fit for conferences.

I love conferences. I don't know what people are complaining about. I feel they learn far more in small groups with me as facilitator than they do any other time. So much gets accomplished! And yet I was the only one in the conference room this morning. My kiddos sent me meaningful looks: "We could be in bed like these other classes."

They'll appreciate it later. I've built in lots of "Peer editing from your bed" in the last two weeks. They'll love it.

Twenty-four minutes to go.

My Prophetic Vision (for teaching)

Teaching is about being continually frustrated, about defering the resolution to a problem.
While I may be able to resolve Student X's difficulties with research, Student Y has different difficulties. For example, Student X doesn't know how to use online databases. Student Y doesn't have the ability to search those databases because she can't think critically about her overall goals, about her project as a type that can be categorized with terms. Student Z pulls up multitudes of information, but can't sort it. Student F sorts it, but can't synthesize.
By the end of the critical bibliography, I'd like them to be at Student Z's level, at least. I want them to be "wordlings" (Burke!) who see language and even objects as "entitled," belonging to categories. How critical they are of those categories doesn't really matter to me; first they need to see that there are ways of terming (ways of seeing, terministic screenings). And other than saying, with flashing lights and fireworks "Hey! Human language is categorical!" I don't know what to do.
As for argument. Oh geez. Today I said the term "rhetoric" and was met with absolute blankness. I talk about it all the time, but some students still don't know what I mean when I say argument. Case in point: One student's critical bibliography stated that the article "didn't have any arguments" because there was "nothing to fight about."
Did I miss something? Did I make some fatal assumption in some warrant somewhere? Do I have to go back again? Have they already forgotten the elements of persuasion and argumentation we did back in September?
I suppose I could point out the rhetoricality of the critical bibliography. Of course it's rhetorical in nature: it's addressed (Burke), it's strategic, it's "sly" in its formulations and organization. It is arranged to make sense of the world for a reader.
Guess I should have said that. Guess I'll have to say it soon.
They laughed at me for calling it "The Big Ethnography of Doom" at the beginning of the semester. Today they asked why I hadn't called it that on the assignmnet sheet. I guess I don't want to freak them out. Too late.
When it comes to style, I always think in terms of rhetoric as identficiation. This is one of my problems with Romantic Rhetoric and Shelley's Defence of Poetry, as you can see from my post a few days ago. But when it comes to Postmodern understandings of rhetoric and writing (is there a difference between rhetoric and writing? Should it be Rhetoric while Writing?), style is obviously one rhetorical method. I want my students to understand that.
Actually, I want to understand that, too. Just more theoretically.
Oh, Papa KB. Help.

New Levels of Patheticness, One Semester Only!

Death by Grad School

I keep telling myself various unhel[ful axiomatic phrases. Mantras, if you will (but you probably won't). Like, "You chose this," or "You know you love it."
I am right on both counts: I did choose this "life" and I do love it. In fact, if someone gave me $20 million, I'd probably go to grad school forever. And write bad poetry. And learn every langauge in the world.
But I did not choose to be this stressed out; I did not choose to have such restraints put on my time and body. Here's Amy's Monday, and Tuesday for example.
5:50 am Wake up. Swear about the Yankees.
6:23 am On Bus.
7:00 am Starbucks for a cup of salvation
7:15 am In office, picking up stuff to teach with
7:30-8:20 Teaching.
8:30-11:30 In computer lab, grading, answering student emails, finishing up my own work.
11:30-12:20 Class.
12:30-1:15 Lunch while reading.
1:20-3:30 Back in computer lab, doing same as above. Mental breaks at 20 minute intervals
3:30-4:30 Class
4:30-5:00 Bus
5:00-6:00 Dinner, staring blankly at tv
6:00-9:00 Attempting reading, but half asleep.
9:00 Shower.
10:00 Try to stay awake for Daily Show. Usually fails, wake up with drool running down face at 10:20ish
10:30: Drool free, attempt to read again in bed.
Tuesday
1:00: Wake up with pen bleeding on pjs. Curse the Yankees. Try to remember if I took my pills.
1:45 Give up on reading; it's making no sense anyway.
5:50 am. Wake up.
Ditto through 8:30.
8:30 am. Realize I forgot to do something for Tarez. Spend next half hour frantically trying to finish it.
9:00-10:20 Mentoring. Room begins to spin at around 10:00.
10:30-11:45 Burke class. Most fun class of all. Like coming home.
12:00-12:30 Bus.
12:30-1:30 Lunch, with the missed Daily Show
1:30-5:30 Nap. Pretty much the only quality sleep all week.
5:30-6:15 Dinner. Assuming I can stay conscious enough to make it.
6:15-10:00 Various readings. Might look at dishes and laundry, but little chance of doing either one. Observe the chocolate wrappers on the floor with a zen-like calm.
10:00 Shower
10:30-5:50 Attempt to sleep. Wake up at 2:00 with guilt for not reading better during Monday evening.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's not horrible, I guess. But not much of a life.
It's 8:00 now, and I'm too sleepy to do what needs done, i.e. write the outline of my paper. The words swim in front of my eyes.
Theory has made less and less sense lately. That's a bad thing, because abstraction is usually what I'm good at. I just feel that it's going too fast, that if I could slow it down even a fraction, by 10% or even less, I could hold on to the things flying by me.
In my dream last night, I was in high school again, in band. Playing those damned (sorry Laura) bells. The xylophone was clean, though, and freshly coated. It rung nicely when I struck the bars with my mallets. And Laura looked at me and said, "Do you know this song?" and for once, I did. It was one of the songs from the gospel show, I know now. "It's in B flat," I told her, and played the song perfectly. She stared at me in shock. "When did you get so good?" she asked. "That's how it always works with me," I reminded her. "I suck for a long time, then magically understand it, all at once."
Then the dream turned in on itself, and we were in the band room. Everyone was still alive and unscathed. Riley Kloos looked at me and said something about my sudden improvement. "This," I tell him, "is the result of what Kenneth Burke would call occupational psychosis." The "this" however, had multiple referents; first, I was refering to my new found percussion abilities. Second, I was refering the the dream itself. "Those create terministic screens," I say cheerfully. Then I say something about desire that apparently did not transfer. I spoke in good post modern academic language, explaining the Burkean system to Riley. Kamp stood short and silent. Jeff, Derek and Nick were in the back by the cages shaking their heads. I was brilliant.
If my dream was really an example of occupational psychosis, then I must ask "What are symbols of what?" "Ability" is something that has been bothering me of late; the one talent I ever had inately, I think, was music. And when I tried to play percussion and couldn't-- the only time I ever really gave up due to disease--I doubted the ability in which I had grounded my selfhood. If musical ability, that is, the ability to "see" chords and harmonies and the pathos of music, is somehow in my mind linked to academic ability, then what I was telling myself was that I need to stop forcing myself into something I can't quite do yet. Because forcing it will only result in what happened before, with the percussion line.
I have, of course, grown up since then. I no longer have any intimations of sacrifice for some abstract cause, like "honor" or "pride." Believing that killing my body in order to achieve some sort of greatness is something better left to those in teenage angst. I am far too pragmatic to belive in a mind/body split.
Am I supposed to be making a point here...? Oh, yes. Patheticness. Tarez is now emailing me reminders about what I'm supposed to do. They are working in the sense that things are getting done that ordinarily would not. But seeing them makes me feel like I've failed somehow. Don't be stupid. That silly little 15 year old with the swollen fingers and bad limp is giving me a guilt trip. She wants some kind of public service award or medal of honor. She wants a Lifetime Story about her heroic struggle through graduate school.
She's such a bitch.
The "crip myth" of the courageous handicapped person overcoming adversity to achieve genius is really cramping my style. Once they label you, they can't unlabel you. I want to disable every 20/20 reporter who featured a parapeligic; I want to give fibromyalgia to everyone who's ever said, "Hang in there!" and then walked easily out the door.
I think this is an anger phase?
I can't wait for Harry Potter 4 to come out. I need a distraction from without.

You can't have Romanticism without Antics

Three a.m. Sunday. Geez. What a time to be thinking about rhetoric and Romanticism.
I took the course because at some point during the Summer of Insanity 2004, while reading A Grammar of Motives I began to realize that I could only go so far with the rhetoric of dystopian fiction without refering to the traditions of revolutionary rhetoric. Specifically, what I didn't know, but had a sneaking suspiscion about, was where/who/when/why we (Anglophones?) began to see literature as an opportunity not only for social criticism, but to provoke a desire for change in our audiences.

So I went through that table in my head of the Periods of English Literature. While the Restoration folk had a lot of political commentary, I decided, they were mainly members of the elite, literate class. Major social revolutions had yet to happen. What I needed was something around, say, the American and French Revolutions, which, luckily occured relatively close together. The British and Americans were entrenched in (some form of ) the revolutionary spirit. And then he appeared in my head.

William Fuckin Wordsworth
And his precious The Prelude.

Good old WW exemplifies the Romantic spirit, by which I mean a focus on the individual (i.e. Agent) that goes along with both revolutions. Romantics believed in the power of the imagination, of personal transcendence of surface phenomonen. In saying "Screw the city; I'm going to go sit in Nature for a while" there is an implicit social criticism.
What's more, WW and friends wrote many treatises defending the place of poetry. From WW's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" which asks his audience to be open to his use of "common" language for poetry to Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" which is doing so much that no one can agree on its main thesis--something about Poetry's ability to transcend and give truth/beauty/god through the imagination of the poet--the Romantics are deeply concerned with what their poetry is doing. And while they do not use these terms, that, my friends, is the sphere of rhetoric.

What did WW assume poetry could do? He saw himself as the poet who could bring the sublime to others. But what, I wonder, happens after readers (what kind of readers were they?) recognize with WW in that 13th chapter, the true nature of the sublime, of imagination? Are we to all run to the Alps or an Abbey and leave behind the choking cities? What of the fact that WW details the joy and intense violence of the French Revolution? What did he want his readers (mainly his close friends and family at that point) to do? What, in Burke's terms, is the Representative Anecdote, the "equipment for living" we are to take from this?

And of the abolitionist poetry, which lacks the subtlety of WW's political arguments in The Prelude, we see actual, real, political debate revolving around what the politicians read in those poems. Real social controversy and dialogue emerge from something some chicks (okay, some dudes) put down on paper and published. And while they lack the sophisticated anecdotal rhetoric, we see poetry as power because poetry is being disseminated to the masses, who are gaining the power to act politically

No wonder in the Victorian era, then, Ruskin (or was it Pater?) believed that declining culture of England (his words, not mine) could be saved by moral education from the arts? That painting and poetry can save us all, if the masses can all be moved at once by the representative anecdotes (my words, not his) art gives us. No wonder the medium most accessable to the masses in the 1930s and 1940s--the novel--boasted some of the most revolutionary rhetoric ever.

The beliefs about poetry and social action that the Romantics left us with--specifically, I think, there is something about the special ability of a poet-hero to notice the problems around him and write so as to stroke the Imagination of a "vulgar" audience--have declined little in popular understandings of "the writer." While in the academy we know that there is no magical Author(ity) any more, that writing is always plural, that there is nothing new under the sun--still, the public imagines a Thoreauian poet who says "Damn it all to hell" and shrinks hermit-like into his woods to contemplate the earth's troubles before transmitting (translating?) those to us. CSPAN has a few hours of Book time because of this; authors of nonfiction books are invited on Jay Leno and praised for their insights because we stil believe that we need these Authors to save us from our own stupidity.
As long as someone is still writing critically, poetically, beautifully, tyrany can't take hold. Our vigilance is in our "poets."

Plato wanted no poets in his Republic because they were too apt to stir up the masses. For literature in English, the idea that we can use that to our advantage seems to have emerged with the political revolutions (which came first, chicken or basketball?) of the 18th century. A little more than 200 years later, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix became the best selling dystopia EVER (I plan on writing an essay explaining how it is a dystopia, but if you've read it, you should know what I mean). Harry Potter is the poetry of our masses, the tentative situation with the "War" on "Terror" is symbolic of larger political stirrings, and Jon Stewart is our Mary Wolstoncraft. And this rhetorical situation, with all of these tensions of symbolic acts (writing, and now, television and film) being the constant force against acts of total domination, is just how we like it. There will be no revolution unless we move from the Attitude (i.e. "latent Action") we learn anecdotally through Harry and Jon to the Action that those in power are able to have.

The spirit of Romanticism, often connotative of "naivity," is still in our language. If we still have the ability to talk about Revolution, we'll be okay. As much as I hate it for its dependency on some grandiose white male genius moment, we need the rhetoric of Romanticism because it is our founding ("constiutional") rhetoric, without which there is room for rhetorics of apathy or domination to take hold.
The End. For now.

Uneven pigtails and Inquisitive Beavers

It's a carnivalesque atmosphere here in the computer lab, in the 10th week of Fall Semester 2005. Graduate students have collectively given up on academic rigor, and have given into burlesque (it's an "esque" day) cavalierism.
And I have no idea what any of those words meant, or if they go together.
Those dissertating (a word?) are a bit hysterical; those teaching have given up on their students. A check of my own roster seems to indicate that five of my 19 students have withdrawn. That explains the lack of attendance.
At least there are fewer papers to grade.
Is it my fault? Not likely. Yes, I've been sick for a few days, and was being the binary opposite of the Energizer Bunny the weeks before that, but here in week 10--White Sox breaking a curse, NFL taking over downtime discussions--everyone seems to be faltering. I'm glad it's not just me.
The Burke paper remains unfinished. My focus is that of a fish. A three second memory.
I cancelled conferences this morning, and asked the students to email me their stuff before noon. Half of them did so. Not bad.
It was surreal riding the bus in the daylight, wearing messy pigtails and my 2003 Witmarsum sweater with the reporter-beaver on the front. Witmarsum: A town in Friesland, Netherlands; birthplace of Menno Simons.
Witmarsum Reporter: Bluffton College [sic] student. With poised pen and Professional Reporter's Notebook on the track of something like truth (which "makes free").
God, I miss being an undergrad. I miss Gerald telling me that there is something like truth about God in all that theory. "Logos!"
Teaching started out good. I think I need to return to a rhetorical construct for this. Rhetoric grounds me in that there are heuristics, ways of categorizing, the world is ordered into ethos, logos and pathos. And the deconstructionist's voice who is situated in my right frontal lobe is not silent, but quenched by a pragmatism for a moment. Truth doesn't matter. What matters is what we see as action and re-action to texts.
So Monday I will frame our little attendance problem as a rhetorical situation. Together we will do a pentad on the computer screen. We've never done a pentad before, but teaching by osmosis like that sometimes worked. It did for me, when Gerald would rant at me during dinner about church history, post modernity and Anabaptism, and the rhetorical constructs that make up our language. Lacan goes with the cross. Foucault explains the gate of heaven.
I don't know how anymore. But it worked back then.

Technology, Literature, Rhetoric, the "human"

Tarez sent me an email about the 2006 Pacific Rim Conference on Literature and Rhetoric. This year's topic? Technology, Humanity, and Change. One of the pannels? Techno-Dystopias in Film and Literature. The others? Electronic composition.
So, of course I'm going to send in a proposal. Not that I have any clue as to how to do that.
But how to narrow my large freakin projects of doom to something suitable for a 20 minute presentation? And which project of doom?
Part of me really wants to stake my claim as a Burkeian doing the rhetoric of literature. Another part of me wants to hold off until I feel I can talk about Burke more freely without getting confused. For the Love of Johnny Damon, I don't want my Burkeian debut to be a disaster.
On the other hand, I can talk about identification without being a complete Burkean, right? My work on the film aspect has been minor (one paper), and it has lots of room for improvement and other resources. One thing I fail to talk about in that paper is the "Green" that is necessary. The ideology-spreading ability of film in that paper is glossed in two paragraphs. The comparison to literature is too quick.
So, something like: "Identification in Techno-Dystopian Film: Tempering the Revolutionary Spirit"??
Or, if I delay my entrance into that discourse community, what are my options? I'd have to research the hell out of what has been said about fan communities.
Which is why I'm sitting in the computer lab, running library searches like there's no tomorrow (there may be no tomorrow). What has been done? Am I repeating someone already?
Oh, please, not repetition.

Frustrated? Why, yes!

(teaching week....oh whatever it was 10/12-10/15)

Frustrations are, of course, to be expected if one wants to treat the Act of teaching as a dialogue or dialectic. There will be misrepresentations, false starts, and questions of authority. And, as goes the quantum theory that at any one moment there is a slight but significant possibility that you could end up putting your hand through a door when attempting to knock on it--given a random ordering of atoms and their constituent parts all deciding to be somewhere else simultaneously--there is a signficant and not so slight possibility that student entropy will occur all at once as well. Particularly when certain environmental factors push the student-atoms to one side in a convincing manor (Motion, says Papa KB, not Action!).
So when only twelve students appeared in class on Thursday, and only a slight majority of those appearing had done the rough draft for peer reviewing, another rare, but significant event spurred by environmental factors ocurred. I stopped playing the "believing game" (Elbow) and started doubting the hell out of just about everything. And I got just about as pissed off as I ever do at students; as a pacifist and social justice promoter, I rarely find myself doubting humanity's ability to create together, but this must have been a final straw. Nice, forgiving, patient Teacher Amy (who is, some how, much more patient with students than with family or friends) removed the students sans essays from the room and proceded to reward those who remained.
Hence, the stratified due dates. Those appearing in class on Thursday will have an extra three days to write the verbal portrait. After all, they have feedback to work from.
Oh, the complaints! Amy has logical fallicies, they say! Those who have done work need less time than those of us who haven't started yet! And, in the standard Western philosophy, the premise of this argument is sound. But because my purposes are more abstract than simply producing essays, the two arguments talk over/under one another.
At least, I think I'm feeling better. My sleep habits don't make sense to anyone but me anymore, but I guess to a certain extent that doesn't matter. If my body wants to sleep from 6 pm to 3 am, I guess that's what it needs. My reading makes more sense to me at 3 am. My energy is peaking around 8 am...which is problematic for that 3:30 Romanticism class, but disability is about negotiation. Give and take.
Humans are not immortal; we are all "disabled" in the sense that our bodies are fallible. What the masses can do, however, is what is considered "normal human ability" despite the internal variations of that ability. We recognize this, and the relatively healthy do not have to negotiate consciously; it is built into our society.
Those of us with differing abilities must actively negotiate, however, and because we are less in certain areas, we must make choices that sacrifice one aspect or another. Those of us not stuck in bed--The doctors can't believe I'm actually succeeding; their surprise is offensive and flattering--are the ones who negotiate successfully because our particular abilites and disabilities can be managed within certain categories. I can go to grad school because I have the flexibility to sleep when I need it; I have a fairly good brain that has been adapting to physical pressures since 1986; my work can be done sitting or standing, and more and more from home via the internet.
If I chose a different occupation, I would seem more disabled. What would you do if you were cured tomorrow? The answer hasn't changed in 10 years. I'd quit grad school and be a journalist in Boston.
This negotiation, the give and take of energies and abilities, has become so engrained (what a weird metaphorical word) in my habits and speech that when students fail to meet my expectations--and, particularly, when it happens all at once--a part of me does not understand. How can healthy beings not manage the tasks I've set? If I did it, they should be able to, too.
It's in those moments that I hate myself. My friends joke that I have no compassion, and it is in this sense they mean it; I have plenty of compassion for the oppressed, the dispossessed, those suffering from ailments of body, mind, or nation, but when I see people wasting their abilities on things I deem frivolous, that I've had to deem frivolous to maintain my sense of self worth I become some Other Amy.
Not that these negative feelings are all bad. The students are there to learn, and it is, apparently, my job to make sure they do learn something. Anything. And it's hard to do that when they seem to have given up on the class, and, by extension, me.
It's enough to make one descend into anime so deeply that one never emerges. Too bad I've got three papers due this week.
Enough "woe is me." I slept from 9pm to 1 am, and am now working on three projects at once. It's invigorating, a reminder of what I am capable of when healthy. And who knows why I'm sicker now than I ever was in undergrad. It's the random arrangement of electrons. Entropy and all that.
Burke never talked about ability. Addiction as Symbolic, yes (it's not that "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is about Coleridge's drug addiction that he didn't have yet; it's that both are symbolic expressions of something else. Why didn't Burke think about Coleridge's vaguely defined "rheumatic pains" and pain's ability to incite symoblic reActions?). He can't help me here. Be quiet, Burke! In due time!