2 posts tagged “feelings”
No, look, I have to shout my little shout, and then I'll bury my little snout back in my 50 books. I hate writing papers. Why? Because I have nothing paper-length to say about any appropriate topic. I find the form impossible. What I consider serious intellectual work is fragmentary, catenary, open-ended, allusive, recursive, not MLA-formatted, not 16-25 pages in length, not spelled out in plain terms for the idle reader. You're picturing a monstrosity, and I understand this, I do. Work must get done. But nothing deserves these intellectual subdivisions, these pleasant little tracts of Times New Roman 12-point real estate with their 1.25" white picket margins, their aluminum siding hiding Gothic levels of philosophical decay. Oh let us excavate a grotto or renovate a warehouse and there build a new way of living with arts and histories and literatures and sweet heady unfinished symphonies; let us leave these New Developments in Literary Studies to those who work close by. Let the forms live and die!
There. There may be more of that left in my system. I'll keep you... all... posted...
I'm sure this is not the first time this has been said, but still. (Bear with me: the block-quote formatting isn't working.)
<<To generalize broadly (at the risk, of course, of flattening out the significant differences between various theorists and poets), the striking consonance between approaches to language in late twentieth-century theoretical writing and avant-garde poetry would seem to place each in a special, even privileged relation with respect to illuminating and extending the scope of the other, setting the stage for a productive cross-fertilization. [...] Yet this presumably ideal situation for the literary critic reading late twentieth-century avant-garde poetry... leads to what can only be described as a certain redundancy or obviousness when the two discourses are placed in dialogue with each other now. In other words, the paradoxical combination of the two factors characterizing the relation between late twentieth-century language theory and language-centered poetry (philosophical attunement and historical alignment) ensures that for the critic today, most attempts to articulate a poetics based on foregrounding connections between the literary text and poststructuralist theory will end up seeming, well, predictable or descriptive... Interestingly, the problem here is not one of a gap, dissonance, or contradiction (the negative terrain on which avant-garde theorists and poets have traditionally found themselves most comfortable working) but rather one of a fit that seems too close. I could say: "In its privileging of the letter and constant deferral of stabilized meanings, Lyn Hejinian's Writing Is an Aid to Memory produces a heterogeneous flow of matter and signs in order to break down normative frameworks of reference and sense-making." And you might well respond: "Tell me something I don't already know!">> (Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, Harvard UP (2005), pp. 308-09)
That's exactly right. I nearly jumped up and down. These bad, overly-close fits happen all the time, though, not only to avant-garde poetry. I've started referring to this whole class of critical writing as "explaining the punchline." I mean— good times if you don't like to laugh.
I know this is lazy commentary, but I'm distracted. No, sorry, I'm hungry. That's the name of that feeling. It likes to go incognito for long stretches, especially when there's no immediate chance of meals and every reason to just keep reading or typing.
