October 11
2008 Nobel Prize for Literature: Jean-Marie Le Clézio
So, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wins the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, and across the anglophone world there are joyful, rooftop-to-rooftop cheers of ‘who?’ and ‘why have I never heard of him?’ Speaking for myself, I was sufficiently ashamed of my ignorance to at least rootle around online a little, to see (for instance) which of Le Clézio’s many books might be worth picking up. Because, yes, I had never heard of him until I heard the news yesterday; and, yes, I’ve never read his books. The first thing I discovered was that despite promising-sounding titles like Le déluge (1966), L’extase matérielle (1967), Les géants (1973), Voyages de l’autre côté (1975), Mondo et autres histoires (1978) and Gens des nuages (1990), in fact Le Clézio has never written a science fiction novel. Imagine! Not even one. But, I’m not one to allow prejudice to get in my way, and I shall give him a go anyway.
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October 10
Manifesto: Literary Reading and Emotion
In mid-July of this year the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts hosted a conference of Literary Reading and Emotion. It was proposed by David S. Miall, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, with the following in attendance: Jan Auracher (Language and Literature) and Willie van Peer (Intercultural Hermeneutics) from the University of Munich, Germany; Sally Banes, Emerita Professor in Theater and Dance, and Ellen Dissanayake (Music) from the University of Washington, USA; Noël Carroll (Philosophy) from Temple University, Philadelphia and CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA; Keith Oatley (Human Development and Applied Psychology) from the University of Toronto, Canada; Reuven Tsur (Hebrew Literature and Literary Theory) from the University of Tel Aviv, Israel; along with Donald and Margaret Freeman (MICA directors) and Evelina Simanonyte (Colby-Sawyer College, New Hampshire, USA).
The group has now issued a brief manifesto (available here, with commments, and here), which includes these two (of six) declarations:
2. We discern a need to shift focus from the interpretative preoccupation of current approaches to the experience of literature and the arts, which includes the need to study their emotional aspects.
3. We propose a new interdisciplinary approach that integrates the social and biological sciences with the humanities. This proposed integration implies the readiness to become actively involved with the methodology of non-humanistic disciplines, including the development of philosophical and empirical research methodologies.
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The Vicar of St. Leavis
Leavis thought that Auden’s “Miss Gee" exhibited “pointless unpleasantness.” After discussing the poem in class earlier today, I can understand his point. But it also seems clear that Auden turns that reaction back on the reader at the end. It is Dr. Thomas who speculates about the repressive origin of cancer, and I think many readers finally recoil at Miss Gee’s corpse in the hands of Buck Mulligan’s right noble scholars.
So, is this “shameless opportunism,” even if you accept the ironic turn? (My quotes are from Leavis’s review of Another Time. I believe it should be viewable via Google Books.)
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October 09
Higher Ed and the New New Deal
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
The Dow plunges 40% in one year. You tell me: which fella looks like Herbert Hoover and which one looks like FDR?
I recorded this interview with the University of Pennsylvania’s Adolph Reed just about a year ago, while the Dow was still cheerfully flirting with 14,000, and it originally ran on How The University Works on January 17th of this year. The sound isn’t great--I hadn’t figured out the importance of a lapel mike. But the ideas are making more sense than ever.
Reed proposes that we pay the tuition of all students at public colleges and universities in the U.S.
“The laughable thing about it,” he said, “is that it is so cheap, so unbelievably cheap. It’s the kind of sum, I hate to say it, that Congress passes out as a tip in corporate welfare.”
As if he were channeling the bailout he continued, “It’s like, ‘Here’s $900 billion--and take another $40 billion for the cab ride home.’”
While you might think austerity is an appropriate response to three decades of bungling, it’s probably time to break the “quality management” pattern of austerity with the aim of accumulating money pots that our executive class then spends freely. This has been public policy as economic feudalism, primitive accumulation: drain the serfs so that the aristocrats can buy baubles for their paramours.
Robert Reich argues persuasively that we’ll need to spend our way out of this crapstorm.
I agree. And what better way to spend some chump change than on completely tuition-free public higher education for everyone who wants it?
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October 08
“This Sandworm anon let flee a fart, as gret as it hadde ben a thundir dent.”
On this day in 1920, Frank Herbert Jr. was born. Herbert devoted six years to “researching” what would become the most popular science fiction novel of all time. I’ve always wondered what counts as “research” when writing a novel. I can understand the need for writers of hard science fiction to familiarize themselves with the ins and outs of a particular field, but for someone like Herbert, wouldn’t “world-building” more accurately describe his efforts? I say this because Herbert describes a world in which the mysticism and magic have replaced science and technology.
This time I am lifting from Adam Robert‘s excellent History of Science Fiction, in which he claims “one of the book’s greatest strengths is its detailed and plausible rendering of the political context” (236). What Herbert spent six years “researching,” then, was the complex political environs of the interplanetary empire he’d invented because Dune‘s reputation as an environmental novel is undeserved. The overgrown extremophiles who inhabit Arrakis are humans from Earth, but somehow survive on a planet with no viable means to create or sustain an atmosphere. As Roberts writes:
We may wonder, for instance, how Dune’s atmosphere is oxygenated in the absence of planetary vegetation. In later books Herbert suggests that the sandworms fart oxygen, which hardly address the problem. [Edited to reflect my poor editorial skills, not Adam’s.]
Indeed, without an atmospheric density in the neighborhood of 1.2 kg/m³ it wouldn’t matter what element those sandworms farted--it would’ve drifted up and away. And where did all that sand come from anyway? The most efficient means of producing sand is wave action, but even if Herbert wanted to be inefficient, a little research would’ve taught him that sand requires big rocks and weathering processes. The geological history of a planet consisting entirely of sand is--will you let me get my geology geek on, please? The opportunities to do so are few and very far between. Fine then. I’ll be mysterious.*
I don’t mean to diminish Herbert’s accomplishments in Dune. So long as he was alive, the series educated science types about the nuances and niceties of medieval politics. (The process, if not the history.) That said, I always found Herbert’s forecast of future history more than a little pessimistic. Like the Terminator and Battlestar Galactica franchises, the Dune sextet pivots on a war between man and formerly enslaved machine, the result of which was a return to a pre-computational society. The mentats are bred--"Fancy meeting you here, dissertation. Please GO AWAY."--they are bred to be mathematical savants, and spice mystically allows for interstellar travel sans star-charts. So, no computers needed. However, Herbert’s novels seem to argue that a rejection of the modern technology entails a rejection of modern political systems--as if dispensing with the convenience of a calculator is the first sign of feudalism’s revival.
Besides the obvious problem with this--somehow those Athenians managed to be quasi-democratic before the Age of Apple--and despite Herbert’s obvious critique of hierarchy and messianic thought, I can’t help but think the novels engender a nostalgia for certainty in their readers. We might not know how spice works, but Our Dear God-Emperor surely does. (Despite having personally and purposely evolved into a human-sandworm hybrid--about which plot-point my dissertation rears its head like Giant Putin over unsuspecting Alaska. So I’ll stop now lest I invite insanity in, slap it on the back, and offer it a brew--which is, yes, how a body feels about a dissertation recently completed. I hear tell this subsides in time, but so far I’ve felt none of it.)
(x-posted.)
*By which I don’t mean anything like “I sat here trying to think what would have to happen for such a planet to come about--including, but not limited to, a cessation of mountain-building after a period of intense weathering by something other than water, since water poisons the marvelous beasts who produce the spice melange and whose evolution would’ve spanned untold eons.” I don’t mean anything like that. I know the answer, I’m simply not in the mood to share.
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Epigrammatic Accumulation
Mario Puzo’s The Godfather begins with the following epigram:
“Behind every great fortune is a great crime"
-Balzac
So “Crime” and “Fortune” are not only foregrounded at the heart of the book, but this oddly Marxist quotation makes a particular claim about the relationship between: the legitimate power of wealth, it implies, is always derived from an act defined by its social illegitimacy.
The relevant piece of Marx would be this, on the idea of primitive accumulation:
“The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production...The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation."
More poetically, he writes elsewhere that Capital comes into the world “dripping, head to foot, with blood and dirt from every pore,” and more to the point, his argument was that the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of capital (be it monetary or social) breaks down if we look at it close enough. All great fortunes, in other words, have their origin in some kind of crime.
Still, Balzac? Wikipedia confirms that the sentence comes from Le Père Goriot, p115, which in the 1896 translation reads: “The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been discovered, because it was properly executed.” That qualifier “for which you are at a loss to account” seems key, for with it we lose the Marxian certainty that all capital accumulation is, as such, a form of expropriation, and the more fundamental conceptual argument that all social modes of legitimation are, at their roots, sublimated forms of violence.
With some cheap internet sleuthing, I found some information in Ralph Keyes’ The Quote-Verifier, which has both the original French and an alternate translation that I like better ("The secret of a great fortune made without apparent cause is soon forgotten, if the crime is committed in a respectful way"), and hypothesizes that Puzo found the pithier (which is to say, pithily mis-quotated) version of Balzac in C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite.
Neither Balzac nor Mills fall under my pay grade--so if anyone has any insight into the genealogy, I’d love to hear it--but the interesting way the former has to be transformed by the latter before it can be adopted by Puzo not only reveals some of what is at stake in The Godfather (the necessary interrogation of social legitimacy by crime), but contains its own kind of literary irony. The secret of a great quote for which you are at a loss to account is a strategic omission? Literature comes into the world dripping blood and dirt from every pore? Behind every great epigram, perhaps, is a great mistranslation?
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October 06
McLiar Bingo
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Having a debate-watching party?
Follow along with any of the FOUR McLiar Bingo cards created by John Sellers and Andrew Boyd of Agit-Pop Communications.
From Card 2:
“Obama “pals around with terrorists.” ACTUALLY: Obama was 8 when radical Bill Ayers planted bombs to protest Vietnam. Now a professor, he & Obama volunteer for the same charity. (CNN FactChecker)
From Card 1: “Obama wants to teach sex ed to kindergartners.” ACTUALLY: The bill Obama voted for in the Illinois Legislature helps protect children from sexual predators. (factcheck.org)”
You get the picture.
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Drill, Baby, Drill
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Founded by Robert Greenwald, the creator of Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price, Brave New Films has become a powerhouse in the world of viral video.
Greenwald’s latest series of political microdocs, The Real McCain, have racked up millions of views on his YouTube channel and the Brave New Films homepage. The popularity has something to do with Greenwald’s decision to step out of the way and let McCain indict himself in his own words, such as “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.”
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October 05
Against Theory
Hey, did you catch how the title of my previous post was a joke on Steven Knapp & Walter Benn Michaels’s Against Theory? Not much of a joke, but it had a point, in that Kugel’s claim, that a text can have a meaning other than the author’s intention, would seem to go against Knapp and Michael’s. But it also reminded me that I’ve meant to post a question at the Valve for some time now.
What do you folks think about Against Theory? Is it the last word on authorial intention? The first? (that is, the first place anyone wishing to study authorial intention should start?) A necessary word in any discussion? What do we think about this book, more than twenty years down the road?
I read it at the time, and I read all the responses in Critical Inquiry. I didn’t like AT. As a devotee of modernist impersonalism, I was hostile to its conclusion, but I also disliked it for good reasons. Or rather, I didn’t like the way it argued. As in, it certainly considered itself the last word on the subject, which struck me as a ridiculous way to approach something that was obviously complicated. Since when is any word in philosophy (& I always took AT to be claiming philosophical seriousness) the last word? Of course this approach could be rhetorical or even theatrical. I’ve since read enough of Michaels to have a sense that claiming irrefutable positions is his métier. I think if I were smarter or less impressionable I could read through such bluster (not that I don’t recognize that Michaels is much smarter than I am), but it just raises my blood pressure.
UPDATE: Post edited to get the author’s names right. D’oh!
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October 04
McKendrick’s Fisheye
Here is a poem I currently have a crush on, from Jamie McKendrick’s Ink Stone. McKendrick is a poet I’ve only recently encountered (this collection came out five years ago: he’s published a newer collection since). He was born in Liverpool in 1955, says Faber’s cover-blurb; and he has published various things, and he has won the Forward Prize for poetry. Good. But ... he has no Wikipedia entry which means that, in a very real sense, he doesn’t exist. The poem is called ‘Fish Eye’:
Hours of nothing biting on the lugworm bait
the twins had shown me how to catch—then suddenly
this spiny monster gurnard face appeared
banging about on the floor of the rowboat
like a fist or a heart. Way too scared
of its hackled gills and crest of spikes
to unthread the hook and heave it back
we froze, and watched its will to live abate
while a fog like a tide of opal stole
over the oily surface of the eye
extinguishing an eerie Borealis.
Were the cells desiccating in the iris?
Or divulging the inky depths to this new hemisphere
of air too thin, too dry and bright to bear?
It’s the four lines 8-11 (from ‘we froze...’ to ‘...borealis’) that make the poem, I’d say: exquisite nape-hair-stirring poetry. Of course the slightly rocoso flourish of their effectiveness depends upon the way they are framed in a series of deliberately downtoned, plainer lines (plainer, although not without their own punchily vivid imagery: ‘banging about on the floor of the rowboat/like a fist or a heart’). What I mean is that the poem starts by positioning itself as a mundane piece of storytelling (’I went fishing with my grandchildren one day, and we caught a fish...’), human experience articulated in ordinary vocabulary weighted towards monosyllables (line 5, say), but then it orchestrates a shift in register ‘up’ (as it were) to capture the awe--if that’s not too pretentious a way of putting it--entailed in being a witness at a dying. In other words, the extravagently polysyllabic line 11 works in part because its situated amongst a clutch of deliberately less extravagent lines.
I’m a little in love with the whole collection, actually: there’s a carefully worked and very resonant pattern of recurring theme-work throughout, about eyes, and about ink (two necessary premises of the poet, we might think; and two things imagistically strangely close). This poem is about seeing, and the passing of sight, and about recording the sight in an inky medium (the inky depths). It is about the uncanny, and it achieves a neatly uncanny effect. Dying is a freaky business. I consider the eerie Borealis of my own consciousness. It won’t last forever, I suppose.
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October 02
The University Against Itself
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
This is part 1 of 4 in my series of interviews with NYU GSOC activists. In this segment they reflect on the lessons learned from the 2005 strike, concluding that no union can stand alone.
MB: So why don’t we talk about the lessons learned. I think one of things that graduate employees, at whatever stage of the struggle they’re in, in their different circumstances--they’re going to want to know what you guys drew from this experience.
Andy Cornell: That’s right. I think we learned a number of lessons about what we could do better. The first thing is that we went into the strike having not been particularly active on campus, or as an organization, between contracts.
When our union, GSOC, first won recognition and we won our first contract, obviously there was a lot of momentum around that. But people got exhausted, wanted to get back to their studies, and the momentum fell off. So that made it particularly hard to mobilize quickly.
We had to build amongst ourselves, we had to build an organizing structure. We had to pull people back into the union and educate them into what that meant. The harsh lesson was that at a lot of universities the withdrawal of the labor of graduate student teaching assistants and research assistants may not be enough to cause the campus to come to a screeching halt. So you really are reliant on a lot of other constituencies on campus.
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When am I not reading early modern poetry?
Am I the only one who thinks Glenn Reynolds only knew this quotation because it’s the name of a popular science fiction trilogy? Because it certainly doesn’t mean what he thinks it means, as William Graham Sumner—one of the three people on whom the label "social Darwinist" can be pinned in good faith—noted in 1877:
Fluctuations in the measure of value are as inconvenient and fatal as fluctuations in the measure of length and bulk . . . . Business is turned into a guess, or a game of hazard, where the prevailing anarchy is overruled by accident:—
"Chaos umpire sits
And by decision more embroils the fray
By which he reigns; next him high arbiter
Chance governs all."In such a condition of things the gamblers have the advantage. The stock exchange becomes little better than a faro bank . . . . The temptation of excessive gains leads from the beaten path of business. Speculation without money takes the place of honest industry, extending from the stock exchange everywhere . . . . Honesty ceases to be even a policy. (Works 472)
This is not to say Reynolds is interested in honesty, merely that he doesn’t seem to know what words mean.
(x-posted.)
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October 01
The idea of order and the problem of Stravinsky
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
The heated, often deeply antagonistic exchange that has developed in the comments to my post on David Foster Wallace reminds me of something from the recent past of my graduate studies. Tom Mellers writes:
[Kugelmass] should possibly watch a little less television, though. I know that whenever I watch too much TV, my sense of order and logic suffers.
My response to his comment was focused on literary works that challenge order and logic, works like those produced by Antonin Artaud and Arthur Rimbaud. Meanwhile, his comment reminded me of something else: two periods of time when I tried to listen exclusively to music that reinforced my sentiments of order and my faith in the logical development of ideas.
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What and Where is the Text?
As David Bordwell has observed in Making Meaning, much of our thinking about literary texts (& movies & graphic novels, etc.) seems to derive from the metaphor of a container. Some things are inside the text while other things are outside of it. Further, some of the things inside the text are not obvious; they’re said to be hidden. One job of the critic is to reveal and explain what’s hidden.
For casual use, this is OK. But it disintegrates if you ask too much of it. We’ve augmented it in various ways, but as far as I know we haven’t arrived at a more satisfactory set of alternatives. My purpose here is simply to lay out a crude sketch of how we’ve worked at augmenting the container notion.
The basic problem, of course, is that “the work of literary art” cannot effectively be reduced to the physical text. The physical text is just a bunch of markings which are meaningless unless taken up by a human mind. How does one work that “taking-up” into a concept of the text?
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September 30
CFP (ACCUTE 2009): LitCrit 2.0: Academic Blogging and Other New Forms of Scholarly Publication
The calls for papers for ACCUTE 2009 are now posted, including my own for a session on “LitCrit 2.o: Academic Blogging and Other New Forms of Scholarly Publishing” (scroll down this list). Panels like this are old news in other venues, but I haven’t seen much about it up here north of the 49th, at least not through ACCUTE (which, for any American readers who don’t know this, is our MLA-like thing). My own thinking about these issues was somewhat focused by the presentation I gave to my department on academic blogging last fall.
The version of the CFP I submitted actually had more apparatus, including hyperlinks that I had hoped would be retained in the posted version. For those who might be interested, here’s the full text with links.
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