tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post5730591322591915193..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: [Oceanic] Critical ModesCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-15542392072063827922009-09-02T10:19:58.704-04:002009-09-02T10:19:58.704-04:00Thanks, Nicola: this project is definitely a kindr...Thanks, Nicola: this project is definitely a kindred spirit to the wonderful things you've been achieving via Glossator.<br /><br />Karl: we are torn, blocked, ambivalent, but desiring to do something that doesn't have a good map. So, we know we touch form as well as content (new media will feature). We know we want experience to trump authority. There will be a piece by Rick Godden on disability, electronic community, innovation; a piece by the Chaucer blogger on fictive forms and new critical worlds ... and what else? We are trying to get a handle on that but it is kind of like asking an ocean wave to stay put in a beaker. So far.<br /><br />Dan, your comments are the reason you are contributing. More soon.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-10182709936722816022009-09-01T12:51:38.421-04:002009-09-01T12:51:38.421-04:00Part 2
Finally, another reason my thoughts appear...Part 2<br /><br />Finally, another reason my thoughts appear here in such a scattered form is that my main critique of the push for/effort towards new critical form in medieval studies makes me nervous--because I do not want either to diminish the efforts of heavy lifting which has been very successful to date of making room for new critical modes (especially by you two, Cary and Jeffrey) or to appear like I 'disagree' or 'oppose' the ways your projects 'tend' to incorporate new critical modes. I want to praise what you have done so far and I do not want my 'critique' to mar that praise or diminish its sounding. My reservation is that so far we have limited ourselves--in bringing new crit modes into med. studies--to, as i said before, bracketed experiments. I mean, we juxtapose contemporary poets with medieval work, but only the safest and most non-radical of contemporary poets. We use 'poetic' diction, but our papers always begin and end in language that is recognizable (syntactically etc) prose; we don't actually produce experimental writing in the sense that it is doing something new with how language--syntax, grammar, sound, diction, rhythm--might function radically different in a new critical mode.<br /><br /> I want to urge you to consider as well the more potentially radical and extreme, avant gaurd forms of writing that might qualify as a new critical mode in medieval studies. I'd like to see critical work appears in language that does not register as in a critical mode, a truly new mode, one we do not yet know how to read. I'd like to see our engagements with contemporary poetry and fiction get riskier. I'd like to see us, when we use an "I" or invoke the 'personal,' to circulate that "I" in our discourse in such a way that it is clearly not a coherent unitary subject to 'scholar' speaking, but a multitude (Jeffrey, you who have started this by wonderfully invoking your family as collaborators) to the extent that Deleuze and Gautarri do when they talk about getting to the place not where one no longer says "I" but where it doesn't matter whether or not one says "I." This would require, I think, for a paper trying not to express something 'held to be true' by the scholarship of an "I" speaking the paper, but a paper that reads more like poem, or a fiction, speaking the I's of everyone one listening to it or reading it [the last three poets listed above do this expertly, understand the circulation and repetition of terms and pronouns perfectly]. When I ask, as I try to do often of myself, about the poetics of my critical language, I want to ask not so much about 'poetic' diction, abstract formulations, the logophilia Jeffrey recently blogged about, but also about the _poetics_ of the work in terms of what effect the language of the writing is having on language--what is the language itself doing and how--who or what does it 'speak' and what discourses does it register in, circulate, repeat, cite, etc. I want to urge you to include some things that are really really new, that break radically with old forms, take up a place in the tradition of work that resists being easily incorporated into or 'redeemed' as recognizable critical prose--prose trying to _do_ something poetically other than communicate scholarly information, prose (or verse!) whose function, rather than to communicate, must be understood to function in terms of its phenomenological capacities (outside of the 'correspondence theory of of truth,' for a philosophical reference point) is say, to name, to call, to break, to push, to open, to crack, to feel, to beckon, to cruise, to turn on or off, to....dan remeinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-59047245825732263222009-09-01T12:51:27.081-04:002009-09-01T12:51:27.081-04:00Part One:
First: from a Godard film (i think pier...Part One:<br /><br />First: from a Godard film (i think pierrot le fou) 'Tell me ancient Ocean, are you my brother'. As far as oceanic modes goes, what I think of is a need to connect to what is 'outside of' the work or 'not' the work, the critical piece, the referent of the critical piece--but in such a way that what is the criticism and what is its outside totally disappears. We can read and write in such a way that people have to ask what it is they are reading, in terms of genre, in terms of referent, in terms of discipline. <br /><br />Not to change our 'methodologies' regarding 'scholarship' or the 'style' of our writing, but to build/construct our pieces of criticism from the perspective of what the language is capable of speaking/doing--to change the very form and function of critical language, first by recognizing the work of criticism that is already being accomplished by poets and fiction writers without having to every 'let down their guard.' I mean, there are times we take a 'pose' in a new critical mode, but we usually explain it away by 'introducing it.' What of the new critical mode that looks different and does not apologize for itself? It does not explain what it is doing, but requires the reader to work at it, the way a reader doesn't get a brand new poem from a poet in an experimental poetry movement with a set of instructions on how to read it. We try to 'redeem' our experiments in new critical modes all to often by bracketing them within traditional introductions and conclusions. <br /><br />I realize these are scattered thoughts, but I just think SO much about this that it is difficult for me to say anything succinctly about it without a very specific question or project in mind. <br /><br />So, I wanted to just share a list of titles that which still, for me, serve as models of new critical modes that just shake off the dessicated restraints, and make it new.<br /><br />For, it seems to me as well, that this project has something deeply akin in it to projects of literary modernism. This may not be something you want to hear, but i don't think it needs to be bad news. There are affinities, for instance, between Dinshaw's desire to touch the past as a basis for community formation in the present with both Eliot's anglincanism and Pound's poetics. The desire to make forms new is undeniably modernist--and dealing with this will make our efforts more richly a part of our own epoch, force us as medievalists to be more aware of more recent literary and critical traditions and how to break or not break with them. <br /><br />So the list:<br /><br />•perhaps most important,Charles Bernstein, "The Artifice of Absorbtion" in _A Poetics_; an 80 page essay in lineated verse, and confusing syntax, about poetics and exactly about the kinds of issues I think new critical modes must consider.<br /><br />•Cole Swenson, _Goest_, a book of poems including a history of light (Alice James).<br /><br />•Most things by the poet/classicist Anne Carson. <br /><br />•Derrida's essay on Jabes in _Writing and Difference_<br /><br />•Nietzsche: the aphorism is a form he himself commented on a new, and it certainly is unheard of now<br /><br />•Marorie Weslish's book of poems _Word Group_ (Coffee House Press)<br /><br />• Ben Lerner's book _The Lichtenburgh Figures_ (Copper Canyon Press)<br /><br />•Michael Palmer's book _Codes Appearing_dan remeinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-38929551271157269102009-09-01T10:25:21.259-04:002009-09-01T10:25:21.259-04:00Great words from Travis, yes.
If you could edit a...Great words from Travis, yes.<br /><br /><i>If you could edit a special issue of a fabulous new journal, what would you include</i><br /><br />I very much enjoyed (finally) reading this exchange, but (?) I'm kind of hung up on this last question. Are you thinking in terms of texts, methods, individuals? It's probably the latter two, since--despite our repeated ethical insistence on honoring the given text in its particularity--any text can give us anything, depending on how we configure it with other texts or with our own needs.<br /><br />So I'll swing this around again: what are you and Cary thinking about including?Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-7751633399571225712009-08-28T11:29:51.994-04:002009-08-28T11:29:51.994-04:00Cool project. I look forward to seeing it take sha...Cool project. I look forward to seeing it take shape.<br /><br />The first issue of <a href="http://glossator.org" rel="nofollow">Glossator</a> will appear soon, containing some living examples of medieval-inspired critical newness, hopefully countering Agamben's complaint that it is precisely the “loss of commentary and the gloss as creative forms” that attests to the impossibility of “any healing” in Western culture “between Halacha and Aggada, between shari’at and haqīqat, between subject matter and truth content.”<br /><br />And here is an old <a href="http://thewhim.blogspot.com/2008/05/new-poverty-and-plenitude.html" rel="nofollow">talk on newness</a>, which might be of interest, being concerned with newness as an impoverished category.Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-8096148015959266312009-08-28T06:39:30.294-04:002009-08-28T06:39:30.294-04:00I hope that Travis won't mind, but I am pastin...I hope that Travis won't mind, but I am pasting <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/08/in-my-craft-or-sullen-art-exercised-in.html" rel="nofollow">his eloquent comment from here </a>below, mainly because it has so much to say to this conversation as well:<br />-------<br />Short answer: I worry about what that “we” encloses, advocates, resists, produces, and so on… and how to orient myself in relation to it. It is my way of affirming (in my own voice maybe) what Dan Remein wrote in an earlier comment: "I'm just more of a critic than a scholar, less concerned with learning and teaching information than with producing, opening, and allowing certain kinds of historically salient experiences/events of language." Right on, but how to enact that in a classroom without closing out other possibilities?<br /><br />Longer answer: One of the best pieces of advice that I was offered this summer came from an instructor who said that something should happen in the classroom that would not be possible anywhere else – whether that is a group activity, a discussion, or an insight that would not have been possible through other configurations of people and spaces. This thought lingers in my mind as I think about the coming quarter. Obviously we will be required to carry out certain activities, to complete particular tasks, and to adhere to regulations that bring us into some uniformity with other sections, with departmental expectations, with university goals, etc. But the way in which thought (I need a verb here: functions, flows, stalls, develops, proceeds, emerges, pauses…) will be entirely contingent upon the people who comprise the we of that space and the kind of space that those people (that is, we) create, which in turn, as I attempted to weave my way through last night, is contingent upon everything and everyone that is enfolded into who we are (whoever that we may be).<br /><br />A final thought because I was thinking about this we (and your 09 K’zoo paper) this morning over coffee: At the end of Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins he thinks about the university as a space “where thought takes place beside thought, where thinking is a shared process without identity or unity. Thought beside itself” (192). This strikes me again because of the possibility of a we without identity or unity (a we “as a relationship that projects possibility” ~ Trigg and Prendergast) but also because I loved this idea of my responsibility to what is near or beside me, which as Dr. Kline’s paper reminds me enfolds more than what is enclosed within the walls of a classroom.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com