tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post8548003455130604675..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Flash review: Ecocritical ShakespeareCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-48494780971973439732011-06-09T05:07:20.719-04:002011-06-09T05:07:20.719-04:00They agonize over the question of activism in its ...<i>They agonize over the question of activism in its relation to writing and teaching as if feminists and queer theorists hadn't published quite a bit on that subject</i><br /><br />Also anthropologists, of course, who like quantum physicists cannot help interfering with the situations they observe by observing them, and have long been aware of this problem; one strand of argument that comes out of this is that if you are intervening anyway, you may as well intervene for good. Obviously a counter-strand argues that importing an ideal of good from outside makes one a missionary not an academic; but some people are OK with this when they believe in the cause (Christianity, socialism, clinical medicine...). And even once out of the field, of course the argument goes on in print. The most recent instalment I can think of is <a href="http://savageminds.org/2009/04/22/vengeance-is-hers-rhonda-shearer-on-jared-diamonds-factual-collapse/" rel="nofollow">the farrago over Jared Diamond's misuse of informants in Papua New Guinea</a>; there may be some ethics of interest bruited in that article and its references.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-47836587001569193462011-06-06T17:24:40.937-04:002011-06-06T17:24:40.937-04:00Oh dear, I didn’t mean there’s no art to theory. I...Oh dear, I didn’t mean there’s no art to theory. I hope I didn’t imply that, although apparently I did. I agree entirely with Jeffrey’s and Julie’s characterization of what we do, and I can only hope that my own work reflects a certain artistry. <br /><br />I only meant that there’s a certain kind of hubris in the willful anachronism that makes Shakespeare (or any other artist, though in Renaissance studies these claims are most often made around Shakespeare, who always gets to be our contemporary) into same specific kind of critic we are. As I hope my own work also attests, I like anachronism – risky, temporally strange claims meant to displace otherwise secure points of origins. But I think these claims have to be made quite carefully and consciously in ways that do justice to the fact that past artists and past texts simply are not speaking the same vocabulary, and that they inhabit very different ways of being in the world. They also have to be made in ways that provide criteria for disqualifying someone from the label we're trying to project: if Shakespeare's an ecocritic, then who's not? <br /><br />When I said that I am not a dramatist, but Shakespeare is, all I meant was that it's important to hold onto the fact that our art is working towards different ends, and I am using a very different lexicon than he is. Simply saying Shakespeare is an ecocritic seems to obliterate that distinction. But I haven’t yet read *Ecocritical Shx,* so I could very well be tilting at windmills!Will Stocktonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-5937766051124399832011-06-06T16:32:05.597-04:002011-06-06T16:32:05.597-04:00I’d like to second Jeffry’s linking of the roles o...I’d like to second Jeffry’s linking of the roles of scholar and artist, critic and poet. For me, reading literature is a fundamentally creative act – we actually create something new by bringing our experiences and concerns into contact with a text and the world it conjures. Scholarly writings are so many efforts to give this creative encounter a form, permanence, and a chance to develop and be shared. Different scholarly occasions call for different kinds of fidelity to the structure or language or historical context of a literary work, and likewise particular pragmatic aims might lead us to focus on questions of gender, embodiment, race, ecology…. For me, the point’s not at all to collapse Shakespeare and myself into the same subject-position. Rather, it’s to recognize that Shakespeare’s vocation & practice share certain features with my own: we both generate new “readings” of the past and of literature, readings inevitably informed by personal passions and current concerns, expressed in and for the present (and the future?) in a variety of expressive forms. I guess I see us all as existing in some kind of messy vital tangle of self-propagating “tradition”… :)Julie Orlemanskihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07529991258830984557noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-51048819125259209422011-06-06T14:36:31.658-04:002011-06-06T14:36:31.658-04:00Thanks for keeping the conversation going, Will. R...Thanks for keeping the conversation going, Will. Re:<br /><br /><em>that distinction is difficult to sustain, but the difficulty is the point, not the thing to be overcome. The collapse of artist into theorist, to be perfectly frank, seems to me to smack of a kind of critical hubris that universalizes our subject position: we want the artist to be us. Tellingly, that particular collapse does not, cannot, cut both ways. For instance, Shakespeare is an ecocritic, and I am an ecocritic. But no, I am not a dramatist. </em><br /><br />Few of us are dramatists, or poets, or novel writers ... but I'm still not sure that precludes a theoretician from being an artist -- no, not an artist of the same magnitude of the texts we work with, certainly not an artist of the same genre -- but a creative spirit, a maker, an experimentalist, a potential innovator. It's hubris to say that we are equal to or greater than what we read with, but is it to say that our profession is a mixed one, a little bit of the analyst, a little bit of the artist, a little bit of the public servant, not rendering us in any way superior, but reminding us that we are always in process.<br /><br />So what if we never amount to much more than the Thomas Kincaide who works on Picasso? (Actually, to keep my analogy intact, the Kincaide to Balzac would be a better comparison).<br /><br />There's an art to theory, to reading and to analysis. It doesn't make us *great* artists to embrace that artistic (creative) portion, but we might as well not limit in advance what we want to attempt. That's not the same as universalizing our subject position, I hope: I was thinking that it was more an admission that we can never be sure where that position is grounded as well as in what home it will long reside.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-47336465930873246722011-06-06T09:57:42.140-04:002011-06-06T09:57:42.140-04:00Hi Jeffrey and Eileen,
Thanks for the response! I...Hi Jeffrey and Eileen,<br /><br />Thanks for the response! I think we’re all on the same page in our opposition to what Jeffery calls “readings as applications” that simply locate evidence of what the critic already knows. I also agree entirely that to refuse to allow a text to alter one’s way of thinking, of theorizing, is also unethical. The more I think about it, the more I think some of my objections are rhetorical: when critics say they aren’t doing “readings,” what they mean is that they aren’t simply doing “readings as application.” In my mind, they’re still reading – they’re just “reading with,” which always entails at least a bit of “reading of,” as this “reading of” is exactly the thing which the most intriguing parts of “reading with” will resist. <br /><br />Eileen, I really like the quote from Attridge: Responsible and *creative* reading "does not ... aim only to appropriate and interpret the work, to bring it into the familiar circle, but also to register its resistance and irreducibility, and to register it in such a way as to dramatize what it is about familiar modes of understanding that render them unable to accommodate this stranger.” I take a similar lesson from Jean Laplanche, whose insistence on the irreducible alterity of the text, of the Other, of the unconscious I find most salutary for thinking about the ethics of reading. <br /><br />It’s in fact that same insistence that makes me still resistant to the collapse between artist and theorist. Granted, that distinction is difficult to sustain, but the difficulty is the point, not the thing to be overcome. The collapse of artist into theorist, to be perfectly frank, seems to me to smack of a kind of critical hubris that universalizes our subject position: we want the artist to be us. Tellingly, that particular collapse does not, cannot, cut both ways. For instance, Shakespeare is an ecocritic, and I am an ecocritic. But no, I am not a dramatist. <br /><br />If Shakespeare or other early moderns are ecocritics, who isn’t? What makes someone not an ecocritic? And what else are they? Psychoanalysts? Marxists? Deconstructionists? Aren’t they anything we see ourselves being? What’s lost to history in the collapse of affinity into identification – or “like” into “is” -- are nothing less that those crucial dimensions of self-identification that sustain the very difference between self and other, text and critic, crucial to ethical reading practices.Will Stocktonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-67946924738459413592011-06-06T08:16:55.550-04:002011-06-06T08:16:55.550-04:00Thanks for that question, Will, as well as the cha...Thanks for that question, Will, as well as the chance that it gives me to clarify. <br /><br />I am certainly in support of "readings with," in the sense of contemporary and historical (human and textual, etc) companionship, an open relationship susceptible to mutual transformations. What I don't see the point of are readings as applications: the critic knows that ecocriticism attends to X, Y &Z, discovers X, Y & Z in the text, and reaffirms the value of ecocritical readings through bringing those points to light. Since you brought up ethics, what is unethical (I think) is to believe that your knowledge is complete before the textual encounter, to disallow that this thing with which you are making your alliance might profoundly alter your reading practices by infecting them with its own interests and agenda.<br /><br />So, yes: readings with rather than readings of. (Though I am also quite comfortable with collapsing the distinction between artist and theoretician since I think that's a nearly impossible one to maintain.)<br /><br />The second set of questions deserve meditation. What IS lost to history as Shakespeare becomes an ecocritic? I don't have an answer to that one, but am suspecting you have an inkling, Will. Care to speculate?Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-27387691489642726142011-06-06T08:15:33.631-04:002011-06-06T08:15:33.631-04:00Will has opened up a fantastic [possible] conversa...Will has opened up a fantastic [possible] conversation here; I have a gadjillion things to do, but one thing I wanted to add here is that, of course [as Will, I think, intuits] there is NO such thing, anyway, as "mere reading"--all readings, in one fashion or another, are *personal* and also invested in some type of world-view [which is itself a "theory"]. I finally, long after everyone else probably, read Derek Attridge's "The Singularity of Literature" just the other day. I read it in one sitting with 2 glasses of Sancerre at a rickety table in an alley somewhere, and I really find this apropos to Will's questions/claims here:<br /><br />"The text that functions powerfully as literature (rather than as exhortation, description, mystification, and so on) uses the materials of the same--the culture which it and the reader inhabit and within which they are constituted--in such a way as to open onto that which cannot be accounted for by those materials (though they have in fact made possible its emergence)" [p. 124].<br /><br />Further,<br /><br />Responsible and *creative* reading "does not ... aim only to appropriate and interpret the work, to bring it into the familiar circle, but also to register its resistance and irreducibility, and to register it in such a way as to dramatize what it is about familiar modes of understanding that render them unable to accommodate this stranger" [p. 125].<br /><br />For Attridge, a "vital critical practice" would be one in which the method of reading would do justice to literary works "as events . . . inventively responding to invention" [p. 137].<br /><br />So to Will's last question I would also ask, can anything really be "foreign" to the "singular" artwork that is open to the future in this way? Yes, the original historical context(s) of the work matter, as does its form(s), all of which constrain what it can "say" as an object, but if it is really "new," it is also a form of alterity waiting to be "read" in the future.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-14753021828285346642011-06-05T16:03:27.555-04:002011-06-05T16:03:27.555-04:00Sounds like a great book! I will put it on my list...Sounds like a great book! I will put it on my list. Your review actually touches on a question I’ve been pondering for some time, so I wonder if you or others have any thoughts: why the need to disavow that one is doing an ecocritical (or queer, or postcolonial, or any other “theoretical”) reading? I understand and endorse the continued push for critical practices that allow texts to inform theory: mere readings of a text are dull; reading should ideally affect the way we theorize, and the way we see the past and the present and their relation to one another. That’s another way of saying a “reading of” should also be a “reading with” – a collaborative meeting in the middle. But considering that theory emerges in academic contexts, and works with very distinct lexicons usually quite foreign to the texts under discussion, claims by academics that they are not performing a reading usually strike me as disingenuous. More hyperbolically, they strike me as unethical, especially when they go so far as to collapse entirely the distinction between artist and theoretician. Doesn’t the difference between these ways of relating to the world matter? What’s lost to history when we call Shakespeare an ecocritic? Shouldn’t that loss concern us as much as the prospect of cross-temporal collaboration excites us?Will Stocktonnoreply@blogger.com