The Art of Criticism

Greetings, all! I hope this finds you doing well and perhaps starting to dig out a bit from the wreckage of the semester's nutty final weeks. I expect to post again about some LIT 500 matters (a Trumpet retrospective and other final thoughts, perhaps), but since I recently chanced upon this interesting interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, I figured I'd send it along to you. In particular, near the end of the interview, you may find his thoughts on the role of literary theory in the undergraduate curriculum (e.g., "I think undergraduates should be kept away from Theory at all costs") to be especially interesting. Then, in answer to a subsequent question, he asserts that "it's better that [students] should be reading Pauline Kael reviews in the New Yorker than Derrida."

a PM p.s.

Good luck as you try to manage the semester's crazy endgame, the last two-to-three frenzied weeks out there in "the matrix" -- ah, yes, I had to invoke the text/film that we almost automatically associate with Baudrillard's theorizing. Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker some years ago (2003) wrote this: "Although the movie was made in 1999, its strength as a metaphor has only increased in the years since. The monopolization of information by vast corporations; the substitution of agreed-on fiction, imposed from above, for anything that corresponds to our own reality; the sense that we have lost control not only of our fate but of our small sense of what's real--all these things can seem part of ordinary life now. In the mood of Dickian paranoia, one can even start to wonder whether the language we hear constantly on television and talk radio ("the war on terror," "homeland security," etc.) is a sort of vat-English -- a language from which all earthly reference has been bled away. This isn't to say that any of us yet exist within an entirely fictive universe created by the forces of evil for the purpose of deluding a benumbed population -- not unless you work for Fox News, anyway. But we know what it's like to be captive to representations of the world that have, well, a faintly greenish cast."

I enjoyed the discussion of postmodernism this past Thursday (and I hope the two U2 clips helped bring some illumination to some of the operative issues). There was some question about how to date postmodernism. It's probably worth noting that Baudrillard has elsewhere traced the emergence of the simulacra as far back as the Renaissance (focusing on the counterfeit in the early modern period, which first destabilized the notion of the sign). Poststructural thinking would tell us that the conditions that allow for Baudrillard's most extreme formulations have always been there (i.e., that there are no reliable centers to our structures, no core realities or objective truths, etc.), but by the time of Baudrillard's stage of hyperreality we've completely lost the notion of any difference between reality and simulation -- that is, in this "fourth stage" signs no longer even claim to represent reality but instead offer themselves in its place.

Oh, to explain my reference to the "fourth stage," and to give you still another temporal frame for postmodernism: According to Baudrillard, there are four basic historic phases of the sign (recall, of course, that a sign is composed of any signifier and signified): (1) There is a truth, a basic reality that is faithfully represented (by a sign, by language, etc.); (2) This truth/reality still exists, but it is distorted, warped, or perverted through representation; (3) This truth/reality has gone, though we still try to cling to it by masking its disappearance through representation; (4) There is no relationship between the sign and reality, because there is no longer anything to to reflect. Western society, according to Baudrillard, has now entered this 4th stage and is unambiguously in the age of simulation. U2's "Satellite of Love" might be one modest way of suggesting that there might be at least some degree of recovery possible. By the way, Baudrillard even provides occasions to revisit the questions about gender and sexuality raised in previous weeks. That is, via Baudrillard's logic, normal sexual desire is no longer a personal response to a person we meet and engage: instead, it's created and stimulated by images of beauty and desire with which the media bombards us.

Well, it's all enough to make the head spin! Baudrillard died in 2007, and if any of you are so inclined you could always check out his bold post-9/11 essay, "The Spirit of Terrorism," or even seek out that slim but even more controversial book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, which discusses the marketing of the war and argues that the reality of the war disappeared into a televised presentation that made it something like a video game (eating popcorn in one's livingroom, one could turn the channel from an episode of The Simpsons or a vacuous sitcom to watch a cruise missile landing on Main Street to the strains of a CNN theme song).

(By the way, regarding that semester endgame, I wish for you all at least a few hours of rest over the holiday later this week. If you're traveling, be safe! See you for Jackie Kay and Trumpet upon our return).

Comic Interludes

Greetings, all. You may be needing a chuckle or two over the coming weeks to alleviate the stress. Here are a couple offerings. First, via The Daily Show, consider Sir Archibald Mapsalot's contribution to our discussion of postcolonialism (via a cartography lesson that reminds of the confluence of maps and power). Then, following our discussion of teaching this past Thursday, there's this rather hysterical take on "What it's like to be a new TA".

By the way, returning to The Daily Show, and on a more serious note, I referred in class to a recent Huffington Post article (actually an interview with Chris Hedges) about Stewart and Colbert (a pair understood elsewhere to be "a postmodern response to a modern media universe") that claims they've destroyed satire because they've been coopted by the system and the entrenched power interests. Hedges argues that only by stepping outside of the mechanisms of power are we in a position to stage any kind of true revolt. All of this reminds me just a little of Greenblatt's essay that we read (and only briefly discussed) a few weeks ago, particularly that moment when he posits that "the apparently isolated power of the individual genius turns out to be bound up with collective, social energy; a gesture of dissent may be an element in a larger legitimation process, while an attempt to stabilize order on things may turn out to subvert it" (308-9).

The problem with Common Core

As I was cruising through Facebook this morning I came across this little gem: http://www.upworthy.com/a-student-explains-whats-wrong-with-our-school-system-and-why-we-mistrust-teachers-nails-it-6?c=ufb1

Although my experience with pedagogical theory is, admittedly, very limited this speech really resonated with me, especially in light of Margret's critiques of "Why Teach?" and the rather depressing and confusing end to our class last night. He speaks mostly about high school teaching but I think it could also be readily applied to university education as well.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

I hope that our hour talking about the thesis last week tallied more on the helpful rather than the overwhelming side (though I'm sure there was inevitably some of the latter). Kaitlynn, Mark, and Jeremy obviously had a lot of great advice to share, although it may be the type of situation where you appreciate it most a little further on down the road. For now, there are the demands of the semester's endgame to deal with, of course! One would hope, looking ahead, that you'll start to formulate some manner of a thesis idea by the midpoint of the Spring semester. If you can move towards finding a Chair by the end of the year and then do some meaningful work during the summer (which could involve writing some material for a chapter, but it could just as plausibly mean lots of research, consolidating a lot of notes and fragments of text, drafting an outline, etc.), all with an eye towards completing a chapter by this time next year, you'll be well on your way!

When I did my thesis back in '95-96, I didn't quite finish in time for the Spring deadline, but I simply registered for a summer credit and defended in June. That still left me well positioned to move to Oregon and start my PhD work that Fall. Incidentally, I still have a piece of paper my thesis adviser (Virginia Carmichael, a postcolonialist) gave me at the outset, a quote by Isak Dinesen: "When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself."

Of Rubber Islands & Umbrella Drinks

Our discussion of "The Sea is History" this past Thursday, especially that last section with its implied critique of the post-independence period, reminded me of Walcott's 1992 Nobel lecture, "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory." It's such an amazing speech, stunningly blending the poetic with the polemic and suggesting a strikin example of sly civility at work (e.g., when he refers to being "on the raft of this dais," he's very ingeniously figuring himself as a stand-in for an exotic Caribbean island, implicitly but very subtly critiquing, I think, the mostly white male Nobel audience surrounding him with its (patronizing?) "applauding surf"). The speech at times reminds us of the bind faced by these island nations: to sell themselves & the tourist industry, they must almost necessarily promote and encourage the delights of mindlessness (i.e., the privileged tourists must see the islands as a place to flee the colder, more serious climes of the West). Here's one of Walcott's most memorable (and visually striking) sections:

"But in our tourist brochures the Caribbean is a blue pool into which the republic dangles the extended foot of Florida as inflated rubber islands bob and drinks with umbrellas float towards her on a raft. This is how the islands from the shame of necessity must sell themselves; this is the seasonal erosion of their identity, that high-pitched repetition of the same images of service that cannot distinguish one island from the other, with a future of polluted marinas, land deals negotiated by ministers, and all of this conducted to the music of Happy Hour and the rictus of a smile. What is the earthly paradise for our visitors? Two weeks without rain and a mahogany tan, and, at sunset, local troubadours in straw hats and floral shirts beating 'Yellow Bird' and 'Banana Boat Song' to death. There is a territory wider than this -- wider than the limits made by the map of an island -- which is the illimitable sea and what it remembers."

The agenda of so many postcolonial writers and artists is precisely to articulate and explore that "wider territory." Postcolonial studies, as you might imagine, implies studying and promoting writing by "postcolonial" writers (like Walcott, Rushdie, Kay, Achebe, et al.), but also bringing our critical attention to the discourse and literature of imperialism (as Said does in his nuanced reading of Conrad's Heart of Darkness).

Speaking of Said, and mindful of Rushdie's multi-colored sea of stories and implied indictment of essentialism, here is his call for contrapuntal reading in the stirring last paragraph of Culture and Imperialism:

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems to be no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot's phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the 'other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.' It is more rewarding--and more difficult-- to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about 'us.' But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how 'our' culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter). For the intellectual there is quite enough of value to do without that."

Bhabha Blah Blah

It can seem that every time I return to Bhabha after an interval of time, or -- to use a more Bhabha'esque phrase -- after a "temporal disjunction," it's as if for the first time. Reading it can seem akin to this kind of processing: "Blah blah blah ambivalence blah blah blah hybridity blah blah blah third space." But I'm also being too hard on him, because inevitably I do come back to him, and I find that if I put in the work (arduous though it may be) in trying to assemble and follow the argument, the payoff is often nearly exciting. And you all? What do you think of "Sly Civility"? The idea I always struggle to clarify in this particular essay is that "less than one and double" notion: help?!