Silly discussion forum, your debate is futile: meaning is infinitely defered down an endless chain of signifiers. Our babble is but empty signification.

Seriously, I thought it was quite a balanced article. I’m glad that English departments are coming to realize that theory is not an end in itself, but a malleable tool that can help cast a new light on old texts.

Literary theory is dead
Long live literary theory.

Home

Till Derrida do us part
I originally read this as satire, but then I remembered grad school....

JUDGE SILVERMAN: Friends and relatives, we are gathered here today to witness the marriage of Allison and Cary. To do so, we must perform these vows in an act of ceremony.
But what are these things: to wed, to marry, to take a wedding vow? They are what the philosopher J. L. Austin, in his study How to Do Things With Words, calls “speech acts,” of which there are two different kinds: constative speech acts, whose primary attribute is that they say something; and performative speech acts (of which this ceremony is an example), whose primary attribute is that they do something. A performative speech act, as Austin puts it, doesn't describe a state of affairs; it possesses the crucial feature of accomplishing the very act to which it refers. The very act of saying it makes it so.

Home

Sigh... Can a paper be dreamy?

I think I have a crush on the Guardian... When literature lives up to reality. C'mere, baby. Let's rub ink.

Consider the word houyhnhnms for a moment. It is a word that is never typed or written other than anxiously. Its orthography resists complacency. It opposes the virtual invisibility that overtakes the familiar.

Which is just as well, because this one word, on its own, demonstrates the power of language to equal the actual world.

For literary theoreticians, it is axiomatic that language is unequal to the task of encompassing reality. Its failure is inevitable, a given.

It's damn lucky this internet thing came along or I'd still be reading local rags from which literary discourse is slowly disappearing.



Home

Derrida the movie
An action-packed new blockbuster in which our hero Jack, a secret CIA agent, infiltrates the French intellectual terrorist scene and starts a campaign of covert assassinations before finally staging his own death.

Home

Speaking of heavy tomes...

A book about books. Imagine!

Booker compiles a Jungian taxonomy of stories, distilling the entire history of the fictive arts into a handful of flexible but unbreakable archetypes—Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth—and then extracts from those seven imaginative drops a single battle royal between Dark and Light.

Hm. Now that I have all literature labelled, I think I can begin to organize the rest of my mind. Seriously, I think I might read this.



Home

I am occasionally left.

Zach is right. An "open forum" is best.

In fact, Zach is always right.

Oh, the irony.

American Reader: It's a bit rabid to suggest that posting a link to an article constitutes 'promotion.' We're all big boys and girls here and can negotiate ideological biases for ourselves. What's better (i.e. less reactionary)? An open forum, or one that merely presents opinions that everyone agrees with?

The New Criterion is the kind of publication that presents the ideology that keeps Bush in place. strange to see a Republican rag promoted here.

the stuff about Derrida is predictable. the stuff about the Nobel in the article is more interesting. it shows the american puritanical fear of sex (oh those randy Swedes)

Laureates like Toni Morrison, Dario Fo, and José Saramago cheapen the Nobel Prize. But this year’s laureate, the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946), marks a new low. It is likely that you hadn’t heard of Jelinek before—or, if you had, it was probably only because her sadomasochistic fantasy The Piano Teacher (1983) was made into a movie with Isabelle Huppert in 2001. Other titles by Jelinek have been translated into English—Lust (1989), for example, an unrelieved carnival of sexual and physical brutality culminating in a woman’s murder of her son. Jelinek is a radical left-wing fantasist. She was a member of the Austrian Communist Party from 1974 to 1991—a period when, as Stephen Schwartz pointed out in The Weekly Standard, the organization “was little more than a KGB network.” With the fall of the Soviet Empire, support for its satellites dried up, so Jelinek left the party. But she didn’t abandon her left-wing animus. Her most recent work is Bambiland (2003), a stream-of-consciousness anti-American effusion masquerading as a play. Most of her work is a species of arty pornography. The Nobel judges rhapsodized about Jelinek’s “musical flow of voices and counter-voices … that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” But what the reader actually finds is not the revelation of but a shameless wallowing in clichés. The Swedish Academy has made plenty of mistakes. In choosing to honor Elfriede Jelinek it has made itself a laughingstock.

Something about Derrida that looks interesting, but I haven't really read it because I'm having a hard time caring today and I feel sick in the pit of my stomach in a way I haven't since Reagan was elected to a second slack-jawed term and I was pretty sure I'd soon be cinder or the leader of a motley band of post-apocalyptic nerds...

Blah. Somebody shoot me.



Home

Sounds to me like he has an ax to grind. It really rots my socks when reviewers contaminate their reviews with opinion and context. What a reactionary jerk!

Whatever Happened to the Study of Literature for Its Aesthetics?
Academia.

Writers and literary academics have never been closer, and never further apart. Since the New Criticism of the 1950s, there have been two developments that should be contradictory but whose agreement in fact makes gloomy sense. On the one hand, for the first time in history, many poets and novelists are graduates of English studies, many of them put through the theory machine for good measure. Writers and academics teach together, attend conferences together, and sometimes almost speak the same language (Rushdie's essays and academic post-colonialist discourse; DeLillo's fiction and academic postmodern critique). But during the same period, literary criticism as a discourse available for, and even attractive to, the common reader has all but disappeared. Literature as criticism -- DeLillo's knowing essayism, Rushdie's parables about hybridity, Franzen's postmodern riffs -- has burgeoned, while criticism as literature, what R.P. Blackmur called 'the formal discourse of an amateur', has faded.


I love his definition of "undamaged": people who emerged from theory as writers, not academics.

Home

Are Literary Texts Ethical Texts?
Well, if this is what ethical means, I'll stick to amoral, thank you very much:

If Nussbaum is right, we turn to thoughtful works like Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage or John le Carre's Absolute Friends (both, as I write this, on the Canadian best-seller list) for an understanding of what it means to live well, and how such a life can tragically exceed even an essentially good person's grasp. If Posner is right, we take from these same works a deeper understanding of our own tastes, perhaps -- I see myself in this character, yes! -- but no broader lessons about the world.

Home