Disturbances in the Field (Or: A Particularly Catholic Unhinging)
In fact, it is this unreflective feeling on the nerves in our ordinary reading that interests me the most, the way we respond—or not—to error when we do not make error a part of our conscious field of attention. It is the difference between reading for typographical errors and reading for content. When we read for typos, letters constitute the field of attention; content becomes virtually inaccessible. When we read for content, semantic structures constitute the field of attention; letters—for the most part—recede from our consciousness.
Joseph M. Williams, “The Phenomenology of Error”
The reason I drink is to understand the yellow sky the great yellow sky, said Van Gogh. When he looked at the world he saw the nails that attach colours to things and he saw that the nails were in pain.
Anne Carson, Short Talks
There is an elision in the Williams quote between typo and error—one that is convenient, but troublesome, because error as a field lies somewhere in between typo and content, tucked sweetly between those sheets, attached to both, fleshily so. Aside from that, though, or perhaps because of that, the overall investigation that Williams undertakes interests me in several ways, as writer, as reader, as teacher and as student.
As writer, I am unable to read my own published work because of all the syntactical errors that float and loom and circulate there, and to proofread, too, because of an inability to fix my vision solely on the surface when I need to. Always I make a change for better meaning, or better sound, always I create a new typo, always I lose hold of the story, grasping onto commas and dashes, onto the nails (oh, stigmata!).
[Stigmata/Penitence story: When I was fifteen, I was friends with a much older boy who was in a punk/skate band called Stigmata Club. My parents went off to Copenhagen for their wedding anniversary, on an overnight trip, and I invited Stigmata Club to play—amps and slam dancing and all—in the sitting room of our rented house. The next morning there was a crease that ran the length of the sixty-foot rented carpet in the living room. I remember being down on my knees, crying, praying, and ironing the carpet, as the minutes ticked by toward my parents’ return. Miraculously, it worked.]
As student, I do love it though when an error is identified for me, when I feel for a moment less alone in the language (in which I long to live alone). when someone appears and guides me through, when I have a chance, briefly, to play penitent. (Okay, not always; sometimes I am filled with rage and resentment. But not when it’s done gently, or with humor, by someone who seems aware of and interested in the meanings I am trying to generate.) Correction and demonstration are forms of attention I find nourishing, if only for the temporary spot (macula, stain) of clarity they offer, and—
As teacher. Certainly the students I’ve been working with seem to like the flat-out instruction on a one-to-one basis. In class, though, at 8 a.m.? Forget it—as I discovered on Friday. Actually, I wasn’t even trying to teach grammar, but it was the closest thing to a traditional, back-to-basics lesson plan I’ve tried, a review and exercise organized around quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing. Went over like a lead bloody balloon. Even the Twix I passed around didn’t help. I’d be terrified to try and teach grammar or syntax to a group.
I wonder whether all of the “contempt” Williams identifies is felt for the errors themselves, as he believes. Is the anger directed, really, at the error, or the erring—or is it fury and frustration at the culture itself, and in particular at an educational culture that has 1) failed to teach children grammar at the developmental stages at which they might be most swiftly able to absorb it, 2) created an economy and culture that prizes social mobility and makes higher education essential to said mobility, and 3) thus sends its heavily indebted students into higher education and only then sets about teaching them how to write in any depth. College instructors are then forced to choose between teaching what, according to the prevailing research, cannot be usefully taught, and pretending that it does not matter, this thing that is at once a potential source of meaning and beauty and a deeply class-inflected skill that they possess but their students do not.
This is the problem of Comp that I stumbled smack into on the first day of training, and where I’ve been stuck, flailing, ever since. (According to Richard Lanham in The Economics of Attention, I’m a moralizer, and maybe he’s right. Certainly I thought as I was writing this of Ford Madox Ford: “It is all a darkness,” and he is speaking of morality as well as perception when he says it). Anyway, the sum total of the advice I’ve received on the matter is, “Oh, everyone goes through it, you figure it out, learning curve, on the fly, don’t do anything you don’t want to, do what makes you comfortable (nothing makes me comfortable) blah blah blah…” And so we all go shuffling, stumbling, through the gate.
The debates around teaching writing also interest me in how they differ from teaching other arts. We’ve seen several instances, in this class and in 8005, of using other disciplines, from modern visual and conceptual art to record production, to envisage new ways of producing text. But what about the methods of instruction in those fields? I know nothing about the pedagogy of painting, or of music or even, say, sound engineering. But why does the kind of rote learning and practice that is still a basic part of instruction in those arts not apply? (I’m thinking of learning scales, perspective, practice, the rules in order to break them and so on.) The Hartwell essay and probably the field of linguistics in general (about which I know nothing) would point to the nature of language itself.
But language is not writing; writing is not language.
[When I was 22, I knew a much older woman, a brilliant, funny, terrible alcoholic. I remember her saying to me on the phone one night, “This conversation is deteriorating into language.” That was probably the first deconstructionist joke I ever heard.]
Williams’ own argument seems to be predicated on some very particular assumptions:
1. the primacy of personal space
2. the privileging of logos and the conflation of writing with speech (thank you, Derrida), as when he equates linguistic error with social error (406)
3. a not unrelated utilitarian attitude toward language, which poses some problems for someone like me…
I believe in grammar in a kind of blind and loving and fearful faith, and I can’t teach it because I don’t know its face. I was never formally trained, and before it I feel humbled and fed. I appreciate Hartwell’s distinction between grammar and usage, and find it helpful, although I’m not sure I was taught usage, either, or what usage really means. I can say that I find myself reading and correcting style, which he also addresses, trying to train students’ ears. That’s why I have them do close reading of texts, that’s why I have them copy out quotes, that’s why I have them read aloud and do “listening workshops,” in which they have to try and recall verbatim a line, a word or a phrase from each others’ work, so that we can then discuss why that fragment and no other stuck.
Look at the nails, I seem always to be saying, can’t you see them? Can’t you hear them? Maybe a little less Catholic here than Yentl. From what I read this week, it’s a futile endeavor, anyway: the arguments against grammar and against reading for error, with their research and their charts and exercises, seem most compelling.
Am I just afraid that if I step out of this chapel of language the door will slam shut behind me? And what, anyway, if it did? What has it ever got me, this constant sacrifice of story after story upon the altar of language, except a loss of what briefly appeared to be momentum? And more to the point of Pedagogy: how can one so trapped in the habits of faith, the most binding of which is doubt, teach?
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (5)Just When I Thought I Was Out, She Pulls Me Back In
Sarah’s response to my Barthes post has inspired me to reconstruct part of a whole long blog post I had written in response to Davis but deleted, for fear it wasn’t in the spirit of deferring to the ethos of the authors we are reading. But you know, my quibble is not with the content but with the form, so here I go again, though in much shorter form. While I agree about the leisurely, nourishing, erotic charge of thinking, I also think that thinking can also be athletic, a temporarily depleting but ultimately strengthening exertion, ( a la Carl Phillips), and maybe it should also be disturbing. (Or maybe just art should disturb, I don’t know.) Certainly I have never shied away, I don’t think, from thought. And one of my less-than-original laments about America is the way in which ideas that are difficult are necessarily assumed to be empty of pleasure. And yet. My poor, patient students were uninspired by Joan Didion, plain and simple; digging deeper into the text yielded them no clarity, and no pleasure. So much for close reading as the answer to all my pedagogical prayers.
So, yes to Barthes. But as for some of the more minor practitioners of theory, I have to say I am under-whelmed. After 14 years away from the stuff, I see the same ideas and same terms being split ever more minutely and dragged out ever more endlessly. I mean, are we still talking about identity and dichotomy and difference and différance? Really? And sticking extra s’s on our words and studding them with dashes and slashes to make it all fresh? Even as we talk about getting students to “see” beyond themselves? I mean, I think the Davis essay enacts a will-to-immanence if ever I’ve seen one. There, I’ve said it.
I long for less self-conscious performance—not in Barthes, or in Freud or Cixous or Kristeva or in Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty or…the list just goes on…but in Davis, yes, and in even less theoretical and more narrative writers like Brodkey—and more economy and compressive force, a leaping out of the big, beautiful idea (or all the tiny, lovely ones). Just as I argued in comp training that I can’t really see past the “mere” language, that I can’t help students organize their ideas without talking about precision of language and construction of sentences, I am losing my mind trying to see past these rhetorics. I don’t think that makes me an anti-intellectual; I just prefer my ideas in the forms of poetry, fiction, and the most delicately, poetically and humanely wrought theory. Maybe less steak, Sarah, than (ahem) wine and cheese?
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (7)Tower
Barthes’ essay is so jewel-like that I don’t want to do more than read it and turn it this way and that in the light. From the opening that goes from wry to gentle, to the depth of exploration combined with a lightness of touch, to the monumental ending, I don’t even want to apply any of it, really, except perhaps ask whether it could not be one of those exemplar texts.
The trouble with the exemplar-text mode, however, of course, is that a certain fineness of mind as well as facility with language is required even to imitate. If Jeff doesn’t want to get boring summer vacation essays, do we really want to get half prosaic-research papers and half stoned meditations on the St. Louis arch? “No shame,” no, but so much of what we have been reading and hearing seems to imply the exemplar, rhetorical method’s not really applicable in this time and place, is hopelessly out of date.
I could not help thinking of language—or do I mean rhetoric—as Tower. And of course of the Ivory Tower (many parallels “One can feel oneself cut off from the world and yet the owner [scholar/thinker/ideator/imaginer] of the world”, except it’s not so pleasant to be in). And finally, as I have this past week, and since the semester started, I think of the Twin Towers, of reading in fiction workshop novel after novel that tries to address in some way their smoke and shadow, of walking to school one morning this week under what we New Yorkers will always call a 9/11 sky (blue, stunning, cloudless), of my friends still back in the city who didn’t go to work, of the writing I’ve tried and failed to do around the subject—and how naively I tried to start my teaching here around it.
Anyway, confluence and intersection are constant for everyone, of course, and I really appreciate mystory as a way to try to harness that for the purposes of teaching and writing, even if my own personal problem has been more along the lines of putting a stop to the connecting, the threading, the spreading.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (7)A Wee Bit More on Walker
Also from Walker, on p. 150
“What we have in sum, is a teacher who is a rhetor, who can not only guide the students through critical examinations of exemplar-texts, but can also perform and reflect upon the discourse those texts embody and that the student is seeking to produce. The student, meanwhile, is studying, rehearsing and imitating exemplar-texts in order to internalize their voices and their characteristic styles and ways of arguing, and ultimately to re-synthesize those internalized exemplars in original invention—thus developing a habitude, while thr teacher critiques and explains whatever can be explained, in orer to guide the development of that habitude as well as possible. The result is not a person who creates discourse according to “the rules of rhetoric”—not, at least, in the sense of methodically applying those rules as a sort of algorithm (or recipe) to produce a text—but a person who has internalized and can “spontaneously” and improvisationally generate the kind of discourse that the rules of rhetoric recognize as excellent. This is what Augustine means when he observes in De Doctrina that no one can be eloquent and think of the rules of eloquence at the same time, and that the rules of eloquence are no help to someone who lacks an internal feel for it….The purpose, then, of the classical rhetorical curriculum in this tradition is to develop that feel”
This, in short, is how I teach. And I have done so without being consciously trained in the, ahem, rules of eloquent teaching, but my imitating my own teachers.
And so, when Walker goes on to discuss how rhetorical curriculum has come to look like creative writing, I think, well, yes. In my case, for sure. Without having received any clear or substantial training in teaching comp, I have just gone ahead and imported the methods and style of my creative writing classes. Which were in turn informed by past instruction in English, in Women’s Studies, in theory, in German and Spanish and French, And in fact, I prefaced every one of my student conferences this week with an explanation that I saw myself as the student’s reader, and we would be having a conversation over the course of several drafts and papers, with the hope that they would come by a process of practice and internalization, to ask, anticipate and answer the questions of the reader when they write. Weird to see it here, all theorized.
As for the shoes, I showed them Didion’s and those were too big. We’ll see of some others fit.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (4)Rare Sauciness: An Attempt to Cope
On Walker, “Sophist’s Shoes”
143: “a manifesto for realism ‘larded’ with genteel, turn-of-the-century talk about truth, beauty, art”
Corder, Brodkey and Bishop all pulled similar rhetorical moves, using language to diminish what they wish to reject. As we all do. Anyway, one has to admire the rhetorical transformation of truth, beauty and art to thick, white fat.
144: So, what I think of as discussing craft is in fact taking a rhetorical as opposed to a grammatical approach?
(I once heard Joy Williams give what was billed as a craft lecture, but turned out to be an anti-craft lecture. “Craft, craft, craft,” she began it, her voice dripping with contempt. “Say it often enough, and one conjures the inevitable cheese.”)
This article is so studded with words I don’t know that it seems the best use I can make of the blog just now is record and define those terms. All definitions from the OED online:
Hermeneutics: The art or science of interpretation, esp. of Scripture. Commonly distinguished from exegesis or practical exposition.
Epideictic: Adapted for display or show-off; chiefly of set orations. b. spec. in Ornith.: applied to collective displays and other conventional behaviour regarded by some as having evolved from the need to control the distribution of population. (NOTE: Oooh, this ornithological version is my narcissistic favorite: Sal’s nickname for me is Bird, or sometimes Birdie. My novel is called Birds. And actually this word/idea is very helpful for the novel.)
Suasory: A. adj. Tending to persuade; persuasive.
Hence suasoriness rare. (I LOVE this! Sounds like sauciness, for one thing, and censorious, and saucisson, a word I often say over and over in a ludicrous French accent. Also, less cheerfully, suicidalness.)
Philology (yes, I admit it: I am so unlearned that I didn’t evebn know the word for love to learning. Or perhaps I’m just not American (see end of definition): 1. Love of learning and literature; the branch of knowledge that deals with the historical, linguistic, interpretative, and critical aspects of literature; literary or classical scholarship. Now chiefly U.S.
Okay, I think that’s all.
On p. 149, one example of that intersection of rhetoric and psychoanalysis whose existence I wondered about in my first blog post, and on which I was corrected:
“Within the central classical tradition, what defines rhetoric as rhetoric is ultimately not the activity of rhetorical criticism, or even rhetorical theorizing—though these are not forgotten—but a pedagogical tradition, in which the primal scene is the declamation exercise.
[whoops: declamation: 1. The action or art of declaiming; the repeating or uttering of a speech, etc. with studied intonation and gesture.]
the declamation exercise, a “theater” of antilogistic argument,
[antilogistic, from antilogism: the premisses of any valid syllogism
[syllogism being an argument expressed or claimed to be expressible in the form of two propositions called the premisses, containing a common or middle term, with a third proposition called the conclusion, resulting necessarily from the other two. together with the negation of the conclusion. ]
where the performer not only contemplates and critiques but also, and more importantly, rehearses and directly (if fictively) experiences both rhetorical performance and the values of a rhetorical culture devoted to free debate (Walker, ”traditions,” and Axer.)
So here the use of “primal scene” invokes the traumatic yet erotically charged moment of witnessing parental sexual intercourse. Yet the intercourse here is the discourse between teacher and student, the witness/audience the class, no? So really the roles are all mixed up. (I do think of Barthelme’s “The School,” though, a story I love.)
Anyway, it seems so ironic that I am teaching my students about clarity and simplicity of expression at the same time that I stumble my way through texts whose meanings I can’t grasp and whose movements elude me, texts written in a language and mode that has a history that is ancient and beautiful and vital to Western culture and identity, but which (forgive me) is all Greek to me.
I’ve tried here to tackle just a chunk of the article in the blog, though I’ve read the rest. (In search of an answer to that question I posed at the end of my unicorn hunt, and which Walker also asks: so what?). I’ve tried also to represent visually my reading process, in the spirit of the idea of a writing project being not necessarily for the reader (goodbye, life’s work!) but for the writer (formerly known as an artist).
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (12)Nineteenth Paragraph Breakdown
Brodkey, Corder both practice a kind of personal academic writing, or what Brodkey calls “writing on the bias,” both in the service of a call to change.
On page 6 of “Studying Rhetoric and Teaching School,” Corder lists the horrors in the news in 1982, two years into the Reagan administration. Astonishing how much the news is the same: drought, famine, agricultural crisis, “war in the Middle East,” “the social security system’s demise,” and links between cancer and diet. Even the comforts Corder lists on the next page are rather the same: good coffee perhaps now inflated to good coffee shops. What blips we all are, for all our struggle and squawking.
I wonder, too, about how things HAVE changed—his deployment of the development of food plants from weeds, of cultivation, evolution and of dispersal as metaphors make me think of Michael Pollan and his critique of corn monoculture. I wonder too how possible cultivated and conscious evolution of pedagogy is in a country where candidates for president consider “evolution” a third rail idea. What about the wild, untamed growth beyond the rakes and hoes of institution? Meaning art?
Corder’s description of teachers’ despair as fertile ground for change put me in mind of Scott’s notion of betrayed individuals as agents of revolution.
Sarah wrote in her blog about the religiosity of Corder’s language and imagery, and while I, cultural Catholic to the core, am always more moved than repelled by God in language and art, God as symbol and metaphor and poetry, I too detected a whiff of evangelism, not only to Corder’s writing, but to all of the readings this week. Perhaps I should check my own rhetoric, though, and call it not evangelism, but, yes, evolution, sea-change, movement. (Still, I heard recently that Wash U has developed a program for Comp that they want to take to institutions all round the country—such missionary zeal!)
Certainly I held back from publishing or rather finishing these notes this week, in case they were wrong in their take and tack—to process and respond in any kind of depth to 120 + pages of readings, split across 4 authors, in typed form, for the consumption of others—in typed form is for me a task that takes a daunting amount of time. I know the point of the blogs is to take notes, but I have always taken notes as I’ve read, since, like 1985. With a pen. Simultaneous with the reading.
Early on, Jeff said it seemed that my notion of writing is that it’s a private experience, and I answered that yes, some of it is, though not all and not always. I do believe that, and don’t feel bad about it, the quiet and solitude that writing and thinking and reflection have always allowed me—and that after all have produced art and literature through the ages. And the same goes for my experience of reading. So, as much as I enjoy trying out some of these technologies, such as this blog, I find myself mourning a little (actually, a lot) the loss of that privacy. For how many of us were books and writing the first and only place we escaped to, away from the chatter? And for how many of us does it represent a loss, this incursion of chatter, of outside, into the quiet inside of reading and writing and thought?
I should say how this connects to my teaching. I’ve always seen the teaching of writing (in the past, fiction), as an invitation to students into an experience I know and love and need. And perhaps because I have taught for only a few years, I don’t feel that despair Corder speaks of, the dislike for students Jeff said a minority of teachers feel (a little fear of them at first, but not dislike). The new pedagogy seems to be asking me to invite them into a territory and experience that is still alien to me, and so while my own pedagogy has always been equal parts doubt and intuition, the doubt is now winning.
It seems strange to me, too, to read of this struggle within the academy—and within teachers—around introducing the personal, and helping students introduce the personal, into writing. All this guilt and resistance. The coaxing of students into personal writing of some depth and complexity is for me the easy part, and as for getting beyond the summer vacation and dead grandma stories, the repetition of received information, I just, as Sarah says, ask a million questions, and tell them what I see in their writing, and what else I am looking for, and even say, “Really? Cause I don’t think this sounds like you.”
It’s not a system, but it is a method.
Besides, in my 1000 class this semester I have two veterans of Iraq, another kid about to be sent there, several whose fathers may go, a girl who’s already had cancer, one whose uncle was killed on 9/11, one who was home-schooled by fundamentalist parents, another who’s passionate about saving small farms, and one who’s got a lot to say about how black communities felt the heat taken off them and redirected towards Middle Eastern people after 9/11.
Damn and blast, this always happens. I start trying to write about the readings and go off on a tangent. Is the point of this blog to prove we’ve read? Should I just type out my scribbled, private notes?
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (12)Noli me fingere: The Hunt of the Unicorn
From afar one may imagine that one perceives the pattern. And one may. But, as one is not challenged—or, more precisely, menaced—by the details, the pattern may be nothing more than something one imagines oneself to remember. And, after all, what I remembered—or imagined myself able to remember—of my life in America (before I left home!) was terror.
—James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen
The unicorn is the only fabulous beast that does not seem to have been conceived out of human fears.
—Marianna Mayer, The Unicorn and the Lake
The choices
The Unicorn, Iris Murdoch; Scottish (Catholic); Sinead O’Connor; Fiction
The Link
And right away I can read them, those first unsubtle, unstable ties, the intricate chain, the loops discrete and indiscreet and interlocking. That’s never been difficult, though, the revelation of revelatory repetitions and their tracking through time, which is to say narrative; what’s far harder has been the pulling back, the perception of pattern, the loosening of grip. In Wikipedia (lazily) I therefore both end and begin.
The Unicorn, by Iris Murdoch
The unicorn is “a fabulous beast,” with “the beard of a billygoat, cloven hooves and a lion’s tail. ” Right away, the splitting-off starts, and in the first pun of the night the lion’s tail leads in one direction to tale, which links to fiction, and (even leaving aside the facts that this is my tale, my mystory, and that I’m a Leo writer), fiction loops back to fabulous, which here on the virtual (which is to say fictional) page is tethered to beast to form a unicorn.
In the other direction, lion’s tail leaps to lion rampant, symbol of Scotland, and on Wikipedia I see for the first time, strangely, the Scottish coat of arms. It bears both lion and unicorn, yokes them.
That image fades though, in the light of another: the medieval tapestry, “The Unicorn is Penned,” bringing me back via another pun to Murdoch’s book and through that as well as independently to fiction.
The Aside
I want to do what Sarah does, remove the self and its interest, but memory keeps intruding, giving off shoots: that tapestry of the penned unicorn hangs in the Cloisters Museum in New York, where I took my fabulist fiction students this summer; we saw the pen, the lure, the hunt and the tether, but not one of my girls (to channel Miss Brodie, that famous Scottish teacher) were lured by that toward writing.
More About the Unicorn
The unicorn is symbol of purity and for this reason has a soft spot for virgins, who were used as sirens to lull them. Beauty sang and the beast slept, it laid its head on her lap, and when it woke it was tethered. To a pomegranate tree, no less, symbol of fertility. Juice stained its haunches.
Another Intrusion From Memory
In 2006, while on a fellowship in Columbus, Georgia, not an hour from the town where I lived as a child, I was asked to speak to the local study abroad program about my international (which is to say patchy) education. One of the things I told those students and teachers is that I had never studied abroad, and also always studied abroad, the line between home and abroad having been breached for me long since before I could remember. I told them there were consequences to such a life: an uncertain sense of self, a permanent sense of dislocation, a never-ending mourning.
I told them that my partner, who grew up with horses (which, according to W’pedia, in modern imagery unicorns have become—though the beasts have kept their horns, they have lost their beards and their lion’s tails, and their cloven hooves have fused) once told me that horses, like elephants, can become ground-tied. All you have to do is tie the shank from the bridle to a post or fence for a few weeks, and after that you needn’t. You can just let the shank fall to the ground. The animal will stay where you place it, believing itself tethered—and isn’t it?
Surely, I said, for all the sorrows of a perigrinatory past, there is something to be said for a life that forces you again and again to test the tether, to trace the shape of the shining shank that links the self to its surroundings, whether real or imaginary. Surely, I said, there are other ties that bind us to place, besides a sense of belonging.
There’s not belonging. There’s aching to belong. There’s displacement and diaspora and alienation and abandonment. There’s occupation. Intrusion. Expulsion. Exile.
Sinead O’Connor
Speaking of place, the hunt for “unicorn” also yields this news story: one-horned deer found in Italy this summer. Italy leads me to Rome, and to Catholic, and to Latin, and deer and Rome and Latin lead my mind to Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt”. (Here I am, at hunt again.) “Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am/And wild for to hold, though I seem tame,” that sonnet ends.
Noli me tangere, of course, are the words Jesus spoke lest Mary Magdalene defile him, and in 2006 Sinead released “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” Mary Magdalene’s song.
She performed it while pregnant—that is to say, tethered to the tree.
Scottish, Catholic, and What Was Done to Sinead
The link between Scottish (Catholic), meaning Irish, and Sinead O’Connor surely need not be stated. Though I did discover that when Iris Murdoch, author of The Unicorn, began to lose her memory, she asked “Who am I?” and then said, “Well, I’m Irish. That’s something.” I did discover too, from my good pal Wikipedia, that we Catholics were the ones who preserved certain elements of Scots culture when those po-faced Presbyterians rejected them—not only highland dress, but the bagpipe. Our music.
And music means song, and song is how Sinead speaks, and how the unicorn was tricked.
Sinead O’Connor made a sung and silent protestation of the Catholic church and its defilement of purity, its abuse by priests of children, when she sang War and tore the pope’s picture.
I need not speak of Sinead O’Connor’s later silence, her retreat to a nunnery, after she was hounded and hunted, here in America.
The link between Sinead O’Connor and unicorn? Well, she simply is one.
Fiction
Finally, fiction, says Wikipedia, is the telling of stories that are not real, an imaginative narrative act that may or many not include what is real. It comes from the Latin fingo, fingere, finxi, fictum. To form or create.
The Thread?
The pattern, then, is woven and looping, interlocking. (A knot. How Celtic.) And what’s at the centre, if there’s any one thing? I think it may be the Unicorn herself. She is a book by Iris Murdoch, she is Scottish and connected to Catholicism, she is Sinead O’Connor. She is (a) fiction.
There, now I’ve penned it. So what?
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (5)Wishing and hoping the breaks work out…
Sarah has posted some really nuanced and interesting thoughts on the problems of close reading as well as multiculturally-based pedagogy tonight. They make me wish I knew more, particularly about the history of pedagogy. I also feel like the Last Close Reader on the planet, trying to drag students into my backwards-looking, New-Critic, probably fascist paradigm. Och well, as my Glaswegian grandmother would say, never mind. Here are some questions: 1. I have never been a fan of the version of paternalistic and guilt-based approaches that in the name of egalitarianism give a free pass to poor scholarship. But is anyone? I feel as though it’s something I’ve seen in practice but surely no one actually dares to espouse it. 2. I understand why, as Greg mentioned in class (”liberating meaning from a text” is the phrase I think Jeff then used, no?) and Sarah also discusses, close reading can function as elitist, especially as it has developed into an extreme and dominatory (if that’s not a word, I’m coining it) fetishization of language—something my critical theory class is currently discussing. On a practical level, however, is examining multiplicity and richness of meaning, is taking into account subtext, is rendering the invisible visible, is acquiring another mode of critique, and placing the language and imagery we use in historical, cultural and linguistic context, as part of an ongoing process, really just another mode of oppression? I mean, we can render it so by the terms in which we describe it, of course (I remember years ago, when defending the role of theory, of all things, in the context of political movements, being accused of having a “trickle-down philosophy” of revolution!). But—and here I go, all capitalist again—I tend to employ a cost-benefit analysis. And there is no eternal, perfect praxis. 3. Also, there can be no translation without close reading (Stephanie, want to chime in here?). There’s a lot to say about that, but one has to know as many meanings and associations of a word as possible—including what can be rendered fairly closely and what is untranslatable (and yes, I understand that all translation is an act of transformation, even violently so, but that doesn’t change my point, I don’t think). And in this polyglot country, could principles and processes of translation (including from one language to another but also one form to another and so on) be engaged in the way Niya and I were trying to ask about today? Also, students bring all their languages to close readings (again, small letters!) and I have come away from conversations with students enriched by a new understanding of how a word operates in a particular culture; this would be an example of a student acting as rhetor. I’m thinking, too, of the massive and continual influx of Black English and references to Black history and culture into “mainstream” American vernacular, and how many white people use Black expressions without even knowing it and make reference to an event or experience they have no knowledge of. Is there not an enrichment and a (yes, limited and I’m sure fraught) move against invisibility and silencing and domination when one reads for those and that? 4. I am still hesitant about this split between the “fit” and the “imaginative,” and am looking forward to it becoming clearer to me, if it ever does. Because I would argue that reading, exploring, and analyzing are imaginative acts; it takes imagination to look past the surface, or to expand the surface, to conjure meaning—and yes, from there to make associative leaps—to envision a complex depth of field. 5. Similarly I’ve heard (not in class today, or from anyone in the room ever, but elsewhere and at other times) people talk about “doing,” things as opposed to “just” reading, talking, and analyzing. Here, too, I balk, because I consider an analysis an act of doing and making, and a thought a thing. I keep hearing in my head Carl Phillips talking about writing for the athletic reader, the athletic thinker. And now that I think about it, I often say to my students that the mind is a muscle, and in reading and writing and discussing we are training it—making it both stronger and more agile. Certainly that is how I think of my own ongoing education, and even my writing…the lifelong apprenticeship of art and all that jazz. Yikes, even as I write I realize how stodgy I sound (how can I be a stodge? I was a fire-eating, jail-going Lesbian Avenger, dammit!) but I’m hardly a passive peon, even as I inhabit that kind of education. So while one can, on the level of language and metaphor, construct any given teaching methodology as problematic, can one not also just as easily construct it in positive terms (sorry for the bad phrase)? Isn’t the result paralysis if we don’t? Sorry for the melodrama, but seeing as we’re taking things to their logical conclusions (which was never my strong suit, I’ve always taken things to their illogical conclusions, ha ha).Okay, I was afraid this would happen. I have more to say but FAR too much work to do in other areas to spend all my time on a blog. But it’s a pleasure wrestling with Sarah’s muscular mind. Truly. Thanks for pushing the discussion, and pushing me to think harder.
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More possible directions for the presentation: 1. Both Gilyard and Miller speak of the middle ground in which we teach—neither fully in the absolute nor in the relative, but participating in both. And the arguments of Bitzer and Vatz seems to represent those two poles, Bitzer on the side of the perceivable, provable, grounded rhetorical situation, Vatz on that of the “merely” perceived, the relative, subjective, phenomenological and—as he keeps calling it— arbitrary experience. A connection then, though perhaps not one worth many minutes of class time. It does lead me back to this question of how to apply rhet. theory to the classroom, an application I think a number of us are struggling to make. And which in turn leads back to the point that as teachers we are forced to revise theoretical notions according to real world experience (both that which is rigid and that which is slippery). 2. Jeff recommends that we give everyone an exercise rather than simply pose questions, as he says that is how learning takes place. I don’t feel especially prepared to develop an in-class exercise appropriate for graduate students, in a discipline so new to me. But we could, as I did in my first blog post, begin to articulate our own intellectual/teaching autobiographies in a more detailed way than we did in, say, comp training, and see how and where we have landed—a la the exercise that Miller describes, the one in which the teacher wrote about how technology had allowed her some (limited) professional progress and flexibility. 3. I keep coming back to Miller and the critique of Freire, and the implied question, who is the study of pedagogy—and the pursuit of deeper meaning in our pedagogy—for? Student or teacher? Of course the two are not so easily separated in their interests. Even if the result is only to make the teacher (as a category or as an individual?) more conscious, then isn’t that enough?
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