FoolsCap

• Irrelevant

I have this specific fondness for days like today: cold, rainy, autumnal.  They always put me in a romantic mood, for reasons which are arcane and cryptic and best left unexplained here.  Yes, autumn, when a young man’s fancy turns to love.  Screw spring.  Spring is for procreation, for mad rutting under blossoming cherry boughs.

But autumn?  Autumn is for long walks under aging elms in the full fiery blaze of fall, huddled against your special someone, each protecting the other from the harsh bite of the October wind.  Autumn looks forward to the promise of winter, when snow forbids long walks and instead invites the happy resignation of a long evening indoors with the special one, keeping away the chill and scoffing at Old Man Winter.

Makes we wish I had that special someone, eh?  I think autumn puts this romantic side in play because it’s a season of decay and inevitability, and all the great romances are about the impossibility of love.  Romeo and Juliet, The English Patient, The End of the Affair, Titanic (though I question its aesthetic greatness), Heloise and Abelard. . .each is a tale of a doomed love.  Of course, maybe these are just the romances I think are great.  What does that say about me?  I choose to ignore the question and move on.

• Relevant

Thoughts on Chaps 1/2 of Berlin.

p. xiii, about the political involvements of English studies

I admit some confusion.  When Berlin (and Anderson too in 7010) write about the politics of English studies I’m never sure if they mean to tie EngStudies to a particular political agenda (i.e. Republican or Democratic) or if EngStudies point to certain political theories (Marixsm etc) or whether studying English is itself political, in the sense that choosing to study some texts rather than others it itself an act of ideology.  I know the answer is that it’s all three, but still.

pp. 6-7, about the Romantic revolution in aesthetic experience

Interesting.  I think maybe this also indicates why the study of popcult gets a bad rap sometimes.  Because popcult is often a collaborative effort (movies & TV in particular) it isn’t the "pure" art form that Romanticism champions.  That is, it doesn’t come straight from the soul of one visionary poet, but rather is produced by a team (committee sounds too judgmental) of creators.  There’s something here I’d like to explore more. . .

p. 14-15, Berlin’s reading of Scholes

Berlin seems to argue that Scholes errs in arguing for a reading theory based on socio/semiotic codes.  Now, to me, Scholes theory makes perfect sense, but I’m not going to critique Berlin for this.  I want to try and see why Berlin disagrees.  In particular, Berlin takes Scholes to task for a reading that is arbitary and fragmented, particularly for not championing a way of "deciding among competing reading codes".  This sort of stands in sharp contrast to things I’ve been reading elsewhere.  Vitanza, R. Williams, and J. Rice all seem to point to a method of reading that exploits contradictory meanings/readings for productive results.  On the other, E. Schiappa reminds us that even Nietzsche recognized that not all interpretations are equal; rather, that texts support some readings more completely than others.  I do see in Berlin, however, some suggestion of a resolution between these models.  Berlin suggests that Scholes, apart from advocating a fragmentary reading model without specifying how to determine between models, also fails to address the possibility of "integrating more than one of them".  This might be what Vitanza et al are after–that we don’t have to settle on one reading, that we can use contradiction for our own purposes.

pp. 28-29: on the long relationship between poetic and rhetoric

I think maybe what keeps me from declaring an interest in rhetoric is that I still conceive of it in civic terms.  That is, rhetoric (as I formerly understood it) is about the use of persuasion in the public sphere–something that is not as evident in Berlin’s reading of rhet/poetic.  Am I secretly a rhet person in a lit person’s clothing?  Heavens forfend!

p. 39, freshman comp as only mandatory class in curriculum

Berlin omits something here (maybe it gets explored later in the text).  But, I’m trying to read in a generative fashion so I’m not gonna say "Bad Jimmy Berlin!" but rather look at the omission as a question.  The question, of course, is why?  My response: as we’ve seen repeatedly, in Foucault/Spellmeyer, Brooke, Brodkey, and oh, just every thing we’ve read in the past month or so, that writing–at it best–transcends hermeneutics to become a heuristic.  That is the importance of fresh comp then–not to make sure that students can write full sentences that are error-free–but to inculcate in them the promise that they can reach understanding without tutorial mandate.  Rephrased: our job as comp instructors may be to teach sudents the mode of discovery rather than the mode of interpetation.  Both are important, to be sure, but much of what we’ve read seems to point toward the greater potential of heuristic/discovery/invention that writing offers.

• Irrelevant

Have you ever been thinking about something and caught yourself thinking?  Like your brain does this:  "I sure like bread.  Bread is good.  Hey, I just thought ‘Bread is good’.  Now I’m thinking about thinking ‘Bread is good’."  Doesn’t your head feel weird when that happens, like a small black hole has just opened in your cerebral cortex?  Or that suddenly your mind has become a recursive loop, a sort of internal Moebius band?  That’s freaky, isn’t it?