FoolsCap

Wrong Berlin.  Dagnabbit.

Thought on James Berlin, somewhat random and haphazardly:

p. 124: "Our larger purpose is to encourage students to negotiate and resist these codes [. . . .]"

I’ve been skeptical in past entries about the emphasis Berlin and others have put on "resisting" sociocultural codes.  While I remain so, I decided to ask myself: Is resistance always a bad thing?  Part of the confusion stems from differing ideas of resistance.  For me, the idea is tied up with images of armed guerillas fighting against some fascist overlord.  A bit dramatic for the classroom, true, but that image informs how I understand Berlin and others; to speak of resisting these codes is to resist a totalitarian model of popcult that I don’t believe in.  What else could it mean?  I think too of electrical resistance: a resistor may affect the total current in a circuit (or something–if I knew that I wouldn’t be an English major) but it’s still part of the circuit.  Which is to say that perhaps the resistance that Berlin et al champion is not an uprising but an alteration, and what Berlin condemns is not popcult codes but uncritical consideration of those codes.

p. 137: "Texts [. . .] should be situated within their historical context."

While I agree with Berlin that understanding textual production demands an account of a text’s historicity, I wonder whether his heuristic model is 100% sound.  By far, I’m not critiquing anything, but I want to pose a question, one to which I don’t really have an answer.  Berlin shows us that much can be learned through reading a text through its historical moment, but what can we gain by dehistoricizing a text?  I think such a move is valuable, but I’m not sure what we can claim is the resultant product.  On one hand, I’m inclined to suggest that any reading of a text that approaches it with a theory in mind that the author couldn’t have known about is such a dehistoricizing move, but I don’t know for sure if that counts.  (Perhaps because sound theory would ostensibly hold true no matter when a text was produced?  Hmm.)  On the other, um. . .it turns out I didn’t really have another hand.  Oh well.

p. 147: "[. . .] principles for discovering the available means of knowledge [. . .]"

Something Jeff and Ethriam may have touched on at the E’s blog.  Regarding citation: essentially, in addition to its practical functions (as reading list), using citation is a rhetorical, epistemological device.  Your argument matters because these other people claim similar things; likewise I can say this thing is possible to be known because of what others have said before me.

So much more, but running out of time.  Boo-hoo!