Amy Shuman: Gender and Genre

I have journals due in one of my current MA classes, but the instructor is only going to glance at them. I have done all of this work for very little return. I know, a journal is often written only for oneself, but I also wrote it as a conversation with the instructor which now will not happen. So as to make this a more fruitful endeavor, I am going to post some of the journals here. Enjoy and feel free to respond so as to make these truly a conversation.
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I remember working with Amy Shuman's essay “Gender and Genre,” which I had wanted to revisit but for the life of me, I can't find that ONE course reader I had from NYU that has it in there. I even know which course reader it was and what color it is, but it must still be packed away. So, I found the article and have ordered the book from Amazon and I will write about it more extensively within the next two weeks. What I do recall is that it was a response to Derrida's “Law of Genre” and that it influenced what I had talked about in my presentation. Again, we talked a LOT about feminism and women's words when I was at NYU. And it now occurs to me that there are a lot of women in English studies, both at WIU and in general.

Richard Schechner, one of my professors at NYU asked a question about the relationship of gender to teaching and he said that it has traditionally been a women's position and that was why it paid so low. I held, and I still do, that it has not traditionally been women's work – but I think that we w ere arguing two different things. I believe that he was thinking about the education of young children, which for the last 150 years or so has been done by women. I am thinking of university educations which women have only been accepted into relatively recently and in greater numbers within the past 40 or so years. But thinking about the “demise of the humanities,” this has been an area that women have been drawn to and so it shouldn't come as a surprise at all that now that women have rushed to the academy to join the ranks of the humanities, that people now think the humanities don't matter and that they should be defunded. But they can't close ranks forever. As they defund the humanities, or at least try to do so, more women will enter the sciences and other fields that have also traditionally been male-dominated, and there will be no place for the patriarchally-minded among us to go where there are no women, unless we have something like a Margaret Atwood Handmaid's Tale kind of reversal of society, which is not as improbable as it seems, given what happened in Germany between the Weimar and the Nazis, wherein there was a political rejection of the open climate of the Weimar.

All of this, again, brings me back to “Gender and Genre,” about a possible “rejection” or at least radical rethinking of academic work and what it means to be academic, what it means for women who have traditionally done “expressive” writing – short stories and fiction, storytelling, to rehink and remake what constitutes academic writing. Is it necessarily less rigorous? What potential do we have to remake academic writing and not have it devalued, like so many things in culture become once they are associated with women and with women's work? Is rigor always to be male-defined or adhered to by male academic standards that we had no role in setting, but must uphold and maintain? And if we choose to change those standards or to not uphold and maintain those standards any more, will our own work be less valid? What would the new standards look like?

And now I am thinking about Rebekah Buchan's class on digital humanities, and she talked about work that was being published online for critiques to happen online. I can't remember now if it was said that the work was never really considered finished, but I tend to think not. And that's what I tell students who come to the writing center, and that's what I even tell my students in class – that no piece of writing is ever really finished, but that at some point you have to finish your writing of it and turn it in for the time being. Although I know that I certainly go back to my writing all the time and borrow from it, revise it, rewrite it, and whatever else there is to “redo” from it. The internet and the digitization of literature is changing everything. I put a lot of my work out on Academia.com and in some cases, that might disqualify it for publication in scholarly journals or at least will mean that I might have to “cheat” and pull my work down from site like that in order to get it published by a journal that “counts” as academic and rigorous in the eyes of academia. There is a lot of talk, and always has been, among creative writers who are academics, because it is possible to amass a whole lot of writing credits that are not “acceptable” to the university because they are not peer-reviewed journals. This is especially true for experimental or avant-garde writers.

Despite all the talk about interdisciplinary work being the rage, the future of academia, that is also not true. Disciplines are still very much in place and defending their turf.

So, I ask you, what is a genre-jumper, an academic/non-academic, someone for whom writing is both a social and an anti-social act, to do?

Cross-Genre Writing and In-Class Performance/Presentation

I have journals due in one of my current MA classes, but the instructor is only going to glance at them. I have done all of this work for very little return. I know, a journal is often written only for oneself, but I also wrote it as a conversation with the instructor which now will not happen. So as to make this a more fruitful endeavor, I am going to post some of the journals here. Enjoy and feel free to respond so as to make these truly a conversation.
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Women Writing Culture was a book used in my feminist ethnography class at NYU. That was a very important book because it showed examples of women writing ethnography as stories, plays, and poems. It talked about the fact that often male anthropologists were off talking to the men of a community who gave the “official” story of their tribe, village, or group while their wives were talking to the women, getting information on their day-to-day lives and writing it up as short stories. At NYU, we were actively encouraged to play around with genres and in fact, my department chair gave a reading of sonnets that she had written in response to Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. It always disappointments me when I am in a program that discourages such experimentation and that is why I wanted to take that freedom when it was offered in this class.

I was using the poetic technique, which I have often seen in prose as well, of numbering items to make it cohere, turning back on itself, without having to have formal transition. Because I had a limited amount of time, and because I was working with disparate theories and incidents that would all come back around to the main point, I decided on that format. It was a very conscious decision once I wrote my initial text.

My reading of the text was a performance in itself, meant to be like a lecture. When I directed a play at Scott Community College, a version of Antigone that I had put together myself from Sophocles, Georges Bataille, and Kurt Schwitters, I had the academic chorus instead of a Greek chorus, reciting lines from Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim¸ asking how psychoanalysis would be different today if Freud had started with Antigone rather than Oedipus. Drawing from that experience and the “performance of academia,” that is why I decided to stand up and read the text. Also, as I write this, I think about how much academic work was not necessarily published as a text initially, but as a speech, a class, conference proceedings, etc., including Saussure’s Course In General Linguistics, much, if not all of Lacan’s various Seminars, Derrida’s “Law of Genre,” etc.

I really took umbrage at the comment, made later, that my presentation was personal expression, but by then we had moved on and I didn’t feel like bringing the conversation back to my “lecture.” I do, however, want to defend it. I dislike most poetry that is solipsistic, that deals purely with the feelings of the author and nothing else, and I also dislike teaching theories that focus only on interiority and self-expression. As Kirsten and I were saying, we have a student who comes into the writing center who was obviously taught using those kinds of theories in the 1970s and thinks that writing is only about his impressions and ideas, and we are having a hard time getting him to see that yes, it is that, but it is also much more than that, especially at the graduate level. So that kind of “self-expression” talk tends to really push my buttons.

While my presentation had much of me in it, and much creativity, I also had a lot of research and a lot of other people’s ideas. I cited Barthes, Foucault, Cixous, and Derrida as well as some lesser-known theories. I also cited primary research I have been doing for several years into different ways that we can help students by not only giving them alternative assignments, but alternative ways to complete those assignments, like my spontaneous research. Surrealism is very interested in consciousness and in unconscious processes. That is why the Surrealists were so interested in Freud and so disappointed when he did not reciprocate their feelings. I believe such concerns are very neglected in educated students and I look to my own levels of interest/disinterest, my own areas where I have divided attention and trouble getting my own work done to think about ways to help my students. Many people in graduate school are “model students.” That’s how we got this far. Most of us are teaching students who are not “model” student or who live in less-than-perfect situations that do not allow them to get their work done. So I ask myself how I can use my own barriers, my own divided attention, combined with my interest in creative writing and in surrealism, to help my students to get their work finished?
I also disagree with the comments that genre is important because it helps us to know how to read a text. After I had thought about that for a while, I came to the conclusion that it is not genre that tells us how to read something, but it is the content itself. If the content is all focused on dog obedience, for example, you can use poems, stories, and research to explain dog obedience to a reader. And in this post-modern world, authors do that all the time! It seems to me that it is only in academic writing, not popular writing, that genre is insisted upon. Corporations use actors to help with their corporate training. They do use poetry and short stories to promote diversity. And three articles that I use in my English and speech classes talk about the value of storytelling to help people learn. Outside of academia, people push the boundaries all the time, using humor, poetry, and storytelling to train and get their points across.

Partially, I take blame myself for people not “getting” what I was talking about. I feel that if you are going to do something that is unusual, you need to prepare people for it somewhat. When I do an avant garde performance at an open mic, for example, I will give the audience an instruction not to “overthink” the poetry and try to figure it out, but just to roll with the images. So in retrospect, I might have done this with my class presentation – given them a line or two of instructions. I guess I thought they would “get” what I was trying to do rather than being adversarial. That might also mean that I was attacking some very closely held beliefs that they have about genre.

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Here is my class presentation:

One Day in the Life of French Theory
Featuring non-French actors

Michel Foucault is collecting objects and placing them – on the wall, on the table, etc., asking himself where these go in the oeuvre. Maybe picks things out of the trashbin of literary history.

Voila! Stephen King’s Parking Tickets
Voila! Nietzsche’s Laundry List
Voila! Hemingway’s hunting license

Takes a large stack of paper out of the trash and holds it up for the audience to see.

Voila! Shakespeare’s supposed (typed) manuscript of his complete works

He sits down at that point and starts going through it.

Barthes enters the room.

Barthes: L’auter est mort! Vive le lecteur!
He looks through a book and then declaims/asks: Who is speaking?

Foucault: What does it matter who is speaking!?

Enter Cixous:

Of course it matters, you patriarchal windbags. The author isn’t dead, She’s right here!” Mutters to herself: “Why is that men on the left cannot see their own blind spots? You go on all day about the oppressors and post-colonial this and post-structural that but then you deny us our voices when it suits you, when you don’t feel the need for an author.

“Who makes me write, moan, sing, dance? Who gives me the body that is never afraid of fear? Who writes me? . . . When I have finished writing, when we have returned to the air of the song that we are, the body of texts that we will have made for ourselves will become one of its names among so many others. In the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh”

Foucault and Barthes either look up and listen, then all continue with what they are doing what in the background. Cixous begins reading her book (Coming to Read) semi-silently to herself while Barthes is flipping through his book (Image, Music, Text) occasionally muttering something out of it. All three fade off as Laura begins.


Prelude:

I. The Law of Genre, or Genre’s Genre

Since the beginning of time, a student paper might read, since the invention of the alphabet, since humans began to carve sentences into stone, put ink to papyrus, they have questioned the nature of writing and of those who write – the author.

I am always trying to subvert academic writing whenever I get the chance, to cross boundaries. To risk annihilation, to risk death. To risk, as Hamlet puts it, those thousand natural deaths that flesh is heir to.” As an author, one who lays her ego on the line to be examined, challenged, refuted, ‘tis a consummation I do NOT devoutly desire, but to which I subject myself, nonetheless.
Derrida says I shouldn’t mix creative work with academic work. His “Law of Genre” states, “I will not mix genres. Genres are not to be mixed.” But Derrida is a postmodernist. Of course genres are to be mixed. Unless he is being ironic. Unless he is pulling our legs. Moreover, it is impossible to mix genres because ultimately the original genre becomes very pregnant, giving birth to a new genre. This is what happened when we mixed drama and poetry, poetry and storytelling, o or most recently, fiction and nonfiction. They resulted in the separate genres of poetry and drama, of poetry and fiction, of creative nonfiction. Perhaps that is the consequence that Derrida is talking about. It is not dangerous to mix genres at all, but very thrilling. But then Derrida goes on to talk about the genre of genre and all of my imaginative imaginings go out the window as I becoming once again confused and numb. So let us move on before we all succumb to that fate.

II. The Death of the Author

In thinking about the “Death of the Author,” I now see that death everywhere. I see it in all writings and I think about it in my own writing. What does it mean? I don’t take it as a literal death nor a hedge against death, although many have talked before about how at least as an author you have a chance to be remembered, to live on. But then I think about my own writing, and when I am done writing a piece, I can admire it, love it, cite it, quote it. Not, I think, out of a sense of narcissism, although that is always possible. But because I, as a writer, die when the piece is completed and I, as a reader, am born.

Cheryl Walker says that Barthes’ “Death of the Author” seems more extreme than Foucault’s “The Author Function,” but I do not see it that way, because Barthes, as our textbook tells us, was caught in the shift from modernism, with its ideas of liberalism, to post-modernism. Thus, with the “Death of the Author” comes the birth of the reader, and that is certainly a way of democratizing reading, of taking it out of the hands of English departments and critics and those “in the know.”

III. Dividing Attention

There are also several points I want to make with this presentation. One thing that as a performer I am interested in is divided attention. What do we pay attention to and what falls out? What do we tune in and out of and what do we sacrifice by our choices? In today’s society, we are faced with this all the time, even as we read. I also want participation, which is akin to Barthes’ “Death of the Author.” The reader (audience) participates in making meaning (performing). It is not just a passive activity. It is never just a passive activity, a past-time, a pass-time. To read is to participate. To read out loud is to perform.

IV. The Oeuvre

Then there are the questions of what goes into the oeuvre, as Foucault asks, and for this occasion, I have written a poem, called Foucault’s Laundry List: (Clear throat)


Nietzsche’s Laundry List

How am I to exist now that I am
Alone in this world
A character without an author
Without a function I am adrift afloat
No god to tell me what to do how
Am I to distinguish from
What is good and what is merely
The Detritus of history?
O, Pirandello, o Barthes and Foucault. Who
Will lead me down the proper path, show me
The way, teach me to distinguish between
Hemingway’s hunting license or
Stephen King’s parking tickets or
Nietzche’s laundry list:
Suit coat
Dress pants
Socks and garter
Bear skin
Tiger paws (with claws)
Straight jacket
Flattened bowler hat
Paper pulled from pockets full of notes and numbers
The stardust from infinite far away planets
Oh, who will tell me what it all means
And if it is collectible part of
The canon.


With the internet, we no longer have to make choices about what goes into an oeuvre. We can very well include Nietzsche’s laundry list to his oeuvre, his collected works. There are writers who have included only margin notes, without the original text. There are authors who create their work by blacking out part or most of the text. Andy Warhol used to buy things, towels and underwear and clothes, and send them straight to a storage unit to become a permanent part of his “collection.” The internet affords us the “space” to collect everything that might some day become useful to us.

V. Ecriture Feminine

I am also interested in feminine writing, which Cixous, as a “second-wave” surrealist (and there are 3rd wave surrealists too practicing right now), contends can be nonlinear and embodied. I want to show all of this even as I comment upon it. I want to make my academic work poetic, a performance, to make my teaching work surrealistic, to make my poetry and art academic. What does it mean for Cixous to talk about an embodied writing? There are people who practice what is called somatic writing, writing from the body. But I don’t really know what that is. But I have, with my illustration, the performance before my piece, to show, not tell, to have an embodiment of what Barthes, Foucault and Cixous are talking about when they talk about authors and functions and writing.

VI. Surrealism and Teaching

I have developed a series of writing assignments for my students that are inspired by surrealism. I have them do “chance operations” in organizing their work, randomly rearranging their paragraphs, which they are reluctant to do at first, many believing the way they have written their paper is the most logical way. This allows them to see other ways that they might have arranged their writing. I have often done this with my own academic writing and found it to work better myself. (I NEVER ask my students to do anything I haven’t done first. ) I have them do “spontaneous research” in which they dive right in to the middle of an article, randomly pick a paragraph, and write in response to that paragraph. I have them write with their eyes closed as a warm up, which they are also resistant to at first. However, as with Cixous’ feminine writing, ecriture feminine, I have noticed a gender gap, with female students being more open to this than my male students.
As a teacher, I am reborn a reader once more.

VII. Dare to Suck

As one of my poetry colleagues used to say at the open mics in Minneapolis, you have to “dare to suck.” I am taking that challenge to heart. I know that all writing is rewriting, may be rewritten one day for a future audience, and so I have faith my oeuvre may contain my ecriture feminine, with all of its glorious mistakes and successes.

I have embraced failure. This is either going to go magnificently or fall on its face. I am ok with either. I will lose a little sleep if it falls on its face, I will toss and turn for a night or two, feel foolish, and get on with my life.

Wolfgang Iser and Reader-Response Theory

I have journals due in one of my current MA classes, but the instructor is only going to glance at them. I have done all of this work for very little return. I know, a journal is often written only for oneself, but I also wrote it as a conversation with the instructor which now will not happen. So as to make this a more fruitful endeavor, I am going to post some of the journals here. Enjoy and feel free to respond so as to make these truly a conversation.
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A brief story. I had a friend who wrote what I considered to be a brilliant poem. In it was the line “brown leaves change and paper.” I had always read that as brown leaves change into paper. He insists that it is just a list. Now, the claim could be made that with proper punctuation, this could be cleared up, like the Facebook memes that tell why grammar is important. (“Let’s eat, Grandma.” Vs. “Let’s eat Grandma.”) But in another way, this gets to reader-response theory. Most of us had only heard the poem as it was read at an open mic and so our interpretation was based on the words, not on the punctuation. The pauses were assumed to be dramatic pauses, not a sequential list. And I was not alone in how I had interpreted the poem. Many other people who talked to the poet said that they had assumed the same thing, but he insisted that it was just a list, as he had intended.

As I read the introduction to Wolfgang Iser, I read the objections to his theory about the “dynamic interaction of text and reader” (1522). I am reading how some thought that his theory would destabilize the text and that “there might be an infinite number of possible readings for every text,” to which I have written “Horrors!” in the margin. Obviously, it depends on the text. If one is reading/writing a medical textbook, you do not want an infinite number of possible readings. You want only one. If you are reading “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” although TS Eliot might want you to “get” only his intent in writing the piece, it is possible and no less desirable, for every person to interpret the poem in an idiosyncratic way, unique to that individual. There is no harm to that, and you can even acknowledge that x is what Eliot intended, but c is the reading that you got from the text based on your gender, class, education, worldview, etc.

Smilefish: An Ekphrastic Exquiste Corpse from the Midwest Writing Center Conferene

Smilefish mama mother
of all other fishes star
fishes smiling whales and trouts
or bass (I don't really know trout from bass
but I don know whats and sharks and jel
lyfish) she is mother of them
all--even octopi. She smiles with her
shades too cool for school-
-s of fishes -- see what I did
there? -- legs ready to evolve into
animal mammal on land smilefish
mother of us birthing fish
and octopi and seals and otters and
birthing us like Eve, Lilith, Mary, Kali
(who destroys AND creates,
eats her young), Mothers mamas
of us all passing on smiles and
shades and her lovely patterns for our
clothes. We will all be striped like
she is, one way or another, showing our
stripes what we are made of our
sharkskin feet and our scaley
pants and our mohawk
heads in punk rock defiance of
species, of habitat. WE live
anywhere we want and we
smile like the motherfish.

Resistance Poetry Wall - 100,000 Poets for Change

100,000 Poets for Change, which sponsors an annual international day of poetry the last Saturday in September has opened up a Poetry Resistance Wall on their blog. Please go there and check out the poetry and post some of your own.

Here are some pictures from the Quad Cities' 100,000 Poets for Change events in 2014 and 2016.

Novel forms

I have been re-reading the chapters of "My Accursed Novel" as I have called it and I have started to see that they are not really that bad. In fact, I think some of the chapters are quite good. The problem is that I can't really get it into the appropriate "novel format," which is a consistency of time with a recognizable plot. But then, I don't write traditionally any more with ANY format, so why would I think that I could or would write a traditionally structured novel?

So, now that all of this stuff is out there and has been seen and read by at least a dozen of you (I am of course being modest. It looks like 2 dozen people have actually read the stories). But there has to be an even wonkier way of organizing this work.

If you have any thoughts, let me know!

What is Writing?

So I am writing an "academic poem" for my writing studies class. It will be a very long poem/academic paper, although we don't really speak of epic poems anymore, since this won't really tell an epic kind of story. But it will include a lot of little stories about Cixous and Kristeva and Derrida and Barthes and many others. Here is the beginning of it, which is just kind of a riff for now.




Prologue: What is writing?

What is writing? Writing is everything. Writing is
communication, imagination, learning, history, memory, language, there is
nothing outside the text says Derrida, and I believe it and I don't there are moments,
says the artist Kiam Marcelo Junio, an artist from Chicago, says that there are moments
when we forget ourselves, they are only moments but they are perfect
moments when we forget ourselves drop our facades because writing although
it is expression is also an unnatural act . We do not naturally create texts – only now
we do. We do because it is all we know, so perhaps Derrida, loathe
as I am to admit it might be wait for it . . .
right. Maybe there is nothing outside the text because we can't remember
anything outside the text it's almost the way we can't remember
(according to the god people anyway) paradise eden there are
no perfect moments only text. But I digress . . .
Kiam Marcelo Junio . . . Chicago artist . . . says that there are moments when we forget ourselves
and lose our sense of self- consciousness and just exist

But writing is all the knowledge and creativity and creation and evolution and revolution and punk rock and heavy metal music and hymns and poems and treatises and manifestos and novels and academic articles and everything that we have learned and try to learn and strive to learn and know and catalogue and categorize and put into boxes marked kingdom phylum genre order class marxist proletariat species human and text and chora and Oedipus and his daddy Freud and his Mama Jocasta and Hamlet and Cleopatra the queen and the movie the woman(en) and the myth(s). How can you not be self-conscious with the weight of all that history upon you and all that knowledge and that was only half a paragraph or six stanzas if you will.

There is something outside the text. Unnamable feelings and joy and wild ecstatic movement and birds songs but the minute we identify it as anything at all, it moves inside the textual fence as it moves into consciousness from unconsciousness and there it sits until it becomes text and writing.

And so again, I will say, what is writing? Like Amiri Baraka once said, I think, of what use is
poetry? At least, a poet friend of mine in Minneapolis, J.
Otis Powell! With an exclamation point in his last name
used to recite a poem that he said was based upon Amiri Baraka's question of what
use is poetry ? Or as Paul McCartney, in the song Mrs. Vanderbilt,
(which is on the album Band on the Run) says “what's the use of anything?”
What's the use of the text? If we can't get outside of the text anymore,
then that makes the text a kind of . . . ideology since theory tell us
that it is impossible to get outside of our own ideologies, outside of our own heads, outside of
the text. Stupid Derrida. I hate it when he's right (write)(rite).
Death of the Author:
God and Mother

Think of the “death of the author” in terms of religion and childbirth,
which are not so far apart and which have been in the West,
uniquely masculine / feminine realms.

Death of the Author:

A Parable

In Christianity, Jesus (the author) must die and be resurrected so that believers (readers) can have safe passage to heaven (the text). This is the male-centered conception of the author as the all-knowing keeper of the text and of meaning. And in fact, Barthes speaks of “the ‘message’ of the Author-God” and says that “to refuse to fix its meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” .

Women, however, have historically had a different relationship to birth and death, with many medieval women dying in childbirth. In this model, the woman (author) dies so that her child (the reader) may be born, but that child will be orphaned, with no one to guide her through life (the text). There is a “death/not death,” a voluntary withdrawal that happens here that can be seen as Cixous’ metaphor for the author. In her manifesto “Coming to Writing,” there are extended passages that are about losing yourself in mad love (amour fou, as Andre Breton wrote of), to writing, to a feminine writing. This is not a nihilistic death, as might be seen in Foucault or Barthes, but a joyous celebration of what it is to write. “Text: not a detour, but the flesh at work in a labor of love” (42). As if she were taking the death of the author literally, then, she says “in the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh” (41).

A Joyous Nonsense/Non-sense: The speech of schizophrenics

Jameson called Surrealism “schizophrenic speech.” Jameson, like Freud before him, was baffled by both Dada and Surrealism and their attempts at nonlinear thought and speech to express the unconscious and to get at the unconscious, to free us all, particularly from the confines of so-called rational scientific thought .

I want to write something meaningful about
Surrealism something academically valid not to make myself a known entity employable or a respected scholar but because surrealism is meaningful to me, it makes me happy and it makes me feel liberated and I want other(s), maybe even big Others to feel liberated and feel the healing hands of Hannah Hoch or Hugo Ball or Raoul Hausmann and some other Dadaist or Surrealist with an H name so I can get good aliteration at the same time, be poetic, while I also tell you some very smart things about Surrealism.
They say writing about Surrealism is like dancing about architecture except that once I looked it up on Google the actual quote is that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I could try to make the connection between music and Surrealism. They both work on an unconscious level. See, it didn't even take me long. But I am a lousy dancer and I don't know how to dance about architecture, although I know many good dancers and they tell me that dancing about architecture is actually a pretty good thing to do. I trust them.

What is Writing? (Revisited)

What is writing?

Writing is a technology that people use to communicate with one other, which can include personal expression and creativity but also includes passing along information, which may include discussion, instructions, news reports, etc.
I have done every type of writing there is to do, including technical manuals, how-to instruction manuals, business reports, resumes and cover letters, creative writing, and of course academic writing. This is why I take the expansive view of writing and see writing within a context. For me to teach my professional writing or tech writing students to express themselves would be absurd and useless to them,

I do not take Derrida’s view that writing or text includes speech. I think that is a way of hedging your bets and saying that everything is writing. I understand the desire to bring non-literate societies, if that is his intention, into the realm of writing or to set writing beside speech.

The act of composing, whether through writing or speech, whether it is thought out and planned or spontaneous, is another matter. But being raised in a literate household within a literate society, I also am/have become someone who thinks by writing but who also rehearses and composes out loud, so the process is more symbiotic for me than privileging one over the other at this point.

I love Roland Barthes and I spent Monday frolicking through his writings, including revisiting Death of the Author, which I find somewhat more interesting and nuanced than Foucault’s “what is an author,” which was published almost a year later, and I also revisited from Work to Text. I like Barthes Death of the Author because with the death of the author comes the birth of the reader and I firmly believe that the reader is, as has been explained to me, “a co-creator of meaning with the author.” Barthes’ Death of the Author also then gives rise to reader-response theories as well, which I, being an aberrant reader of books, pieces of theory, and of all media, tend to appreciate. Foucault does not appear to make much of this birth of the reader, as far as I can tell. He is more focused on the “author function” and what makes up a body of work and whether the Author Function should include laundry lists, for example, from Nietzsche, which is now going to be the title of a book or poem that I will write in the near or not-so-near future.

Probably a poem as I have determined that I do not have the attention span to write a book, although I will have to ostensibly write one for my PhD. So, I have determined that when I write expressively, I do not have such a long attention span and that is why I write poetry and something like short stories that may possibly include creative non-fiction or possibly what Kirsten described to me as flash-nonfiction. But I digress. Which I often do when I am writing expressively rather than to communicate. The Dadaist, the Surrealist in me loves to digress. There are few things as gratifying as a good, well-placed digression in writing/on the page.

I read Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and I was somewhat surprised/somewhat not to “hear” him say that artistic impulses should not be subservient to political ideology. I think of Helene Lewis, author of Dada Turns Red who wrote that “The Surrealists, in their collective and anonymous art forms, succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning. Their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious could be a perfect vehicle for a truly revolutionary art.” Surrealism tried to align itself with the new Revolutionary Russian government, but was rejected by the Supreme Soviet as, ironically, bourgeois.

Finally, I disagreed with Trotsky’s rejection of Russian Formalism/Futurism. He is very critical of Eichenbaum, Jakobsen, Schlovksy, et al, dismissing their poetry as mere linguistics, but one idea from the Formalists that I truly like is Shklovskij’s definition of estrangement or defamiliarization. The point of literature is to defamiliarize language so that we can see things again as they really are. Trotsky would also prove to be historically wrong in his support for Italian Futurism, which directly supported Fascism.

In the end, though, I am somewhat catholic in my beliefs about writing. There is a split in me between the English teacher who believes that everyone can be taught to write reasonably well and teaches all kind of writing, and the poet/writer/theorist in me which is attracted to all kinds of theory and finds a little bit of truth in each one, who can be swayed by contradictory arguments, for “I am large and contain multitudes” and I can hold several different ideas about writing, speech composing, and text in mind at the same time.

What is Writing?

Writing is a technology that people use to communicate with one other, which can include personal expression and creativity but also includes passing along information, which may include discussion, instructions, news reports, etc.
I have done every type of writing there is to do, including technical manuals, how-to instructions, business reports, resumes and cvs, creative writing, and of course academic writing. This is why I take the expansive view of writing and see writing within a context.

I do not take Derrida’s view that writing or text includes speech. I think that is a way of hedging your bets and saying that everything is writing. I understand the desire to bring non-literate societies, if that is his intention, into the realm of writing or to set writing beside speech.

The act of composing, whether through writing or speech, whether it is thought out and planned or spontaneous, is another matter.
But I don’t much care for Derrida. I can never tell if he is serious or not and I tend to think that when others think he is serious I think he is just messing with us and does not mean to be taken very seriously at all. I think I just knew too many pretentious English majors in the 80s running around and talking about Derrida.

I love Roland Barthes and I spent Monday frolicking through his writings, including revisiting Death of the Author, which I find somewhat more interesting and nuanced than Foucault’s what is an author, which was published almost a year later, and I also revisited from Work to Text. I like Barthes Death of the Author because with the death of the author comes the birth of the reader and I firmly believe that the reader is, as has been explained to me, “a co-creator of meaning with the author.”

Foucault does not appear to make much of this birth of the reader, as far as I can tell. He is more focused on the “author function” and what makes up a body of work and whether the Author Function should include laundry lists, for example, from Nietzsche, which is now going to be the title of a book or poem that I will write in the near or not-so-near future.

Probably a poem as I have determined that I do not have the attention span to write a book, although I will have to ostensibly write one for my PhD. So, I have determined that wheln I write expressively, I do not have such a long attention span and that is why I write poetry and something like short stories that may possibly include creative non-fiction or possibly what Kirsten described to me yesterday as flash-nonfiction. But I digress. When I often do when I am writing expressively rather than to communicate.

I read Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and I was somewhat surprised/somewhat not to “hear” him say that artistic impulses should not be subservient to political ideology. I think of Helene Lewis in Dada Turns Red who wrote that “The Surrealists, in their collective and anonymous art forms, succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning. Their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious could be a perfect vehicle for a truly revolutionary art.” Surrealism tried to align itself with the new Revolutionary Russian government, but was rejected by the Supreme Soviet as, ironically, bourgeois.

Finally, I disagreed with Trotsky’s rejection of Russian Formalism/Futurism. He is very critical of Eichenbaum, Jakobsen, Schlovksy, et al, dismissing their poetry as mere linguistics, but one idea from the Formalists that I truly like is Shklovskij’s definition of estrangement or defamiliarization. The point of literature is to defamiliarize language so that we can see things again as they really are. Trotsky would also prove to be historically wrong in his support for Italian Futurism, which directly supported Fascism.

In the end, though, I am somewhat catholic in my belies about writing. There is a split in me between the English teacher who believes that everyone can be taught to write reasonably well and teaches all kind of writing, and the poet/writer in me which is attracted to all kinds of theory and finds a little bit of truth in each one, who can be swayed by contradictory arguments, for “I am large and contain multitudes” and I can hold several different ideas about writing, speech composing, and text in mind at the same time.

This is a continuation of my thinking for my paper on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the avant-garde. This is a little incomplete and ragged right now, but I wanted to share some thoughts.

Language Play in Hopkins and the Coming Avant-Garde


“Patterns of play, when seen as a whole, illuminate both his art as a poet and his unique imagination. . . Playfulness touches almost everything Hopkins treats: God the saints, sacraments, himself, other people . . . When he plays, Hopkins’s preferred modes are whimsy, comedy and the incongruous, wit, light satire, and silliness.” (Feeney 173).

I am not really sure what other forms of play there are besides that list, so it might be said that Hopkins’ wordplay embraces much, if not all forms of play that are available. Feeney further describes some of Hopkins' more whimsical images in his poems.

[W]himsy includes imagining himself as a woodlark, buxom football, and a Welsh bard. The moon wraps herself in scarfs, and Welsh hills hug cow-clouds for rain-milk. A little square house is like a man with a toothache and a bright stormcloud like a shiny bland heard. Moonlight is a blue cobweb. God sits on a thunder-throne and creates with hewing axe and tricking water. Christ is a stage-actor and the Holy Ghost is a male who cheers on a fellow cricketer and a female who broods on her huge world-as-egg. Christ, Mary and the saints live in a lighted barn as Hopkins peeks through a knothole. Stars are fire-folk, citadels, diamond mines, elves’-eyes. A pocket watch is Hopkins’ “mate” and his poems are babies, a pile of linen and dirty Thames-water. Pixies, fairies, goblins, and witches grace hi pages. And he blows a kiss to the stars.

Feeney also cites “wordplay hyphenates, concepts, and sound play” as elements of Hopkins’ poetry. This is the stuff of the avant-garde as well, including avant-garde movements such as Dada and Surrealism, Oulipo, and the Language Poets. It must be said that Andre Breton and others who have come after him stress that Surrealism is not a product or a style, but an approach. Thus, there cannot be said to be any truly Surrealist literature that doesn’t emanate from the imagination, from the subconscious. You cannot “copy” surrealistic style. Furthermore, Breton maintained that Surrealism was first and foremost, a verbal, not a visual, art form. “Whoever says expression says, to begin with, language . . . you must not be surprised to see surrealism place itself first of all almost exclusively on the plane of language.” 2nd manifesto. Surrealist Mind p. 44

I am going to use Dada and Surrealism, which are very closely related and which had many of the same artists involved in both movements, to compare to Hokpins’ poetry for a number of reasons. First, because they are among the earliest manifestations of avant-garde activity and most avant-gardes that came after were reacting to them, either in the positive or reacting against them. Second, Andre Breton had published Hopkins and evidently held him in esteem. And third, and most important, because of the timing of Hopkins’ life and publication, which was very close in time to the historical moment that Dada and Surrealism had developed out of. Had Hopkins’ life gone on for another 20-40 years, into his 60s or even his 80s, he would have had direct knowledge of those movements. Whether or not he would have joined or affiliated himself with them is a matter of pure speculation. I will deal with the pros and cons here briefly before I move on. There are arguments for both sides.

Hopkins and (anti-) Clericalism

Notably, there was the anti-clericalism of Breton and many Surrealists. While it did not keep Breton from admiring Hopkins, it more than likely would have put Hopkins off and kept him from affiliating himself too closely with the movement. In fact, because the Surrealist movement was so heavily French, Spanish and German, most of the Surrealists were Catholic in upbringing and Benjamin Peret was one of the most anti-Catholic anti-clerical members of the surrealists (https://melbourneartcritic.com/2012/11/27/anti-catholicism-surrealism/). For someone who was not only a Jesuit priest in the Catholic Church, but had converted to Catholicism as an adult, this would likely have precluded Hopkins’ from participating fully within the Surrealist movement. Hopkins was a very devout Catholic. In fact, in 1888, his last year, he wrote:
I was a Christian from birth or baptism, later I was converted to the Catholic faith and am enlisted 20 years in the Society of Jesus. I am now 44. I do not waver in my allegiance, I never have since my conversion to the Church. (qtd in Harris, XV.)

Notwithstanding, Harris sees in Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets,” written in the final years of his life, something of a crisis of faith; certainly a different direction, which Hopkins called “inspirations unbidden and against my will . . . [that] revealed a deformed image of his own humankind and a violation of Christ’s body” (xiii). Harris talks about a shift in Hopkins’ poetry “that illustrates the grave anxieties the age experienced in seeking a sound basis for epistemology in the face of a metaphysics exploded by ocean empiricism and a Biblical authority devastated by Higher Criticism” (4). At the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, the crisis of faith suffered in the West corresponded in large part to the rise of science, as well as the horrors that were to come out of World War I. Hopkins was feeling the pull of the former and was decidedly trying not to let doubt overtake him.