How to Open an Academic Essay, Part VIII: Ekphrasis

Outside the second-floor bedroom of a small suburban mansion, dark clouds conspire in thunder.  Rivers will swell, cattle drown, claps one.  Gaudy Christmas sweaters will be drenched, another crashes.  Unaware of the cumulonimbus cabal overhead, Scott slips into an overlarge black leather chair and prepares to study.  The welt of its exaggerated box cushion wrinkles under his weight, revealing the richer shade of black the chair had been before the morning sun (which would have crawled the through east-facing window by now, were it not obscured by the chattering thunderheads) bleached its treated hide.   

So Scott reads, his left heel tapping the chair's tapered maple leg, his right elbow relaxing on its thick scrolled arm.  His head lolls, resting briefly on the descending crest of its thick, upholstered back.  In his left hand, he holds a copy of Amy Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire, open to a chapter entitled "Manifest Domesticity."  It begins with a description of

a white pioneer family in a small clearing surrounded by a dense, towering forest.  The mother stands at the center of the picture, with her husband at her side holding his rifle, and her children at her feet, staring at a freshly killed deer.  An open cooking fire, a crude log cabin, and a few stalks of corn complete the scene.  (23)

Kaplan's approach to academic writing appeals to Scott, who smiles at how cleverly she employed ekphrasis to set the scene of her argument.  The critic of novels should be familiar enough—be it intuitively or theoretically—with the techniques of the novelist to use them as Kaplan has here.  Why not draw your readers in, he asks himself, with the one thing you can be certain appeals to them? 

As if in answer, a vision of himself writing the first paragraph of this post appears before him.  He reads his overblown prose and is disheartened by its forced archness, the way it wishes to be taken seriously but reeks of preemptive, defensive irony—tidy bulwarks against the possibility of suck—and remembers the old chestnut:

Those who can do, do.  Those who can't, write dissertations about those who can.

Previous Installments:

Part I: The Dawn of Man
Part II, part I: The State of the Field
Part II, part II: Killing All Fathers
Part III: The Historical Anecdote
Part IV: The Self-Aggrandizing Personal Anecdote
Part V: The Meta-Theoretical Apparatus
Part VI: The Balinese Cockfight
Part VII: The Modernist Newspaper Clipping

Comments

[Long-Time Reader Who No Longer Cares]

Anyone else remember when this blog was funny?

[J. Lupton]

I beg to differ: I've spent the evening laughing, unable to stop picturing "tidy bulwarks against the possibility of suck" and the forces aligned against them.

[Gary]

Gotta agree with J. Lupton. This post is funny. The "tidy bulwarks" line is golden.

[Rich Puchalsky]

The only non-amusing thing about this thread is the involuntary attempt to guess which of Scott's long-term trolls is "Long-Time Reader", or whether it could really be a lurker. Trolls are boring.

[Luther Blissett]

Kaplan's a really cool person. I'm already a little sick of the "American exceptionalism/imperialism" cottage industry in lit crit, but when it's done well, well, it's done well.

[agua fruta]

"Those who can do, do." heh heh

cf:
The Critic, Jay Sherman: "Camus can do, but Sartre is smartre..."
Homer Simpson: "Well Scooby Doo can doo-doo, but Jimmy Carter is smarter."