Sunday, 01 May 2005

Blather, Blather, Bloviate: an Exercise in Condominium

Seven semesters of Latin produces on average a Latin literalism every seven weeks.  I spent time mighty inefficiently as an undergraduate.  All those hours pouring over Cicero when I could and should have been communing with Barthes and Butler...

Yesterday afternoon I wrote something reasonably intelligent on The Valve for which I deserve props.  Since no one'll throw me any unless I beg: Here I am.  Begging for props.  (I also accept Mastercard, Visa and being rocked like a hurricane.)  Prior to that I blathered at unreasonable length about Robert Altman.  I may deserve props for those "contributions."  Can't tell.  Why don't you scuttle over and judge for yourself? 

P.S.  This post belongs to an insidious initiative initiated by myself and other initiates to initiate my readers into Valve Culture, Valve Life.  All prospective members receive an Official Valveteer Training Cap with his or her name stitched in a steady cursive hand smack on the forehead.  Successful matriculation nets members a pair of sacred suspenders worn by John Holbo, washed by Jonathan Goodwin and pressed by Sean McCann.  Act now.  Space is limited.  Supplies are running out.  Time is of the essence.

May 1, 2005 1:04:45 PM | Academia, Shameless Self-Promotion, Weblogs

1 Comment

David

There is NO SUCH THING as time spent poorly reading Cicero. Cicero pwns j00, puny Ph.D candidate!

Posted by: David | Monday, 02 May 2005 at 12:55 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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How to Open an Academic Essay, Part II, Part II: Know Thyself, Field Surveyor In considering the relationship between the introductory paragraph of an academic essay and the logic of the argument that follows--and I am asserting that such a relationship exists and that, therefore, some combinations of intro. and argument are more felicitous than others--I think it might be instructive to think about how the introductions I've written affect the material which follows them. To continue yesterday's inadequate analysis of the State of the Field intro., I dip into my archives and produce one of the approximately 17,491 introductory paragraphs I've written for the first chapter of my dissertation. Comments on its shortcomings follow: In his review of three recent books on American literary naturalism in the latest Modern Fiction Studies, Jeffory Clymer wonders whether “the withdrawal from organizing interpretations around naturalism per se may…represent a critical exhaustion with reconciling the genre’s inconsistencies.” These inconsistencies, Clymer argues, undermine “certain strands of Foucauldian New Historicism” by “demonstrating how brittle, monolithic, and ultimately unrevealing [they] can be.” The brittle quality of these monolithic accounts of naturalism result, Clymer implies, from the genre’s foundational inconsistency: its desire to depict a deterministic world in which the individual is governed by nature and its frequent, didactic appeals to individualism and human freedom. From a philosophical perspective, as John Conder ably demonstrated in Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic Phase (1984), pessimistic determinism and an optimistic belief in free will and the possibility of moral improvement are reconcilable positions. Employing Hobbes’ notion that freedom works within inscribed terms and Bergson’s notion of a durational self, Conder reconciles determinism and individualism by arguing that the former produces the latter. Though philosophically sound, Conder’s argument relies on individual Americans naturalists developing in toto theories that would catapult Bergson to international celebrity when they were first published in 1907. In this dissertation I will focus on the theories of human and social development available to American literary naturalists at the time they were writing. Produced by the “evolution vogue” following the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), these models embraced or refused Darwin’s advances with wildly different degrees of enthusiasm or opprobrium. Over the next 50 years, these systems would develop in an echo chamber, the cacophony of each contributing to the cacophony of the whole. Deafened by too many incompatible propositions voiced so intelligently and authoritatively, fin de siècle authors cherry-picked individual propositions from larger theoretical schemes. Each author created his or her own idiosyncratic combination of essentialist, determinist, individualist and developmental principles drawn from the representative set of evolutionary concerns. The necessarily idiosyncratic nature of these selections, as well as their rationale, has been obscured by the presentism of the historians and historians of science whose work granted literary scholars access to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s intellectual milieu. This introduction, like Dawes', opens with a subtle assertion about the timeliness of the article to follow. Weathered hat in humble hands, eyes sounding the floor for evidence of structural uncomformities, this intro....
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