tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84013731573527960692012-01-30T12:30:08.487-05:00on literary criticism, philosophy, literary theoryMike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.comBlogger5071100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-38228463407916581782011-01-12T00:30:00.003-05:002011-01-16T13:26:08.738-05:00

It's time to wrap up this blog, everyone. I'll be maybe sticking a couple nice quotes up here over the next few months, but there won't be much more new content. Mostly, this is because there are more important things to do, but also because I think I've learned what I can from this experience--that is, just jotting down things in a more public form, with an eye trained towards an audience of

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-79688578773802799742011-01-11T10:59:00.002-05:002011-01-11T11:07:22.260-05:00

I just love Stanley Fish sometimes: he's someone you probably won't love at all until you see him in person, as you won't have an idea about the tone in which he writes, or just how ironic and silly and casual he says these straightforward, crotchety things that he says. That certainly was the case with me: I was lucky enough to see him for a few days at Princeton and, after having a blast, saw

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-80087207292235782742011-01-11T10:41:00.002-05:002011-01-11T10:42:40.484-05:00

I thought I'd just stop a moment and recommend the great "Philosophy Bites" podcast of David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton, in case any of you haven't heard it. They do a wonderful job, and have some of the best guests: there's a great, great piece with Princeton's amazing Philip Pettit they did recently, which I finally got around to hearing, which I particularly recommend (anything by Pettit is

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-6482440321900375822011-01-07T12:43:00.000-05:002011-01-07T12:43:48.204-05:00

Fashions succeed one another rapidly (Pierre Cardin once defined fashion as that which goes out of fashion), and work that was for a while unchallenged (as to its importance, though not as to its detail)--Leavis, Frye, Blackmur--drops out of view more or less completely. Now and again somebody like Christopher Norris may, ina pious moment, attempt to "recuperate" a particularly brilliant

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-56641195537445855842011-01-07T11:46:00.003-05:002011-01-07T11:58:57.632-05:00

A better way to make a distinction I made a couple posts ago--a much better way, I think, because it doesn't separate sense from knowledge or oppose them, as I bordered on doing--is to just say that there is a new aestheticism out there that is actually trying to ask a question it is hard to take seriously in the study of literature: namely, what is the place of beauty in our lives? Or, rather,

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-14952777234879609682010-12-30T11:38:00.001-05:002010-12-30T11:40:04.310-05:00

 It is possible, of course, to enjoy the literary-historical hall of mirrors in which traditional motif and classical allusion repeat and reflect one another for their own sweet sake, but sooner or later we will come up against the Johnsonian objection referred to earlier ["Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief," the famous remark of Johnson on Lycidas]. Essentially, this

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-18046514930726121782010-12-19T18:46:00.001-05:002010-12-19T18:48:57.419-05:00

The new formalism, as it has been called, has gotten much less flack than the old one (Michael Wood writes of this in his new book). Perhaps because there is a realization going around that, well, we're smarter now, we've done the theory, now we can look at all those small formal things in the text with less rigidity (or however you want to characterize the crimes of the formalists). In

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-73913805001517655002010-12-16T08:37:00.000-05:002010-12-16T08:37:02.037-05:00

After the unaccountable treatment the noble plan of Sir Christopher Wren met from the interested views of ignorant, obstinate, designing men, (notwithstanding it had the sanction of the King and Parliament) who by rejecting it did an irreparable injury to the city of London, the author cannot hope to see a scheme so much inferior to that, adopted in the manner he could wish; he doubts not but it

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-17091606335525073372010-12-07T12:52:00.003-05:002010-12-07T13:12:21.413-05:00

I'm more rattled by Obama's caving in to the Republicans than angry or enraged: it just seems like a strange move. I suspect--there are a couple articles in the Times which outline something like this--that there is some sense in which they are trying to take away the effectiveness of the old "tax and spend" rhetoric. At least that's the only real strategic rationale I can see behind this, or the

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-26735526683932072932010-11-30T06:51:00.000-05:002010-11-30T06:51:23.499-05:00

I was much struck recently by a young lady I was tutoring who gave the right answer when confronted with a question from an old "Practical Criticism" paper; that is, a verse was quoted, and she was to spot the date of it, giving her reasons. Sure enough, she found the images showed that this bit was late eighteenth-century; but what the examiners would not have found out was that she had no idea

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-28911384050269045512010-11-30T06:45:00.000-05:002010-11-30T06:45:10.900-05:00

...let's just get this straight: we're in the middle of an "economic downturn" (i.e. a depression) caused by unregulated Wall Street speculation, and are seriously talking about extending tax cuts to the wealthiest 1% of people in the nation, placing a freeze on pay increases for government employees, reducing the deficit overall, and (in local politics) cutting back on major infrastructural

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-27063750350413564552010-11-10T12:11:00.001-05:002010-11-10T12:14:13.359-05:00

A golden MST3K moment I'm always going to remember whenever I get the temptation to interpret something as a symbol: In The Castle of Fu-Manchu, three characters get a notice they have to return to London. Cut to: the train scene above. Crow (on the right, if you're not familiar with the best show ever) says: "This is symbolic of their return to London." (Another gem from the always

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-70470344682241638102010-11-04T11:24:00.006-04:002010-11-12T05:06:19.508-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about the intentional fallacy, especially after trying to explain it to my students under the assumption it would get them to write more about the narrative and less about the author's design--and finding it not really helpful. This, by the way, is now how I do literary theory: if something breaks down in the process of teaching, there's probably something wrong with it.

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-12650322632559881012010-10-29T16:08:00.001-04:002010-10-29T16:12:39.803-04:00

You might have caught me defending critique against the anti-critical trend of certain work in the humanities, but I think I've figured out why I've been doing it, and why it has never quite felt genuine on my part: I've been defending critique because it's often tied up with criticism, as if it implied the latter. I was worried, in other words, by a sort of guilt-by-association sort of thing,

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-22291282657353829552010-10-26T07:31:00.000-04:002010-10-26T07:31:35.382-04:00

Irony in this subdued sense, as a generous scepticism which can believe at once that people are and are not guilty, is a very normal and essential method; Portia's song is not more inconsistent than the sorrow of Helen that she has brought death to so many brave men, and the pride with which she is first found making tapestries of them; than the courage of Achilles, which none will question, 'in

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-71261086396812217452010-10-01T11:48:00.006-04:002010-10-07T16:33:54.626-04:00

I've grown much more comfortable with Empson. I've always been amazed at his work (and his poetry, for that matter, of which I always want to read more), and liked it a lot, but have also been a little hedgy about his larger views of things mostly because I see him so pigeonholed in theoretical circles, and these views so distorted in relation to Richards especially: [For Richards,] poetic

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-53408931772967622332010-09-30T08:21:00.002-04:002010-09-30T08:23:49.975-04:00

...It teaches well. 'Nuff said. I still prefer the Fitzgerald Aeneid (for its brilliant and beautiful attempts to define a high style in American English, which I think is more like what Virgil was doing), but the more and more I work with it, I get over the shock of the rawness of Fagles' Homer and appreciate the poetry in that very quality: brutal, quick (if you read it aloud, not silently),

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-56416179132784898012010-09-28T06:07:00.000-04:002010-09-28T06:07:08.530-04:00

The comments of the CEO of a company taking over public libraries on the West Coast are genuinely scary: “A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-2835307234079964802010-09-25T08:56:00.004-04:002010-09-26T10:27:03.509-04:00

Should I keep a journal with a view to publication? Can I make the journal into a "work"? [...]  No, the journal's justification (as a work) can only be literary in the absolute, even if nostalgic, sense of the word. I discern here four motives. The first is to present a text tinged with an individuality of writing, with a "style" (as we used to say), with an ideolect proper to the author (as we

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-45221734299265171432010-09-22T22:12:00.000-04:002010-09-22T22:12:03.444-04:00

I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/ands, and this was an attitude which for a long time hampered the development of a more confident and creative way of dealing with the whole vexed question--the question, that is, of the relationship between nationality, language, history, and literary tradition in Ireland. Luckily, I

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-393370988957175132010-09-22T21:22:00.001-04:002010-09-22T21:23:27.928-04:00

Every time you hear the phrase "fiscal responsibility," think "job cuts," and "no services," because that's what it means, and what it has meant for 30 years now. "We have to be fiscally responsible," in the mouth of some conservative or libretarian or pro-business leftist blowhard, however "multicultural" or "green" or "patriotic" or whatever they are, means "I think we have to cut jobs and

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-5154064218686970512010-09-17T12:15:00.007-04:002010-09-18T00:32:40.517-04:00

(Many apologies for the sloppiness of everything below, and all the fulminations on the place of literary criticism etc.: I wrote it all way too fast, and with the intention of showing how what we've been up to in the last 10 years especially has really been more philosophy-friendly than in past decades, and especially friendly to the realist sort of view.) Paul Fry's new book Wordsworth and the

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-51038999736648699232010-09-16T14:27:00.006-04:002010-09-17T08:41:47.487-04:00

I reflected a little while ago on the English of Robert Fagles' translations, not to criticize the translation, but to criticize us who use it--so accurately does Fagles capture contemporary English in all its range. What I mainly wanted to document was basically that English in America lacks the registers that it had in the past, or that if it has registers (low, middle, and high styles), it

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-35738350765704477022010-09-08T11:15:00.001-04:002010-09-08T11:16:49.596-04:00

I was having the darndest time trying to find Dryden's translation of Horace's famous second epode in a form that was able to be copied and pasted. This happens to be the case with much of Dryden's work in general, and especially his translations (there isn't even a full version of the Fables that is easy to use anywhere). But the unavailability isn't due to indifference so much as the lack of

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-19212873790971888242010-09-07T08:15:00.000-04:002010-09-07T08:15:15.323-04:00

Dryden once said he was “troubled by the disease (as I may call it) of translation” (Preface to Sylvae). And he’d have to be, I think, in order to English (wonderful verb), not just the venerable works of the Greek, Latin, French, or Italian languages, but also those of English. It takes an itch to translate, in other words, in order for an English poet like Dryden to translate Chaucer or Milton.

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-54598840143506312452010-09-02T13:52:00.005-04:002010-09-02T15:40:07.056-04:00

Just ran across one of my favorite similes from Virgil, at the beginning of Book VIII of the Aeneid. But I should say something about similes in general first, because they are very strange things. This is especially true when they take the extended "epic" form, which I actually think is the purest. Now, there are a lot of reasons to think otherwise: the epic simile provides a comparison which

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-74739159143365834332010-08-25T15:03:00.001-04:002010-08-25T15:32:43.011-04:00

I said a while ago that reviews in literary studies tend to be excellent compared to those in other disciplines. But there are always exceptions: Dr. Rostvig is again excellent on the intellectual background, particularly in bringing familiar material into new focus. She gives a fresh turn to the topic of Augustan poetry and landscape-gardening. Her essay on the still underrated James Thomson,

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-22442382202773180152010-08-25T14:58:00.006-04:002010-09-02T22:20:04.609-04:00

I often recall this statement of Fredric Jameson whenever the dissolution of the Left becomes too much to bear: The critique of totalization in France goes hand in hand with a call for a “molecular” or local, nonglobal, nonparty politics: and this repudiation of the traditional forms of class and party action evidently reflects the historic weight of French centralization (at work both in the

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-48471359861354093872010-08-19T14:55:00.004-04:002010-08-21T10:46:07.894-04:00

There's a distinction to be made between self-referential stories and metafictional stories. While self-reference rolls itself up into a ball, seeking to disappear in indexicality, metafiction sprawls, unfolds, and interrogates the consequences of self-reference and parody more than it engages in either. In metafiction is room for development, where self-reference aims for merely a more pithy

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-26929105664778799122010-08-16T13:53:00.000-04:002010-08-16T13:53:09.761-04:00

One of the most striking aspects of Fables, Ancient and Modern is its prominent inclusion of Chaucer. In the famous Preface, Dryden has more to say about him than anyone else, and it is in remarks about the Middle English poet that Dryden also makes some of his most important statements about his view of language. This makes sense, however, as translating what is nearest to Dryden's English--

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-60159798029079692002010-08-15T13:34:00.003-04:002010-08-16T11:33:53.475-04:00

I forgot about this notorious passage, and laughed aloud (not a rare occurrence when perusing Austen) when I was rereading Persuasion this weekend: They were actually on the same sofa, for Mrs. Musgrove had most readily made room for him;--they were divided only by Mrs. Musgrove. It was no insignificant barrier, indeed. Mrs. Musgrove was of a comfortable substantial size, infinitely more fitted

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-17755225431719329492010-08-13T15:03:00.003-04:002010-08-14T08:47:57.997-04:00

I thought that since I was comparing so many translations of this passage from the Iliad, I should also put up Dryden's version, which--I have to say--I like the best: Achilles cut him short; and thus replied: My worth allow'd in words, is in effect denied. For who but a poltroon, possess'd with fear, Such haughty insolence can tamely bear? Command thy slaves: my freeborn soul disdains A

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-55582488797576009532010-08-03T15:09:00.013-04:002010-08-10T10:16:51.658-04:00

Yvor Winters has a very famous defense of the heroic couplet in his mammoth collection In Defense of Reason. I'm inclined to agree with nearly all of its conclusions, though not with the vengeful sort of impulse that leads Winters to them (and often takes him further into more absurd generalizations). This is understandable though, since even if wasn't a consequence of his particularly vengeful

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-28491440722130518892010-08-03T12:50:00.000-04:002010-08-03T12:50:23.132-04:00

Making my way through Pope’s Iliad again, I’m struck by its quickness, its poignancy--ultimately its poetry, after reading so much of Fagles. Take the following passage, from the first book, in which Achilles ends the quarrel with Agamemnon. I’ll use Richmond Lattimore’s translation first, which is wonderfully runs line-for-line, as a sort of neutral rendering of the scene: “So must I be called

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-1474326803973151442010-07-25T07:30:00.007-04:002010-07-26T09:48:38.050-04:00

A phrase of Paul Fry's suggested something interesting to me as I was writing one of my last posts. Fry says Dryden's preface to his Fables "is written in the enviably casual manner," and this got me thinking about what an enviable style would be like, if it were viewed as a project not unlike the answerable style of Milton (see Book 9 of Paradise Lost): if we sink under the fitness of Milton's

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-44533636934844119862010-07-22T10:56:00.003-04:002010-07-23T18:31:05.417-04:00

We see the essay as a vehicle for an opinion. But for Johnson, as he says in his Life of Addison, the essay aims to teach the minuter decencies and inferior duties, to regulate the practice of daily conversation, to correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, and to remove those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, impress hourly vexation. It is an

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-50268941252233954512010-07-18T18:38:00.005-04:002010-07-19T11:41:47.871-04:00

Paul Fry makes a great point about the "undue solemnity" of literary theoretical writing in the following, which is from his excellent 1988 book, The Reach of Criticism. Fry is introducing a (particularly good) chapter on Dryden: Shelley's Defence of Poetry [...] rivals any theoretical text of which I am aware in its metaphysical precision and range, but also succumbs in a good many places to

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-46029554565644340022010-07-18T07:45:00.001-04:002010-07-18T07:50:01.813-04:00

A week or so ago I chanced upon perhaps the best academic review that I have ever seen (and reviews in my corner of academia--literary studies--tend to be extremely good). The review is by Arnold Stein, an amazing, principled critic of Donne and Milton, as well as a subtle theorist of the high humanist movement in literary studies after the war. It concerns Wesley Trimpi’s interesting 1962 book

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-73822817299137572042010-07-14T12:48:00.120-04:002010-07-31T12:25:28.809-04:00

I will be talking a lot about translations of the classics in the coming months, as I will be teaching the Odyssey when the semester begins. In particular, there is a lot to say about Robert Fagles' stark translation which we will be reading. Right now, I'll simply say that as I read it this summer I found it immensely exciting and slightly disturbing at the same time: the colloquialisms are just

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-15458882866110984262010-07-13T08:31:00.001-04:002010-07-13T08:33:12.915-04:00

When Freud's thought was first presented to a scandalized world, the recognition of unconditioned instinctual impulse which lies at its core was erroneously taken to mean that Freud wished to establish the dominion of impulse, with all that this implies of the negation of the socialized self. But then of course it came to be understood that the bias of psychoanalysis, so far from being Dionysian,

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-59636928287487512732010-07-01T01:07:00.016-04:002010-07-04T10:25:47.937-04:00

I have been finally getting around to watching the new 2009 BBC adaptation of Emma, and so far I have to say it is wonderful. It's a lot plainer in the use of language--even coarse at times, in shocking splurts of "vérité" half-phrases--so the pleasures coming from that (so many in Austen!) fall away. But this is because everything is converted so well into a visual and dramatic mode. In short,

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-48707407012194185762010-06-29T14:17:00.002-04:002010-06-30T23:59:05.572-04:00

So while I was out in California for a couple weeks, the NYC DOT finally put in the bike lane along Prospect Park West. There was uproar all through the Slope about the lane, put in the master plan over a decade ago in 1997. Things got really intense earlier this year, when the borough president (Marty Markowitz) asked the transportation commissioner (Janette Sadik-Khan) to kill the project in an

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-75143423966889974022010-06-28T15:05:00.007-04:002010-07-01T00:05:57.822-04:00

I've been digging around in the 17th century lately, and am just falling in love with the poetry. I particularly can't get enough of Ben Jonson. His verse (to say nothing of his drama) is so experimental, which is perhaps a different thing than the inventiveness we rightly admire in Elizabethans like Spenser (who is just unmatched in ingenuity and originality). Of course, we think everything

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-38188804830104233912010-06-05T10:50:00.011-04:002010-06-07T16:35:27.016-04:00

Read this, Shakespeare's 138th sonnet: When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her, though I know she lies, That she might think me some untutor'd youth, Unlearned in the world's false subtleties. Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, Although she knows my days are past the best, Simply I credit her false speaking tongue: On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd.

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-8300828369716815192010-05-26T11:20:00.006-04:002010-06-03T14:36:53.348-04:00

...there would be epic simile where that rock is: She was an elfin pinnace; lustily I dipped my oars into the silent lake, And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat Went heaving through the water like a swan-- When, from behind that craggy steep till then The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again, And,

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-70408763677171579882010-05-20T16:57:00.001-04:002010-05-21T11:36:26.567-04:00

One of my favorite little bits of coiled, almost crushed verse (we speak of crushed ice, why not have two options for the poetry dispenser?) from Coleridge's lesser-read later writings: "The Mole." Coleridge extracted it from his cryptic little 1811 piece, "On the First Poem in Donne's Book" (which refers to "The Flea") to use in his Friend in 1818, to describe mechanical (that is,"crass and

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-48244124718074215492010-05-16T13:03:00.002-04:002010-05-16T13:09:38.918-04:00

A good article from a couple days ago that tries to reclaim the word social from Facebook. It reads, however, like someone asking us to go back to Web 2.0 (and thus the Google websearch is idealized as open, when it arguably isn't). While I myself miss Web 1.0 (that wonderful, stupid, experimental time where we had so many web pages like Homer Simpson's), this means we've probably actually really

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-23125762656083094252010-05-14T13:08:00.009-04:002010-06-03T14:26:43.123-04:00

For some reason I've been absolutely addicted to audiobooks lately. It started with Tristram Shandy, which I was rereading but realized I didn't quite have the time to go all the way through again. Then I stumbled upon Peter Barker's unbeleviably excellent recording. It is ridiculously inexpensive ($7!!!), since it is in the (still excellent) "Great Literary Classics" series made by the Royal

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-16326744778370686152010-05-12T23:34:00.013-04:002010-05-14T10:51:03.735-04:00

I am rereading Frances Ferguson's excellent early work, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (1977). I remember the following statement well, though, not only because it is the first, most concise articulation of a position that will run through the rest of Ferguson's work, but also because I have always thought it the most sensible and most demanding of any possible position. In other words, I

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-10790711903319073722010-05-10T17:26:00.011-04:002010-05-16T12:25:48.091-04:00

I'm not particularly fond of William Empson--especially the early work, which many people not overfond of him (fewer than you might think) are willing to admit isn't as good as the looser, wilder, later stuff--but at certain times his eye, his ear, his strident way of characterizing what is going on in a poem is indispensable, even if misguided. He produces "strong readings" of the minutest

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-1241689856086073082010-04-29T11:04:00.002-04:002010-04-30T15:05:42.942-04:00

Timothy Morton has his fascinating Romanticism class at Davis available for podcast download here (link will open iTunes). Particularly good are the sessions on Wordsworth. Morton's sense of the poet is pitch perfect, and while he stresses all the essential characteristics, he also makes them interesting--not just by infusing them (or rather, as is the case in his amazing book on Shelley's

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-91523684795598325552010-04-29T09:46:00.000-04:002010-04-29T09:46:53.586-04:00

Among the many, many gems in Stewart's book, looking at it again I'm blown away most perhaps by her initial presentation of the function/innovation of lyric, which is just overflowing with amazing formulations. Commenting on Wordsworth's famous (but still always shocking) statement about the intrinsic connection between meter and the alleviation of pain ("There can be little doubt but that more

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-16073956681059537662010-04-25T17:05:00.001-04:002010-04-25T17:06:46.590-04:00

The following is an excellent bit at the end of an unbelievably rich book, a book that does nothing less than overthrow some of the most tired assumptions that we have when approaching poetry, making the latter seem fresh (a sort of addictive feeling, the feeling one always gets when returning and really significantly reinterpreting a poem, seeing something wholly new about it, or experiencing it

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-68335462386865293762010-04-20T11:11:00.007-04:002010-04-20T14:03:49.142-04:00

...is simply masterful, if that isn't too paradoxical. And I indeed think it isn't. My hesitation comes only from the fact that while we often speak of prodigies in music or painting, we don't really do so when it comes to literature. And maybe we should start. Regardless, this stuff is amazing, and while I've known this for a while (having even written on The Beautiful Cassandra before), I am

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-7387971848057014102010-04-15T17:46:00.007-04:002010-04-15T17:58:11.096-04:00

Here was a quick "parts of metaphor and how it works" handout that I gave my class this week: If figurative language is (speaking broadly) language that says what it says only by meaning more than what it says, then metaphor is language that means more by comparison or the assertion of identity between one thing and another (not just likeness, which is a simile). Put more exactly, a metaphor is

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-46138142529518883752010-04-13T13:41:00.002-04:002010-04-13T13:44:31.545-04:00

Just listened to John Rogers' absolutely excellent lecture on the famously wonky similes in Book One of Paradise Lost. He moves through two of the most acclaimed recent readings of them, but then adds his own take (tying together the renowned spear simile with the "Autumnal Leaves" simile below, via--and I doubt you were expecting this!--Galileo), which really makes me want to finally get around

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-78238397663646059382010-04-08T07:32:00.001-04:002010-04-11T15:44:44.364-04:00

John Rogers has his really great lectures on Milton up for viewing or listening. John Joseph Campbell has a nice nature of mind course. I have also been listening to the end of Cathryn Carson's superb course on the history of science, which I have recommended before. Also really good is Stephen Stearns' course on evolution, ecology, and behavior.

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-5981757366155292952010-03-16T19:56:00.006-04:002010-03-23T09:30:34.718-04:00

I've been thinking about a recent post on the different Heideggers out there, and wondering which one is my own. I think I first read him in my sophomore year of college--a few essays in Basic Writings (intro to Being and Time, "Origin of the Work of Art," and, strangely, I remember reading "The End of Philosophy"). Then I got into philosophy of mind, which is what really led me to phenomenology.

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-87960792592166839982010-03-03T00:34:00.006-05:002010-03-11T15:40:36.938-05:00

I might be willing to vigorously advocate a switch over to distant reading as the basic form of professional literary critical work (though even then I see distance and closeness on a spectrum, while many just want to trash close and, worse, symptomatic reading altogether for something wholly innocuous), but when it comes down to what to teach it has become clearer and clearer to me that close

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-49846268949051241022010-03-02T11:34:00.000-05:002010-03-02T11:34:45.856-05:00

I think I'm probably going to end this blog pretty soon. Not now, but soon.

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-23400311927290745022010-02-28T23:19:00.013-05:002010-03-02T16:12:03.988-05:00

On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy is one of my favorite books by Derrida. I haven't seen it commented upon as much as I would have expected. I think that once they registered Derrida's death (which happened just when On Touching came out in English), people in America turned quite quickly to The Animal That Therefore I Am (which came out soon after, even though the text dates to 1997). Perhaps this was

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-88734892845380938822010-02-24T17:50:00.007-05:002010-02-25T15:14:26.866-05:00

Judith Butler gave a really great lecture on Whitehead at a recent conference at Claremont (care of the Whitehead Research Project--who knew?). In "On this Occasion..." she also has a few remarks about Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and a couple others (there is a knockdown discussion of Freud and melancholia in the Q and A section--condensing her arguments elsewhere and putting them in a

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-59103262910436118632010-02-24T10:24:00.005-05:002010-02-24T10:47:14.557-05:00

Peter Gratton has a nice remark about Derrida on materialism. I think he's right that "transcendental signified" sometimes describes what idealism is up to better than any sort of talk about "subjective projection" (in fact, this might be one of his most important contributions to philosophy and to non-philosophy). We hardened the concepts that Derrida invents pretty quickly (with his help, since

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-53234398175566122792010-02-18T23:17:00.001-05:002010-02-18T23:19:20.146-05:00

One of the best Zizek lectures I've ever heard, from a little while ago (November of last year). I myself would get behind a lot of what is said--including the comment on Latour. The look at the contradictions in the notion of individual choice is precise. But also featured are levelheaded remarks on the artificial (biological life), the posthuman and augmented reality, Freud (materialist) and

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-91298211903873429922010-02-13T15:37:00.003-05:002010-02-13T15:41:09.424-05:00

It has been a little busy here lately with writing and teaching--but just wanted to say two things quick: 1) We're slowly starting up again at the Latour blog, moving now into the work of Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, John Law, Alain Badiou, and others. 2) Check out this CFP from the Cornell Theory Reading Group--certainly I've always thought a lot about form... maybe I'll write something

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-30618493721057369642010-02-05T12:13:00.026-05:002010-02-18T10:34:51.396-05:00

So, I just got off Facebook. Why? Basically privacy concerns, but also because I fundamentally felt that the technology was much more promising when it first came out. There were limitations: Facebook couldn't do everything and anything. It felt like an extension of text-messaging. Twitter now is more like what Facebook was then, although that could change too. But now the clunky thing just feels

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-30571676508279276152010-01-22T10:48:00.020-05:002010-01-26T22:28:15.349-05:00

I don't usually post my actual literary critical work here (though there are some exceptions). This blog is usually just a speculative theoretical space for me. But I've been wanting to show, in a nutshell, what the Marxist Raymond Williams was up to in talking about "counter-pastoral" in The Country and the City, since the general argument there a bit complicated and spans several chapters. And

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-79875962607572086312010-01-20T16:21:00.071-05:002010-01-26T21:51:16.746-05:00

From Marxism 2009 last year. Though I'd heard of him and his excellent work before, I only really started to read some of Harvey when I was writing on Raymond Williams (Harvey has the single best piece on Williams--in Spaces of Capital--thinking through Williams' problematic "militant particularism"). I'm liking him a lot. Again, if you haven't seen the Reading Capital course, check that out.

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-17440902617328266862010-01-20T14:55:00.003-05:002010-01-20T14:59:36.736-05:00

I've always been suspicious of de Man. That said, I've also always tried to give him a fair shake. You never should dismiss any thinker outright. Part of the problem, though, is that de Man takes a lot of your good will and puts it into his service. It's the common practice of a cynic, of course--not too hard to get around (though it takes John Guillory some time). But you have to be vigilant.

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-84803679662820290592010-01-20T10:52:00.005-05:002010-01-20T11:02:29.433-05:00

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality.

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-32092412329688058872010-01-19T12:54:00.003-05:002010-01-19T13:44:21.765-05:00

Bad and good are probably the worst ways to characterize anything, and I tried to mess with this binary a bit in my post by introducing a (somewhat antiquated and Nietzschian) notion of health: bad theory was rotten, spoiled, or ready to fall off and decompose. Since bad theory though would rail against any binary whatsoever, though, rather than (like Derrida) see the limits of its usefulness (

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-76189858880232678012010-01-18T21:08:00.004-05:002010-01-20T13:47:45.469-05:00

It's surprising to me that Ricky Gervais' American promos for the new HBO animated adaptation of the Ricky Gervais Show usually only feature him and Steve Merchant, when Karl Pilkington is so integral to things. I simply can't believe he's still so unfamiliar to the American audience. Surely his boswelox should be world renowned by now. Do yourself a favor and meet Karl (above) ...and while

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-50436934971007161952010-01-14T20:57:00.002-05:002010-01-14T20:59:14.826-05:00

Evan has just written a great series of posts on Latour and Bourdieu over at our Latour blog. I have been trying to get more into Bourdieu myself over the past year (at the suggestion of a professor), and I enjoy him a lot. But Evan has been actually working a while within the Bourdieuvian framework--as the thoroughness with which he compares Latour and Bourdieu shows. Here are the posts: "

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-79035790771305586772010-01-10T11:51:00.010-05:002010-01-10T12:06:07.105-05:00

As I read Sianne Ngai, she wants to say that emotion produces the very distance or distantiation that is at the heart of the experience of an aesthetic object qua object, via a modification (not at all Marxist) of Benjamin's concept of aura. Where for Benjamin, this sense of the object crystallizing out of a more richer intimate experience was itself only a nostalgic projection of the bourgeois

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-75678465242826897862010-01-08T09:56:00.002-05:002010-01-08T11:06:02.127-05:00

Just found out that David Harvey's famous (and thorough, and excellent) yearly reading of Capital I is online in all sorts of formats.

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-53892204205485945022010-01-05T16:17:00.025-05:002010-01-08T14:01:40.916-05:00

Almost forty years now of theory widely practiced in the US--and we only have a general sense of what theory is. It's a notorious problem that is actually its own solution: theory is one of the only fields where knowledge doesn't know what it has to be. So perhaps we shouldn't ever have to lock down what it is. Neverthless, it has assumed certain shapes. These too should not be avoided or

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-28685062635870556442010-01-05T13:50:00.000-05:002010-01-05T13:50:40.953-05:00

Once it is a question of determining the problem or the Idea as such, once it is a question of setting the dialectic in motion, the question "What is X?" gives way to other questions, otherwise powerful and efficacious, otherwise imperative: "How much, how and in what cases?" The question "What is X?" animates only the so-called aporetic dialogues--in other words, those in which the very form of

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-17473424455339170772010-01-03T14:28:00.001-05:002010-01-03T22:06:47.844-05:00

So long as one has not studied the structures of the future in a defined society, one necessarily runs the risk of not understanding anything whatsoever about the social. -Sartre, Search for a Method, 97 The more I read and research, the more I weirdly gravitate towards statements that just seem to word things right, rather than towards complex and interesting ideas in general--and for reasons

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-67679650177524445302010-01-02T08:29:00.007-05:002010-01-02T08:43:25.366-05:00

I think style is extremely useful as a way into a text, and I often take it up instead of form if I want to attune myself to what is going on in a poem or even in critical/expository writing (I don't use it really while reading a novel, and I'd be hard pressed to put it into service even in a modernist text: issues of plot and character are simply more important there). As soon as it becomes the

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-36354485062773171152009-12-31T23:32:00.000-05:002009-12-31T23:32:19.671-05:00

One great thing about 2010 is we finally get to refer to each of our years from now on as "twenty-" something. For me, that always seemed the real concrete thing that would bring home just how much we live in the future imagined so vividly by people in the middle of the twentieth century. Referring to "twenty-nineteen" or "twenty-twenty-seven," regardless of the actual historical time involved,

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-21850132250007025582009-12-30T17:19:00.007-05:002009-12-31T15:01:07.136-05:00

A great parenthesis: (Nietzschean relativism and fictionality is thus most productively used as a mode of triangulation or of the deployment of parallaxes, rather than as some idle flight from "linear history" or "old-fashioned" notions of causality that are themselves in reality mere narrative forms.) -Fredric Jameson, "Actually Existing Marxism" in Valences of the Dialectic

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-23128844429085774062009-12-29T14:33:00.006-05:002009-12-29T17:29:13.746-05:00

One special notion entertained by the Chicago critics is that the only alternative to a genre criticism is an escape into the psychology of the author or reader. Thus they execute what I shall call a double or slant antithesis, one which is not a true or exclusive opposition. They say that, if criticism leaves the species or kinds of poetry to search for the general definition of poetry itself,

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-19374540639692426692009-12-29T13:55:00.012-05:002010-01-07T09:25:40.860-05:00

Let's just say (and without any spoilers), Avatar does a lot right that I said Star Trek does wrong. I was a little off in saying the movie does everything right, as I did in an overexcited tweet a couple days ago after seeing the movie. Star Trek might be the most lengthy popular meditation on what it means to stay within a world created by an SF series--and for that it deserves some serious

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-76236216562790882782009-12-25T20:21:00.005-05:002009-12-25T20:33:50.018-05:00

I thought a typewriter would help me write, in that it would slow down my composition and make me think more about the irreversibility of my sentences (the ceaseless push onward, that can't really be erased like handwriting). Currently though the device is serving a different purpose: it has turned into a way for me to take notes. I hate starting up a computer when I have something to write down

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-70478097015872692832009-12-23T19:23:00.005-05:002009-12-24T11:57:55.427-05:00

Speaking of TV, I've always been amazed at the transformation of the device into a fireplace each Christmas. Yet another reminder that content steadfastly refuses to remain content on a TV, as Grant points out ("The Form of Content Delivery"): here something like reference, or even indexicality, brings the device back into the realm of mere depiction, and yet also fills out the space of the

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-41220481425297750462009-12-18T14:21:00.010-05:002009-12-18T18:05:26.873-05:00

What's most interesting about Raymond Williams' book on television is the scorn for McLuhan. Williams is often reserved in his work, preferring dismissal or contempt to appear only in oblique ways. The feelings, of course, aren't any less intense for all that: it's just that Williams reserves his more fiery language for more directly political writing. But Television toes the line here, and so

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-89767718372977074032009-12-12T11:54:00.039-05:002009-12-17T07:14:57.710-05:00

So I finally saw the new Star Trek last night. For various reasons I just couldn't make it to the theater over the summer--though one of those reasons was that when I could, my ambivalence over the whole thing kept me from going. You see, I'm a bit of a devotee (i.e. fan!). TNG has always been my favorite series, since I prefer its more hard-sciencey sort of focus and the more thorough

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-75533239407550194182009-12-11T13:50:00.006-05:002009-12-17T07:17:08.758-05:00

So, I divorced literary theory from critical theory a bit last time. But I did so not to knock at the latter so much as show how literary theory is really doing something else, something less critical in the sense that people have been lately been referring to this--that is, negatively, and with its Kantian overtone. This isn't to say that ideology critique isn't also what we do in literary

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-74969582535172517202009-12-10T12:52:00.018-05:002009-12-10T17:32:30.457-05:00

Tuesday I sat down with other people to discuss literary theory (which, remember, is not critical theory) with one of our more prominent professors. I agreed a lot with what he had to say--and even more with the jovial way he said it, with genuine seriousness appended as he focused on describing how using literary theory feels. I share some of my notes here, however, because regardless of

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-29966309870849861932009-12-07T17:35:00.008-05:002009-12-10T12:31:41.434-05:00

Just one of my favorite passages from the Poetics, which I'm rereading. Aristotle is talking about plot. I've mixed together two translations, alternating between that of Hubbard and that of Butcher as their formulations become more or less useful: It is not enough for beauty that a thing, whether an animal or anything else composed of parts, should have those parts well-ordered; since beauty

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-17954896844731583342009-12-03T09:25:00.010-05:002009-12-04T11:16:55.235-05:00

The following is the essential meditation of I.A. Richards upon closeness, and thus shows us something of what it originally meant to call literary critical reading "close reading," as he famously did. It is taken from Interpretation in Teaching, which was both an extension of the empirical tests in Practical Criticism to the reading of prose composition (and with students not in Cambridge but in

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-76373437137769877532009-11-25T11:12:00.006-05:002009-11-25T21:17:02.738-05:00

-A post on Marshall McLuhan vs. Raymond Williams. -A post on why literary theory doesn't deal with aesthetics (often perplexing to those outside literature). -A post on the dividual in Deleuze and notions of community, via a nice passage from Red Mars. -A post on Jameson's deep notion that postmodern theory ends up thinking (only) the body. -Another post on Addison, with special guest Addison

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-3541808063762679282009-11-24T16:40:00.009-05:002009-11-25T08:49:55.635-05:00

In philosophy in America you're usually either for clear arguments, or you're against using the standard of clarity to judge all argumentation. While the former position excludes much good argument by saying it's not clear, a lot of ink is spilled trying to show how the latter position also demands some sort of rigor, rather than an "anything goes" form of argumentation. A lot of this is

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-9341182191022709602009-11-19T18:29:00.007-05:002010-03-03T00:37:45.211-05:00

Franco Moretti is, as I've said before here, the most virulent of the increasing number of opponents to close reading in American literary criticism. He coins the term “distant reading” in order to suggest how his method of using abstract models for literary history--graphs, maps, and trees--actually makes sense of texts. I want to go over that once more. Quite simply, distant reading makes

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-15800672826695102622009-11-06T15:35:00.025-05:002009-11-11T10:51:13.009-05:00

I've been wanting to write a post on Jameson for a while, since wading through his immense corpus is basically all I've been doing over the last month or two. This won't be that post. Rather, I just want to give a little review of a few chapters of his new book, Valences of the Dialectic, which came out Sunday, the first of the month.The first essay or introduction (it borders on both), "Three

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These classifications were necessary to enable us to emphasize, without risk of misunderstanding, the sociological and at the same time relative nature of the notion of a species as well as of an individual. From the biological point of view, men who belong to the same race (assuming that a precise sense can be given to this term) are comparable to the individual flowers which blossom, open and

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Over at my Latour reading group blog, I explain that wonderful first thesis of "Irreductions"--nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else--and say the following:In other words, Latour is saying that nothing is singular (irreducible) because it always needs others. Derrida would say everything is singular (irreducible) because it (a thing) needs others. Both, yes, say

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I said last time that while I find Eve Sedgwick's position in her essay "Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading" extremely problematic--largely because of her unquestioning (and, indeed, last ditch) commitment to close reading, her authoritative, hyper-moralistic, and accusatory tone, and her general feeling that "big thoughts" are really irrelevant--I'm confident one suggestion of hers is

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Always historicize? What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal adverb "always"? It reminds me of the bumper stickers that instruct people in other cars to "Question Authority." Excellent advice, perhaps wasted on anyone who does whatever they're ordered to do by a strip of paper glued to an automobile!-Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 125I've always thought this

Mike Johnduffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08298199094068648093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8401373157352796069.post-58244677453225437962009-10-26T11:13:00.005-04:002009-10-26T22:46:45.930-04:00

I may use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirty-five years old, the latter hundreds of thousands. Will you see me as a DIY expert "of contrasts" because I mix up gestures from different times? Would I be an ethnographic curiosity? On the contrary: show me an activity that is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time. Some of my genes are 500 million years

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