The photographer Jeff Wall writes about moving into moments of eroding freedoms. He describes racism as “determined by social totality” that “has to come out of an individual body.”
Elegant description of what CR is doing by staging the way ideologies of race speak through the "you" in the text.
There’s not a lot of laughter in Citizen. No doubt, that sense motivates your use of the word maneuver—it means, etymologically, “to work with one’s hands,” but it’s usually a way of talking about unsticking something, getting around an impasse or an obstacle course, or dealing with touchy subjects.
Yes: might push harder on this absence. What does it signify about the role of "wit and the unconscious"?
The image forces things to stop for a moment. It forces the reader to reinvent breathing so that the eyes can again focus.
Nice reading, since the text often thematizes flow, fast motion, aggressions occuring before the mind has time to process.
They were placed in the text where I thought silence was needed, but I wasn’t interested in making the silence feel empty or effortless the way a blank page would. In your Sex, or the Unbearable, you say the experience of “any non-knowledge is not usually a blockage or limit but is actually the experience of the multiplication of knowledges that have an awkward relation to each other, crowd each other out, and create intensities that require management.”
Connects with theme in CITIZEN of disrupting everyday interactions with questions, with pauses, with glitching of usual smooth recognition.
He was not always so,
Extraordinary moment when John actually considers deeply (for him) what kind of subjectivity Julius possesses. He reads Julius very crudely, but not in ways that elicit comedy: we see here the real gap between a subjectivity organized around white supremacy and the possibility of recognizing blackness in its otherness as part of "America" as Du Bois urges his readers to do.
I went to execute the commission. When I pulled the handkerchief out of her pocket, something else came with it and fell on the floor. I picked up the object and looked at it. It was Julius’s rabbit’s foot.
Maybe a bit corny, but the story does open enough space to imagine, not "local color" that's fun to dip into, but a more fundamental epistemological fissure, where we're not sure whether Enlightenment rationalism or "premodern" magic is the controlling factor. Allegorically this points to the issue of narrative authority: that Julius might be "master" of the narrative.
“Aun’ Peggy look’ at de head-hankercher, en run her han’ ober it, en sez she:—
The emphasis on gift exchange--Aunt Peggy never conjures for free--rhymes with the way Julius uses his tales to "buy" himself things from John/Annie, even if the latter don't always realize it.
“Oh, yes,” she answered, “I forgot to tell you. He was hanging round the place all the morning, and looking so down in the mouth, that I told him that if he would try to do better, we would give him one more chance. He seems so grateful, and so really in earnest in his promises of amendment, that I’m sure you’ll not regret taking him back.”
Annie as "sentimental" reader, once again!
“I hope you didn’t let the old rascal have it,” I returned, with some warmth. I had just received a bill for the new lumber I had bought.
What do you make of this recurrent twist? Is Julius just a hustler, or is there a game behind the game? How might readers have responded to these twists around 1900?
W’en Mars Marrabo ‘skiver’ dat Sandy wuz gone, he ‘lowed Sandy had runned away
Not to beat a dead horse, but note that selling slaves, breaking up families, and fugitive slaves are not staples of the tradition CC is writing in, to say the least!
our colored coachman
Important shift to "our" Julius. Also note that he has a job title!
I found, when I bought the vineyard, that Uncle Julius had occupied a cabin on the place for many years, and derived a respectable revenue from the product of the neglected grapevines. This, doubtless, accounted for his advice to me not to buy the vineyard, though whether it inspired the goopher story I am unable to state. I believe, however, that the wages I paid him for his services as coachman, for I gave him employment in that capacity, were more than an equivalent for anything he lost by the sale of the vineyard.
Comedy of manners here, as the Yankee demystification of the "conjure" comes along with an engagement in the trickery that's such a big part of the story. As in the dominant plantation tradition, note of compromise between North/South (here, master/slave) that sutures together the historical wound of the War.
“Nex’ spring, w’en de sap ris en Henry’s ha’r commence’ ter sprout, Mars Dugal’ sole ‘im ag’in, down in Robeson County dis time; en he kep’ dat sellin’ business up fer five year er mo’. Henry nebber say nuffin ’bout de goopher ter his noo marsters, ‘caze he know he gwine ter be tuk good keer uv de nex’ winter, w’en Mars Dugal’ buy him back. En Mars Dugal’ made ’nuff money off’n Henry ter buy anudder plantation ober on Beaver Crick.
Complex set of interactions here: (super)natural role of the grapes/goopher, which align Henry with natural cycles; exploitation of abstract labor-power of capitalism (Henry is like a "cyclical" stock that rises/falls relatively predictably); question of how both master/slave are gaming the system for advantage, though obviously in asymmetrical ways.
“Now it happen dat one er de niggers on de nex’ plantation, one er ole Mars Henry Brayboy’s niggers, had runned away de day befo’, en tuk ter de swamp, en ole Mars Dugal’ en some er de yuther nabor w’ite folks had gone out wid dere guns en dere dogs fer ter he’p ’em hunt fer de nigger; en de han’s on our own plantation wuz all so flusterated
To put it mildly, references to fugitive slaves are unusual in the "moonlight and magnolias" tradition of "plantation fiction" that CC is writing into.
Mars Dugal’ foun’ he had made fifteen hund’ed gallon er wine; en one er de niggers hearn him laffin’ wid de oberseah fit ter kill, en sayin’ dem fifteen hund’ed gallon er wine wuz monst’us good intrus’ on de ten dollars he laid out on de vimya’d.
Note how Julius inserts a bit of "Yankee" calculation of ROI here, calibrated to appeal to the narrator.
“Now, ef dey’s an’thing a nigger lub, nex’ ter ‘possum, en chick’n, en watermillyums, it’s scuppernon’s. Dey ain’ nuffin dat kin stan’ up side’n de scuppernon’ fer sweetness; sugar ain’t a suckumstance ter scuppernon’. W’en de season is nigh ’bout ober, en de grapes begin ter swivel up des a little wid de wrinkles er ole age,—w’en de skin git sof’ en brown,—den de scuppernon’ make you smack yo’ lip en roll yo’ eye en wush fer mo’; so I reckon it ain’ very ‘stonishin’ dat niggers lub scuppernon’.
Julius/CC laying it on pretty thick here, eh? Hard to believe that reviewers criticized CC (as Sussman points out) for being a mere transcriber of reality!
As he became more and more absorbed in the narrative, his eyes assumed a dreamy expression, and he seemed to lose sight of his auditors, and to be living over again in monologue his life on the old plantation.
How are the temporalities of the "Yankee" auditors and the Southern teller different? Is there daylight between how the narrator interprets this difference and how we readers do? What does it mean that the narrator feels that Julius "lose(s) sight" of himself and his wife?
“Lawd bless you, suh, I knows all about it. Dey ain’ na’er a man in dis settlement w’at won’ tell you ole Julius McAdoo ‘uz bawn en raise’ on dis yer same plantation. Is you de Norv’n gemman w’at’s gwine ter buy de ole vimya’d?”
We'll talk a lot about the issue of the synthetic dialect via Sussman's work and ideas about "stenography" in the 19thC--that is, translating oral discourse "directly" into written form, as it were--but for now, note the strangeness of an African American writer employing this minstrel-tinged practice.
He resumed his seat with somewhat of embarrassment. While he had been standing, I had observed that he was a tall man, and, though slightly bowed by the weight of years, apparently quite vigorous. He was not entirely black, and this fact, together with the quality of his hair, which was about six inches long and very bushy, except on the top of his head, where he was quite bald, suggested a slight strain of other than negro blood. There was a shrewdness in his eyes, too, which was not altogether African, and which, as we afterwards learned from experience, was indicative of a corresponding shrewdness in his character. He went on eating the grapes, but did not seem to enjoy himself quite so well as he had apparently done before he became aware of our presence.
Who is Julius? What is the narrator's assessment? How might we revise this assessment, by the time we've read more deeply into the collection?
“Don’t let us disturb you,” I said. “There is plenty of room for us all.”
A resonant line: how does this gesture frame the entire narrative?
We drove between a pair of decayed gateposts—the gate itself had long since disappeared—and up a straight sandy lane, between two lines of rotting rail fence, partly concealed by jimson-weeds and briers, to the open space where a dwelling-house had once stood, evidently a spacious mansion, if we might judge from the ruined chimneys that were still standing, and the brick pillars on which the sills rested. The house itself, we had been informed, had fallen a victim to the fortunes of war.
How is the recent past "written" on the landscape, and how does the narrator "read" this text?
though I learned later on that underneath its somnolent exterior the deeper currents of life—love and hatred, joy and despair, ambition and avarice, faith and friendship—flowed not less steadily than in livelier latitudes.
Note that the year of publication--1899--comes some 20 years after the collapse of Reconstruction. In the interim: the Jim Crow system has been built, brick by brick, with Southern states creating new constitutions designed to (among other things) disfranchise African Americans; lynching has emerged as a form of extralegal discipline (roughly 1k/year in this time period, nationwide); and Plessy v Ferguson instantiates "separate but equal" in 1897, two years prior. So it's very much a matter of perspective that "things have become somewhat settled" in the South...
I was engaged at the time in grape-culture in northern Ohio, and, as I liked the business and had given it much study, I decided to look for some other locality suitable for carrying it on.
Who is the narrator? What "lenses" does he use to view the world around him? What is his frame of reference?
The manufactured authenticity of his dialect writing suggests that, while it may be informed by the same ear for speech that made him a successful stenographer, it did not conform to any original speech act; while there may be no speaking subject whose voice Chesnutt “transcribes” in his fiction, he nevertheless captures and encodes an image of American Blackness that he did not possess but could represent to white audiences who thought it authentic.
Yeah: a painstaking imitation of an imitation (or really synthesis).
English pronounced as an ignorant old Southern Negro would be supposed to speak it, and at the same time to preserve a sufficient approximation to the correct spelling to make it easy reading. (“ To ” 105)
Sophisticated claim by CC about the accomodation of the "phonographic" speech to the norms of written language and the frame of reference of the reading public
All writing, but especially one fraught with the political necessity of fidelity to experience that Chesnutt saw in realism, is always already stenographic in nature. 11
The footnote points to Derrida on "Freud's mystic writing pad": useful point of reference in linking technologies to "deep," "inner" processes.
In other words, Kealing worries that the demands of the market are turning students into mere writing machines and leaving them without the “basal culture” that will allow them to understand and interpret what they type—they will become a generation of amanuenses, vessels for knowledge and culture without the tools to recognize the richness of the language and history passing through their fingertips and unable to recognize error when they encounter it.
Ahh: structural determinants in ed system of the "natural" mimicry and lack of imagination of blacks
If what makes a good realist is a facility for mimetic representation—that is, imitation—what makes a “bad” or at least minor realist is a facility for mimicking the facility for mimetic representation. The former mimesis takes place as a kind of translation of the world into the linguistic codes of realistic representation while the latter is portrayed as a knowledge of only linguistic codes. 9
Pithy restatement of above point.
What seems bizarre about Simmons’s analysis, although also correct, is that Chesnutt is damned to the status of imitator both by those who want to include him in the realist camp and those who do not.
Wow: CC is read only as successful or unsuccessful imitator of "real" realists by critics such as McElrath or Simmons.
I am not arguing that The Conjure Woman stories are “more realist” than they are usually given credit for but that the orthographic fidelity they simulate locates the “real” of the literary text in a material register (grammar, spelling, and syntax) rather than the conceptual register (the assumed relation of a fictional narrative to the reality it purports to reproduce).
Displacement of "real"/"realism" from theme to form, to the phonographic representation of black speech.
The rejection of “Rena Walden” may have suggested to Chesnutt that an editor such as Gilder, who was sympathetic to realist literature, was not so interested in the phrase and carriage of everyday life if the days and lives described bore no relation to his or his readers’ own.
Important point that perhaps doesn't come through strongly enough: that realism depends upon a bourgeois POV, that its readers construct its reality as much as its authors.
The very ways in which we find Chesnutt, in his day and ours, excluded from the realist canon suggests that the limits of the genre have more to do with the relationship between racial politics and epistemic difference than they do with the mimetic fidelity of descriptive language
Ahh: provocative point that we still use the logic of racial mimicry to construct literary realism on some level.
The reader is left to infer that an essentially “imitative” people in a cultural arrangement that actually encourages the dangerous imitation of unsuitably civilized morals and norms is in a tough spot indeed. 6
This basic claim that imitativeness, the dangerous supplement that threatens originality, is itself original/natural to blacks, is kind of hilarious.
Consequently, Jim Crow became not only a legal regime but a mode of thinking that haunted the postbellum nineteenth century’s imagination, one that persists to this day
Broader claim: Jim Crow as "mode of thinking" rather than mere legal structure. But is this so surprising? Don't all legal regimes depend on "modes of thinking" to endure?
Distinctions between mimesis, realism, and imitation may at first seem too fine to merit consideration, but their very ability to substitute for each other occasioned not exactly definitional confusion between them but the terms of access through which the logic of racial politics could come to resemble those of literary politics, through which the Howellsian trope of fidelity could also become a prized form of technological functionality.
Keywords for Ss analysis: mimesis, realism, imitation. Cognate but subtly different terms in contrast.
Yet the suggestion that, through the manipulation of orthographic convention or a narrative verisimilitude inspired by Chesnutt’s own experiences with the color line, fiction might hew too close to transcription automatically ejects the work from the aesthetic realm and into that of reportage, from art to “just telling things.”
Fascinating that dialect fiction was critiqued along the same lines as documentary art!
His exploitation of the “transcribed” feeling of dialect writing, the sense that it was drawn from a present and actually experienced scene of speaking, suggests that subversive political energies lay dormant in instrumentally transcriptive writing practices such as stenography.
Tricky pivot to argue that dialect and steno are parallel processes, and that the written "copy" of speech contains a latent subversiveness.
“The Goophered Grapevine” suggests, both in the linguistic codes and the plot elements it deploys, that misdirection, subterfuge, and epistemic legerdemain subtend the aura of simplistic straight talk implied by the use of dialect.
So dialect is not a deficit--a failed attempt to speak "correctly"--but a skillful manipulation of linguistic codes to write one's ticket, as it were.
Dialect fiction, an ostensibly mimetic writing form that portrays human speech as the locus of racial authenticity, ironically materializes and substantializes what Chesnutt elsewhere strove to demonstrate was insubstantial. For Chesnutt, then, writing was the sole arena in which the paradoxes of race thinking could take shape; to write race was, in some sense, and perhaps only for Chesnutt, to literally bring race into being.
Nice move: S points out the proto-Butlerian judo move CC pulls on race discourse in C19. Racists say that to be black is to mimic, copy, reiterate; CC replies that all race is a fiction enacted by performative repetition and proves it via his fiction, which thematizes "phonography" as writing down speech.
The connection of writing to stenography and stenography to writing, far from being limited to the singular professional development of Chesnutt (the first major black American novelist), reflects some of the shared anxieties and contradictions of the racial and literary imaginations of the nineteenth century. Stenography, as a writing system that claims to record and preserve the inflections of human speech, and literary realism, a form of writing that claims to register the vicissitudes of human experience, both participate in a form of mimesis that was, by the end of the nineteenth century, the primary site of critical discord surrounding American fiction.
Thesis, one that plugs into Gittleman's argument about the Edison era. Note the fact that CC supported self via a) freelance steno; b) fiction writing; and c) own steno business (following Gittelman, seems like steno was a means of building a multivalent business platform in C19).
I asked William Whipper, of Pennsylvania, the gentleman alluded to above, whether he thought Mr. Douglass’s power inherited from the Negroid, or from what is called the Caucasian side of his make up? After some reflection, he frankly answered, “I must admit, although sorry to do so, that the Caucasian predominates.” At that time, I almost agreed with him; but, facts narrated in the first part of this work, throw a different light on this interesting question.
Note how "ethnological" theories of race and racial heritage are unavoidable in this time period, no matter how committed a given writer is to abolition or antiracist politics.
Heaven lends me ability, to use my voice, my pen, or my vote, to advocate the great and primary work of the universal and unconditional emancipation of my entire race.
Closes with linkage of these different expressive modalities: what are the differences between these ways of translating will into communications? What are the channels? Who is the author of each and who are the readers?
But for the responsibility of conducting a public journal, and the necessity imposed upon me of meeting opposite views from abolitionists in this state, I should in all probability have remained as firm in my disunion views as any other disciple of William Lloyd Garrison.
The social relationships necessitated by the production of the news changes FD: so print is not just the passive expression of inner "ideas" and "character" but a network, in which the production changes the producers even as the producers shape the production.
a slavish adoration
If you read carefully, FD is kind of hilarious.
I found them very earnestly opposed to the idea of my starting a paper, and for several reasons. First, the paper was not needed; secondly, it would interfere with my usefulness as a lecturer; thirdly, I was better fitted to speak than to write; fourthly, the paper could not succeed.
Whole set of thorny questions here: relative political value of speaking, editing, and writing compared (with subcomparisons between the relatively prestigious and durable publishing of books like the one we're reading v. the more ephemeral but wider-reaching publication in the periodical press). The question of financial capital: how to start up a publication written/edited/read by African Americans when that population is starved of capital?
On their own motion, without any solicitation from me (Mrs. Henry Richardson, a clever lady, remarkable for her devotion to every good work, taking the lead), they raised a fund sufficient to purchase my freedom, and actually paid it over, and placed the papers 8 of my manumission in my hands, before [291] they would tolerate the idea of my returning to this, my native country. To this commercial transaction I owe my exemption from the democratic operation of the Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850. But for this, I might at any time become a victim of this most cruel and scandalous enactment, and be doomed to end my life, as I began it, a slave. The sum paid for my freedom was one hundred and fifty pounds sterling.
Remarkable example of bodily inscription, in that FD must reckon with what his body means, how it reads in public as a "free" body v. as an "enslaved" body. Moreover, he must think about how much he is worth, literally and figuratively, in these different states.
in the language of the LAW, “held, taken, reputed, and adjudged to be a chattel in the hands of my owners and possessors, and their executors, administrators, and assigns, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever.” (Brev. Digest, 224).
Classic example of bodily inscription, as we've seen in Kafka and Foucault.
An end was put to the melee, by the captain’s calling the ship’s company to put the salt water mobocrats in irons. At this determined order, the gentlemen of the lash scampered, and for the rest of the voyage conducted themselves very decorously.
Note how the ship becomes part of what Paul Guilroy famously called the "Black Atlantic," an indeterminate space between national boundaries in which identities and ideas of legality and social propriety get renegotiated.
JAMES M’CUNE SMITH
Smith has a fascinating biography himself: here's a thumbnail sketch.
If, as has been stated, his intellection is slow, when unexcited, it is most prompt and rapid when he is thoroughly aroused.[17]
The clinical tone regarding FDs capacities speaks eloquently to how much pressure black writers are under, in ways that anticipate Du Bois's arguments from 50 years later, to account for themselves, both their "outsides" and their "insides," so to speak.
twelve thousand dollars of his own hard earned money,
That's a lot of money in the 1850s. Underscores the way cultural capital and financial capital intersect, when you think about the challenges of building a black press (and a black cultural infrastructure more broadly).
Yet, these gentlemen, although proud of Frederick Douglass, failed to fathom, and bring out to the light of day, the highest qualities of his mind; the force of their own education stood in their own way: they did not delve into the mind of a colored man for capacities which the pride of race led them to believe to be restricted to their own Saxon blood. Bitter and vindictive sarcasm, irresistible mimicry, and a pathetic narrative of his own experiences of slavery, were the intellectual manifestations which they encouraged him to exhibit on the platform or in the lecture desk.
Note the gesture to fissures within the abolitionist movement which, in the 1850s, was splintering into a) a hard-core wing, bent on nothing short of total, federal abolition; b) a nascent Republican party growing out of the "free soil" movement to allow slavery in the South but keep all new territory free; and c) a colonization movement that wanted to repatriate enslaved people in Africa.
The reader is, therefore, assured, with all due promptitude, that his attention is not invited to a work of ART, but to a work of FACTS—Facts, terrible and almost incredible, it may be yet FACTS, nevertheless
Important tension, as with the 1845 LIFE: how to respect Douglass as a writer without losing focus on the documentary aspect, the facticity and typicality of the experiences related here.
HONORABLE GERRIT SMITH
Smith was a notable abolitionist and filthy rich real estate mogul who supported Douglass in various ways: perhaps most relevantly in the founding of Douglass's newspaper, the North Star. Learn more here and there if you're interested.
copying the following portrait of the religion of the south
Again, I think of Foucault's "genealogical" history, which is "effective" insofar as it "cuts" at the pretensions of consensus narratives via parody and other forms of ironization.
I, however, finally became a subscriber to it. The paper came, and I read it from week to week with such feelings as it would be quite idle for me to attempt to describe. The paper became my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire. Its sympathy for my brethren in bonds—its scathing denunciations of slaveholders—its faithful exposures of slavery—and its powerful attacks upon the upholders of the institution—sent a thrill of joy through my soul, such as I had never felt before!
Douglass is thus not just a reader, but a subscriber: he's joined to a large, lateral body of readers linked by the periodical press to broader political issues/beliefs/feelings.
Mr. Johnson had just been reading the “Lady of the Lake,” and at once suggested that my name be “Douglass.” From that time until now I have been called “Frederick Douglass;” and as I am more widely known by that name than by either of the others, I shall continue to use it as my own.
Author himself becomes a blank, erasable/inscribable surface: no patronym, no stable name, name taken from literary tradition. The name comes from a poem by Walter Scott) that's drenched with nostalgia for an idealized Scottish past and (in a deep irony) gave rise to the KKKs tradition of burning crosses.
But I remained firm, and, according to my resolution, on the third day of September, 1838, I left my chains, and succeeded in reaching New York without the slightest interruption of any kind. How I did so,—what means I adopted,—what direction I travelled, and by what mode of conveyance,—I must leave unexplained, for the reasons before mentioned.
Complex dialectic linking the freedom of the writer before the blank page with the enslavement sanctioned by the law: the latter writes, as it were, a void into the former in this space.
Of course, it was impossible to get any white man to volunteer his testimony in my behalf, and against the white young men
Issue of race and testimony resonates throughout the book: whose testimony carries what authority in what contexts?
wrote several protections, one for each of us.
What is writing for? Within the acts of framing the text as credible, as typical, as the product of a "prodigy," and so on, the notion that writing is also forgery, deception, masking up.
I kept up my school nearly the whole year I lived with Mr. Freeland; and, beside my Sabbath school, I devoted three evenings in the week, during the winter, to teaching the slaves at home. And I have the happiness to know, that several of those who came to Sabbath school learned how to read; and that one, at least, is now free through my agency.
Literacy, as before, depicted as a social activity: just as the scrappy Baltimore lads help FD gain literacy, here he aids in the viral spread of reading within the slave community.
This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.
Almost fable-like feeling here. A literalization of Hegel's narrative of the master-slave dialectic, whereby FD gets recognition as an equal via his physical conquest of the master
I would then make the letters which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way. During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I learned mainly how to write. I then commenced and continued copying the Italics in Webster’s Spelling Book, until I could make them all without looking on the book. By this time, my little Master Thomas had gone to school, and learned how to write, and had written over a number of copy-books. These had been brought home, and shown to some of our near neighbors, and then laid aside. My mistress used to go to class meeting at the Wilk Street meetinghouse every Monday afternoon, and leave me to take care of the house. When left thus, I used to spend the time in writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy-book, copying what he had written. I continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of Master Thomas. Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.
Moving focus on the material side of writing: scarcity of writing materials, including "white space," in which to develop expressive potential.
The idea as to how I might learn to write was suggested to me by being in Durgin and Bailey’s ship-yard, and frequently seeing the ship carpenters, after hewing, and getting a piece of timber ready for use, write on the timber the name of that part of the ship for which it was intended.
We think of "literacy" as being a unitary thing, and indeed most of us are fortunate enough to learn to speak/read/write simultaneously via an articulated curriculum. But note the distinctness with which the receptive/expressive dimensions of language are confronted here. For a long time, FD can consume texts but not produce them. And we realize that each of these practical skills has its inner "spiritual" dimension, impinging on the development and functioning of the subject in different ways.
a book entitled “The Columbian Orator.”
Here it is. This is the first time FD has found his life reflected, in some sense, in print.
These words used to trouble them; they would express for me the liveliest sympathy, and console me with the hope that something would occur by which I might be free.
Political economy of the slave system cracks a bit here to allow space for a counter-economy, one based on gift exchanges: FD gives bread to poor whites; they give language and sympathy.
She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute.
You could cut the irony with a knife here. Elegant comment on the idea that education "ruins" the enslaved.
In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.
This moment resonates broadly throughout the text: reading, among the most basic preconditions of bringing enslaved experience into print, is illegal, making it a very tight bottleneck to pass through.
Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read
As Foucault puts it, "wherever there is power, there is resistance": here, the very prohibition on reading elevates the drive to learn it in FDs mind.
My home was charmless; it was not home to me; on parting from it, I could not feel that I was leaving any thing which I could have enjoyed by staying
We feel the pressure of the norms of 19thC sentiment here: FD has the burden of explaining why he must narrate this leave-taking without the customary tears.
I had no bed. I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out. My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.
Surreal image of the pen of the author being laid in the cracked feet of the enslaved boy he once was. This poetic images makes us ask, "what are the material conditions for getting experience into print?" And "what kind of discourse issues from cracked, whipped, damaged bodies?"
The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.”
Strange space-time of writing: the Sorrow Songs, Douglass's tears at remembering them, and the dispersed set of readers' imaginations are all present, in some sense, in the synthetic space of print.
This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.
Crucial passage: note the elements of what Mikhael Baktihn calls "polyphony": different discourses joining together in the same discursive space. Here, we have the meaningful but opaque song of the slaves, Douglass's own narration, and the overseer's barbaric curses, curses that disorient the white supremacist hierarchies of "proper" and "improper" English.
It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.
Interplay of material/spiritual, literal/metaphorical: the sight "strikes" with traumatic force, the traces of the beating are too vicious to be captured in the traces of words.
I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night.
Think about Foucault's arguments about "progressive" narratives from origins v. "effective" history that's written by "cutting." FD narrates the absence of origins and the parody his life makes of bourgeois narratives of "Bildung" or "development."
I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.
FD establishes himself as writing himself into existence right from the start!
He was such an impressive orator that numerous persons doubted if he had ever been a slave, so he wrote Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass.
Note the paradox of being an enslaved writer: the very fact of eloquence/articulateness casts doubt on the authenticity of the expression. We'll have to unpack this!
You, too, publish your declaration of freedom with danger compassing you around. In all the broad lands which the Constitution of the United States overshadows, there is no single spot,—however narrow or desolate,—where a fugitive slave can plant himself and say, “I am safe.” The whole armory of Northern Law has no shield for you. I am free to say that, in your place, I should throw the MS. into the fire.
Metacomment on the various meanings of translating slavery into writing. Among other things, it's a magnet for the Law.
I was glad to learn, in your story, how early the most neglected of God’s children waken to a sense of their rights, and of the injustice done them. Experience is a keen teacher; and long before you had mastered your A B C, or knew where the “white sails” of the Chesapeake were bound, you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel and blighting death which gathers over his soul.
Interesting use of 2nd person here: intimate mode of address
his case may be regarded as a very fair specimen of the treatment of slaves in Maryland
Again, the question of typicality v. extraordinariness.
There stood one, in physical proportion and stature commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in natural eloquence a prodigy—in soul manifestly “created but a little lower than the angels”—yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave,—trembling for his safety, hardly daring to believe that on the American soil, a single white person could be found who would befriend him at all hazards, for the love of God and humanity!
What does it mean that FD is so extraordinary? How would circumstances be different if he were just a "meh" speaker/specimen/writer, a bit lower than the angels?
his first speech
We might track the relationship between the spontaneity of speech and the belatedness of writing here: Garrison emphasizes the particular feelings that flow from feeling FDs live presence. How does this relate to the written text that follows?
PREFACE
Need to think about what the very existence of this preface means, in this slave narrative and many others. What are the unstated assumptions baked into the act of prefacing Douglass's works within this act of framing? How does this paratext to Douglass's narrative interact with Du Bois's argument?
General question: the guiding metaphor here is visual. Du Bois claims the "Negro" has "second sight," lives behind a "veil," and so on. What are moments in which writing impinges on this metaphor and makes things more complicated? How does Du Bois raise questions of access to writing, inscription, publication throughout this piece?
the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,
Why "gift"? Du Bois would seem to lay out a model of victimhood here, with the "Negro" being split and nearly torn. So is he being ironic here?
How does it feel to be a problem?
It's a strange question. What would be the usual way of wording this? What position does this question put Du Bois (and by extension, minority subjects in general) in?
Between me and the other world
Canny readers will hear this phrase echoing through African American writing, from Douglass, as we'll see, to Wright's poem "Between the World and Me," to Coates's recent book, which takes its title from the Wright poem.
Now he stood there naked.
Why naked? How do you read this little ritual of disrobing? What might it have to do with the comedy that happens in the preceding paragraph?
Then the Traveler heard a cry of rage from the Officer.
How does affect work in this tale? What kinds of feelings are evoked in whom by what kinds of stimuli? What do these eruptions of feeling tell us about the unspoken value system that undergirds this society?
That gave rise to certain technical difficulties with fastening the needles securely, but after several attempts we were successful. We didn’t spare any efforts. And now, as the inscription is made on the body, everyone can see through the glass. Don’t you want to come closer and see the needles for yourself.”
Why glass? Given that the Apparatus is a mere tool, an agent of "justice," why such pains to make its workings visible? Why talk about it so much?
The Traveler wanted to raise various questions, but after looking at the Condemned Man he merely asked, “Does he know his sentence?” “No,” said the Officer. He wished to get on with his explanation right away, but the Traveler interrupted him: “He doesn’t know his own sentence?” “No,” said the Officer once more. He then paused for a moment, as if he was asking the Traveler for a more detailed reason for his question, and said, “It would be useless to give him that information. He experiences it on his own body.”
How you you read this crucial moment? Who knows what in this story, and how does Kafka exploit the lack of symmetry between Commandant, Officer, Traveler, Condemned, and so on?
“He was indeed,” said the Officer, nodding his head with a fixed and thoughtful expression. Then he looked at his hands, examining them. They didn’t seem to him clean enough to handle the diagrams. So he went to the bucket and washed them again. Then he pulled out a small leather folder and said, “Our sentence does not sound severe. The law which a condemned man has violated is inscribed on his body with the harrow. This Condemned Man, for example,” and the Officer pointed to the man, “will have inscribed on his body, ‘Honour your superiors.’”
Alas, the double entendre of "sentence" as a grammatical and legal entity at once is not active in German, but the slippage certainly fits here!
“However,” the Officer said, interrupting himself, “I’m chattering, and his apparatus stands here in front of us. As you see, it consists of three parts. With the passage of time certain popular names have been developed for each of these parts. The one underneath is called the bed, the upper one is called the inscriber, and here in the middle, this moving part is called the harrow.” “The harrow?” the Traveler asked. He had not been listening with full attention. The sun was excessively strong, trapped in the shadowless valley, and one could hardly collect one’s thoughts. So the Officer appeared to him all the more admirable in his tight tunic weighed down with epaulettes and festooned with braid, ready to go on parade, as he explained the matter so eagerly and, while he was talking, adjusted screws here and there with a screwdriver.
What's the effect of Kafka's use of abstraction here? Those who know his other works are perhaps used to this stylistic feature, but why the abstract titles/names, from Commandant to Traveler to apparatus?
Of course, interest in the execution was not very high, not even in the penal colony itself.
What's the tone of this story? Why does it matter that no one is interested in the execution, including the condemned?
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now, We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it
anticlimax: focus on quanitites and abstractions; imagination circumscribed by circumstances.
We are things
Shocking moment: things!
I shall wait, if you wish: revise the psalm If that should frighten you: sew up belief If that should tear: turn, singularly calm At forehead and at fingers rather wise, Holding the bandage ready for your eyes
New model for warrior for justice: behind the scurryings, doing the affective labor and bodily care.
Children, confine your lights
Apostrophe to children: new address
children, pray, to pray
More antiquated diction
mail of ice and insolence:
hard not to hear "male" here
It was you, it was you who threw away my name! And this is everything I have for me
Negativity of the X transformed into positivity, perhaps.
I shall create! If not a note, a hole. If not an overture, a desecration
Talk about "creative destruction"...
barbarous and metal little man
What's the little man? The building? The window itself?
treasonable faith
treasonable/reasonable
cry of art
cry of art/heart
Marc Crawford
Look this up.
Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps! for sudden blood, aborted carnival, the props and niceties of non-loneliness— the rhymes of Leanin
enigmatic closing, and note that the (male) scheming culminates in feminine fantasy/reality.
Their country is a Nation on no map
Alien to established leadership, even radical leadership. Gloss for students: Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown.
but swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask and assist him at your zipper
antisenimental depiction of youthful life.
Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds
Names of Chi gangs in 60s?
Cottage Grove.
Where is this?
Blackstone bitter bureaus (bureaucracy is footloose)
Play on bureaucracy and politics: alternative, emergent model.
cold bonbon
Huh?
cancel, cure and curry
Vision of leadership: dash of West Indian influence, caring/curing/preserving.
Sores
sore/soar; heal/heel (like a dog)
Thirty
Mere quantity: aggregate blackness
DISCIPLINES
funny diction: discipline in Foucaultian sense?
Rangers
anagram for "rage" and "anger"
disruptorinterruptbusinessasusual
Business as usual that valorizes itself for being "disruptive"! Your project, then, is a disruption of "disruption."
InconnectingtheprecariousnessofnetworklifeandlaborinTransmissiontotherhetoricsandrealitiesof“uberization,”mystudentswerepreparingfortheirfuturemembershipinthe“newdangerousclass”oftheprecariat(Standing)
But thinking about Erin's argument, are they not training, by collaborating on an open platform, to resist the Uberization model, where laborers are atomized and casualized and discouraged from associating together?
Whatevertheirdisciplinarytraining,however,precarityintermsoflabor,debt,climatechange,citizenshiphasnowbecomethe“stateofexception”(Agamben)forstudents
Completely agree with the political frame around the pedagogical question of assignment structure, but I don't follow the relevance of Agamben here: what's "exceptional" about "precarity"?
Inotherwords,ifwethinkofeverystudentessayasaritualofmembership,weneedtoconsiderthekindofcommunityimaginedbythethreetofivepageessayandthepriceofthismembership.
I would add that the printed essay is basically a memo written for one's "boss" rather than a publication broadcast to a readership. When students "publish," even just to peers, they own their intellectual work in a different way via sharing it.
threetofive(orten)page“typed,”doublespacedessay
Amen, brutha! I love the "typed."
other,“scholarly”Scalarpagesbeforet
I love this focus on history of the material text to temper the technoutopian sense that we're now "doing things yet unattempted in prose or rhyme" when we should be historicizing new tech.
studentspracticedadeepformofactivereading,repeatedlygaugingandexplainingtotheirpeerstherelevanceofparticulararticlestogrouptopicsandquestions
I'm curious for more detail re: assignment design here. What did you do to guide this "deep" practice and keep it focused, especially for Ss not familiar with literary research?
usedgroupbasedgoogledocs
Man, this is a useful object lesson in why the scrappy .orgs and .edus in Erin's argument have such an uphill struggle! I'm not being sanctimonious: I use these platforms too every single term!
cognitivecapitalism
Not familiar with this term: gloss?
studentseagerlyembracedtheopportunitytoescapetheusualmediumforrepresentingstudentlearning
Selfishly, since my paper bitches about traditional litcrit pedagogy, I'm curious what the terms of their eagerness were...
takeKennethBurke’sfamousdictumthatliterature“betreatedasequipmentforliving”asseriouslyaspossible
I never realized how much Burke makes literature sound like an iOS app until I read this sentence. But he also said he thought a literature's value was "in keeping a society becoming too assertively, too hopelessly, itself." I'm interested to trace how the novel and your collective reading it/writing on it constitutes a kind of counter-engineering...
But if the point of these technologies is to prepare students to critically understand and act in our digitally-mediated world, then it seems that it is also our duty
Thanks, Erin: this is great stuff. As a closing point, I'm struck by the short-sighted fetish of comp sci in the academy and "teach yourself to code" in the culture more broadly. I think it's the role of DHers to put the brakes on everyone running for the "learn to code" bandwagon and refocus attention, as you do here, on the more critical and humanistic side of computing, the need to foster collaboration, self-determination, and autonomy.
Social Paper never achieved this utopian visio
Though it is integrated into the Commons, which is running a pilot this spring to incentivize instructors to use the Commons (with Social Paper and other open tools) as an LMS. So there's some diffusion going on here: maybe it's part of an archipelago of tiny utopias!
nfortunately these models have been largelyignored in the technological practices of higher education, thus directingtheuniversity’s technical, infrastructural, and social capitalto directlysupportcapitalist digital media companies’s broader monopoly on our technologicalimagination andthe globalproduction of digital tools, platforms, and services.
Not to be all Pollyanna, but I'm struck by the handful of remarkable successes out there: Wikipedia whupped Encarta (or whatever), WordPress whupped Blogger. And HTML, in the most dramatic example, conquered AOL in the early 90s. None of these successes were inevitable, all struggled with the same challenges of building user bases of folks willing to put up with less slick UI/UX to build them up. How/why did they succeed, and what do these successes have to offer us? I should also mention hypothes.is as a scrappy and so far successful story...
the “invisible discipline,”
Nice phrase. If it's not the name of a Bushwick-based postpunk outfit, it should be.
And without mass adoption (which is somewhat a result of these limited resources), they are unable to offer interactive access to a networked population, arguably one of the most valuable “features” of social platforms with massive user bases
Here, the academia.edu v. the various open commonses in the academy comes to mind. At CUNY, where we have an unbelievable commons, I guarantee more faculty have academia.edu profiles than profiles in our scholarly commons!
a genuine, popular, and sustainable alternative to capitalist digital media
Your argument reminds me that nonprofit/open resources have such a uphill battle in ways that are analogous to or really isomorphic with co-ops more broadly in late capitalism: for every Park Slope Food Co-op that thrives next door to Whole Foods/Amazon (for now, at least!), there are innumerable scrappy, idealistic small-scale outfits that lose: it's hard to convince folks to pay the tax, so to speak, of $$ and convenience to work within the nonprofit structure's limitations.
The Free Software Foundation, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Internet Defense League, Fight for the Future, Platform Coop, and Unlike Us
Can we get some links here? I know some of these players but not others.
rogressive, collaborative, student-centered, and publicly-engaged learning in the classroom (Kai-Wai & Kennedy 2013) as critical alternatives to institutional technologies that are often driven by management imperatives rather than educational principles (Stommel 2017; Watters 2014)
I'd like to hear more about the arguments you marshal here: which capitalist tech are counterposed to which ed tech options?
a rejection of capitalist digital tools and the important time-saving, collaborative, and networking affordances they offer, may feel equivalent to professional suicide
I'm thinking guiltily about my own use of GDrive with students. I do try to embrace open platforms/interfaces whenever possible, but Google is JUST SO GOOD at some things that are really boring and routine but important to workflow.
and the still emerging details of the fake news scandal of the 2016 U.S. election have helped draw public attention to some of these issues, there is still little sign of effective resistance or democratic redirection of these technologies formore fully human aims.
My Hunter colleague Jessie Daniels has a great piece on how social media has enabled white supremacist organizations: as you suggest, it's not just "not being evil"--it's creating the infrastructure that enables others' evil with nothing but hand-wringing and -washing as a response.
Build OERs with your students. Though students may be beginners with most of the content in your course, they are often more adept than you at understanding what beginning students need in order to understand the material.
Very happy to see this utopian dimension that comes from the #digped side. At my institution, discussions from admin side tend to focus on the $$ savings issue in isolation; therefore, it becomes limited to simply replacing the $100 ECON text with "free" (read: created with fac labor) replacements and often embedded in closed LMSs.
How will they afford childcare on top of tuition fees? How will they focus on their homework if they haven’t had a square meal in two days or if they don’t know where they will be sleeping that night? How will their families pay rent if they cut back their work hours in order to attend classes? How much more student loan debt will they take on for each additional semester it takes to complete all of their required classes? How will they obtain the credit card they need to purchase an access code? How will they regularly access their free open textbook if they don’t own an expensive laptop or tablet?
This is a crucial point for those of us, like me, who teach outside of elite SLACs and private Us. A CUNY colleague of mine, librarian Maura Smale, has done amazing ethnographic work on "student taskscapes"--the way students' education is lived. What stands out so powerfully is the "last mile" problem y'all eloquently speak to here: time and $$ budgets required to find paper, printers, tablets, electricity, free time, a couple ft. sq. of space, and so on. Forget about a room of one's own: a corner to squat in, 50 pp of copying @ $0.05 per, and enough Luna bars to get through the day.
The excitement of and capitalization upon names and naming is for Stein no longer a matter of grammar, sentences, paragraphs, or prose, but of poetry.
Introduction of poetry to argument about sentences, paragraphs, and grammar comes out of left field here!
“Diagraming sentences” turns out not to be a case of what “I” do, but itself the subject and object of a “doing” of which “I” am the incidental product.
See my above comment: nice summary of the aporetic nature of grammar.
This “edge” of grammar, this “forgetting” of grammar, and this “difference” of “repeat and duplicate” form the beginning of a thought about the ways in which grammar may not quite “meet” or “arrive at” itself, and about the “why” of “making,” about the “thinking” that attends this nonidentity to itself of grammar. What does grammar—the reserve of a writing understood to “make” things like “emotion,” “paragraphs,” and incidentally “me”—itself hold in “reserve”?
Fascinating and rich. The simplest implication here is that HTW poses the problem of where "the subject" is located: in the I that speaks grammar, or in the grammar that makes it possible to construct a speaking I?
paradoxical nature of this “reserve” of exemplary value in Stein?
This, too, is really opaque (speaking of opacity). I take it that Lezra's point is that a) economics and psychoanalysis co-evolve in Stein's era around analogous structures; b) that Stein tries to ground her move from singularity to example in a similar structure.
The concurrent aesthetico-political debate over the legacies of early modernism cannot be separated from these broader crises in the conceptualization of the value-form
Cool move. Stein's (and many others') engagement of the value of words, the way signifiers are exchanged for signifieds, is implicated with economic decoupling of value from the "mystical constant" of gold etc. in the interwar period.
four aspects of the imbrication
Tough sledding here. Roughly:
paragraphs and sentences—roughly aligned, as she describes it, with the affective difference between the emotional and the nonemotional, between the natural and the nonnatural.
Useful analysis of the initially confusing distinction Stein makes: grammar aligned with "affective and organic states."
self-commodification
Useful biographical context: HOW TO WRITE appears amid shift towards Stein's celebrity and outreach to lay readers. Hesitancy between "unruled reception" (lovely phrase) and construction of onramps to broaden access.
The apposition permits a desperately interrogative tone to emerge—“How to read? How to write?”—quite at odds with the forthright sense of Stein’s title and of my own today, if rather more faithful to most readers’ experience of Stein’s work of the period.
Somewhat Steinian exploitation of ambiguity in syntax here. How to read how to write can be read two ways, depending on syntax.
Whether it’s penciling notes in the margins of a beloved novel,
"Penciling"? What's a pencil!?
makesitgodead
What makes it go dead? Recognition? As "beauty"?
became
everyone became consciously aware WWI as singular event for distributing the agreement in "composition," of recognizing the work of the "outlaw."
andromanticism
One of the most puzzling moments: romanticism is linked with 1914 and with a widespread linkage of sameness and difference. Is the idea that romanticism, as the first "modernism" in language, normalizes the idea of a break, of discontinuity in search of continuity?
usingeverything.
Three principles of "composition": continuous present, beginning again and again, using everything. Unpack this for students.
writingasitismade
Introduction of Stein's "continuous present," the idea of creating a rich, contingent space for the writer in the act of writing and the reader in the act of reading, a temporality that abolishes the neat past/present/future triad of traditional narrative.
goingtobethereandwearehere
Another motif that recurs throughout: composition creates a distance in space and time. We are here and its is "going to be there," appearing to us from a distance.
eginningagainandagain
First occurrence of this motif: central principle of composition is repetition, is "beginning again," a phrase which Stein evidently loves for its poetic qualities as much as its investment in creating loops of time.
athingacceptedbecomesaclassic
Side note: Stein's argument here is extremely close to that of Eliot's in his 1919 "Tradition and the Individual Talent," though Eliot is advocating for the "classic" rather than the newness of the new.
isanoutlawuntilheisaclassic
Temporality of "composition": the experimental artist disrupts and then is integrated into history as a "classic." Stein jokes (seriously) that "there is almost not an interval" between these two moments, that we forget that (for example) Picasso was an "outlaw" once he has become "classic" and "beautiful." It's certainly the case that a tour through MoMA is rich in examples!
time-sense.
New term. The discussion of war leads to the discussion of "composition" with "time-sense," temporality, the idea of the new art as making a break in time.
thewar
Beginning of a set of riffs on WWI narrowly and war more broadly: war as that which makes a break, produces difference. To this extent, modernism is deeply implicated with WWI and (perhaps) with war in general.
makesacomposition,itconfuses,itshows,itis,itlooks,itlikesitasitis,andthismakeswhatisseenasitisseen
Stein emphasizes that "ways of looking" change, and the list of verbs emphasize the power of the "composition" to derange looking and make us see "the same thing" anew in ways that "make a difference."
BythisImeansosimplythatanybodyknowsitthatcompositionisthedifferencewhichmakeseachandallofthemthendifferentfromothergenerationsandthisiswhatmakeseverythingdifferentotherwisetheyareallalikeandeverybodyknowsitbecauseeverybodysaysit
This word "composition" will be THE keyword in the piece. Note how much S freights "composition" with here: a) it inserts a wedge between generations (i.e., each generation has its own "composition" that is authentically "new"); b) it's something that only those who "know it" perceive, thus internally splitting a generation between those who are down with its "composition" and those who lag.
This word "composition" will be THE keyword in the piece. Note how much S freights "composition" with here: a) it inserts a wedge between generations (i.e., each generation has its own "composition" that is authentically "new"); b) it's something that only those who "know it" perceive, thus internally splitting a generation between those who are down with its "composition" and those who lag.
Indeed, in Barthesian terms West constructs a writerly album by utilizing the advent of Web 2.0. TLOP is/was made through the simultaneous collapse of the record-industry model and the creation of Web 2.0. Although it’s more than probable that both of these events contain a causality rather than a slight correlation, the heavens aligned and opened up before West, as one could only undergo such a creative undertaking in a world where “content is king.”
I like this provocative connection but wonder what Barthes would do with the way "celebrity" is wrapped up in Kanye's album (and career). To my eyes, Barthes's leftism is invested in a Literature that is demystified by dissolving the "author-function" into a shared ambience of reading-writing. It's certainly true that Kanye's work invites his fans in as "writers" in a sense (twitter, Genius, etc.) via Web 2.0 tech, but all this "writing back" also aggrandizes and inflates Kanye's own image (and lines his pockets). I don't say this by way of censure--to me Kanye is like Warhol in this dimension, and he's damn near as clever about it--but by way of distinguishing between two very different charges assigned to the "writerly" mode.
Following the Orion reference, "the boatman" is stated outright this time alluding to Charon, the ferryman of Hades who carries souls along Styx. This directly references the sea that the hunter is trapped on: the division between the world of the living and the world of the dead. This also serves as a potential reference to where Kafka acquired the idea for the appearance of the hunter windows would be shut, they would all lie in bed, with sheets thrown over their heads Max Brod, one of Kafka's closest friends and his literary executor who defied Kafka's wishes and published his work rather than burn it studied religions and might've been familiar with the pagan tradition of covering the face of the deceased to prevent the spirit from leaving the body to be a ghost for all eternity. Kafka might've lifted this idea to show how afraid the citizens of Riva would be if the hunter, a wandering spirit, would ask for help. Go back to the page The thought of wanting to help me is a sickness and has to be cured with bed rest. Rest cures were a very common way of treating sicknesses at the time this was written. Kafka at the time of writing this story was just diagnosed with tuberculosis and was going through the preliminary stages of seeking treatment. He would then be subject to rest cures for the years to follow up until the completion of this story in 1922. The fact that this is written at the end could match the timeline and Kafka's failing health even with the rest cures (with his death only two years later). Go back to the page I have lived for centuries. The hunter is now trying to solidify his place among biblical figures - a claim almost equating to himself as someone without sin for living an extremely long life. Biblical scholars have for years equated declining longevity in the bible to the introduction and practice of sin. Go back to the page And now are you intending to remain with us in Riva? "Remain in me, and I will remain in you" (John 15:4). Go back to the page it journeys with the wind which blows in the deepest regions of death. A typical end to Kafka's work. The ending is full of lament, anguish and anxiety. There is no end to the hunter who is to forever remain in purgatory - but aren't the people of Riva living in their own form of purgatory as the cycle of their mundane lives repeat? The accident of the hunter's fall deals less with death but the inability to die. Kafka's life closing soon in a very depressing fashion could lead him to believe that life itself is the true accident of existence. Go back to the page
missing a "back to the page" link
Julia, th
annotation missing?
beir
bier
it being a
its being a
it's
Its, not it's
by clarifying that Hermione Granger’s skin tone had never once been mentioned.
Interesting. This comment reveals how fans, as well as authors, can also be driven by unconscious biases.
Just as one can become more of a writer through reading, it seems that an annotation can also become a Text through ceaseless annotations upon it, and an annotator can thus also become an author.
Again, fabulous transition that pushes the argument in a new direction without losing the prior thread.
the potential to become a form of entertainment,
Cool. You make me think about temporality here, too: we think of novels as existing somewhat out of time, but these practices (not to mention the midnight vigils to buy new of HP novels) create an intense simultaneity for readers that makes them more like TV or film.
there is a total number of 78,787 and 95,683 listed Harry Potter related works respectively.
This archive begs for "distant reading" modes: how does this body of writing compare to the "original" texts?
though Rowling confirmed his homosexuality in interviews and on Twitter, many fans feel that the paratextual confirmation of Dumbledore’s sexuality is a cop-out.
This is a funny idea, no? Does Rowling know Dumbledore's sexuality better than her readers do? Who controls the authority of textual interpretations? You also might consider the rather aggressive role played by readers who want to prescribe X or Y depictions of sexuality here: do you see a problem with stipulating how "out" a character is in a text?
Fan fiction is effectively marginalia, annotations on an original source text that has gained a life and autonomy of its own. I
Lovely connection, and rhetorically speaking, a fabulous transition.
Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, could be read as fan fiction of the Bible.
This is WONDERFUL: hilarious and true.
something that is inherently natural
See above on "naturalizing."
the traditional roles of author and reader.
Avoid naturalizing print as the "traditional" here, since you're making very broad arguments encompassing oral-print-digital: it seems that your point is that "tradition" is evolving in ways that hearken back to pre-print tradition!
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
I would include MYTHOLOGIES rather than this later text, which is more illustrative of poststructuralism: Barthes is a convenient pivot-point between pre-late 60s structuralism and poststructuralism, since he's central to both periods.
This startling discovery confirms the idea that the repetition in the text is not completely random. Making the same discovery would have been difficult through close reading, since the text is replete with many shorter repetitions, and impossible through more straightforward string searches without preknowledge of its existence.
Here the argument gets really weird but/and interesting: Stein has written a text that only computers can read? Stein writes like a computer? Computers can write like Stein? I don't want to get too delirious here, like the "dreamy" bit from Voss and Werner above, especially since Clement's central point is that computing power is a tool in service of making meaning. But the example of Stein, whom many readers have found unreadable (for better and for worse) does push one's thinking in this direction.
Ultimately, these analytics and visualizations help us generate new knowledge by facilitating new readings of the text and by affording a self-reflective stance for comparisons, a perspective from which we can begin to ask why we as close readers have found some patterns and yet left others undiscovered.
Like Jeremy, I find this a weak broth. Quantifying approaches risk doing what social scientific disciplines sometimes end up doing: confirming what we already know with more data.
While it is not within the purview of this discussion to debate whether the categorical systems that structure the archive are any less structured than the database, the notion that we are constantly met with interfaces (such as the card catalog) that reflect real structures with real people (with all of their quirks and fallibilities and imaginative wonderfulness) in real institutions reminds us how material and constructed (how situated) is the context in which the reader accesses and analyzes cultural content with text analysis, data mining, and visualization methodologies.
Consistent reminder that analog cultural tech is still tech: that the card catalog or magnifying glass is as technological as the database or search tool.
that depend on differential (close and distant, subjective and objective) reading practices, technologies of self-reflection and collaboration, and the value of plausibility, all of which have always been crucial to literary inquiry.
So it's not just "distant" reading; rather, it's using computing to pose and answer a wide range of questions, some of which may be quite traditional.
All parts of the process—from creating quantified information to producing visualizations—are acts of interpretation.
Crucial point to make at the outset: dataviz is aesthetic and value-laden, not "objective" (whatever that means).
The reflection is very effective, subtly pointing out all that you packed into the voice of LM in the "move."
Here and throughout, you do a wonderful job of filling in the empty space around the "handsome" depiction of Budd. You really demonstrate how the game opens up imaginative possibilities of reading Melville in a "writerly" way a la Barthes.
Subtle allusion to the theory that Budd is Vere's son: I like it.
Many of my critics have thought: Clag sticky in English but a more convincing one, Anklaegar accuser in Greek (which alludes to Satan meaning accuser and adversary in Hebrew). I may have drawn inspiration from Paradise Lost. Being foreign, neither English nor Latin in origin of his name, is what makes this character stand out as was the accuser foreign and sudden, with no background, from the garden. Perhaps this was my intention or perhaps not but alas, I cannot remember for I am old in my days. Maybe if my characters could just speak to and remind me… Related
This fanciful riff nicely captures the creative process and I love the joke about wishing his characters could speak to him, which is quite possible in this game.
Billy would totally love emoticons!
….not. I think our Handsome Sailor is setting up a mutiny, why else would he be so nice? The way he charms all my men on the ship, the way he acts so “sweet” and inn-nnn-nn-o-ccc-eeennnt. I think he’s up to no good. I heard stories, about what happened with that man Delano and the slaves revolting against that poor Cereno lad.* He thought that soup incident was so funny. Wait till he thinks how funny he is when he walks the plank.
Exemplary instance of using the gameplay to explore off-kilter, unusual angles on the plot. Here you channel B. Johnson a bit and explore the possibility that Claggart is sincere and Billy devious: I love it.
I love this crossing of the streams. And many critics note parallels between BB and BC in terms of the questions of vision, blindness, and justice.
****”You just couldn’t let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.” The Dark Knight, Dir. Christopher Nolan. I chose to reference this quote because like Batman and the Joker, Billy and Claggart are forces that (by virtue of being opposite) are by nature destined to clash. In the context of this quote, the Joker is the “unstoppable force” (signifying “evil” like Claggart), Batman being the “immovable object” (signifying “good” like Billy). In that sense, Claggart is the unstoppable force, in which he eventually provokes violence against Billy the immovable object, leading to Claggart’s demise. Related
I'm fascinated that both you and Jeannine have referenced comic books (she mentioned DEADPOOL) with regard to the text. There must be something about the play of the game that is comic-like, no?
One of the most interesting moments for me in the Dansker’s narrative is when he cries this utterance, and I was desperate to find the different connotations of the phrase. I really like the idea that Dansker couldn’t quite verbalise what he was saying to Billy, that his language is so caught up in the nautical (cat’s-paw is also a knot often used in maritime settings), that he can’t quite breach into the wider English language. Related
Nice reading: exemplary instance of linking a creative performance to a more cerebral "close reading" in the same move. And I love that the "cat's paw" is a knot that is associatively linked with the knot in BENITO CERENO: I hadn't noticed that detail before.
With each wax and wane of the sun and sky the tension builds. I’m not the only one on the ship to notice it, and neither am I the only one to ignore it. But these young ones, these children – babies! They don’t ignore because they know the world like I do. They ignore the problem to save their wet hides, like a stowaway among the onions.
I love the voice you create here for the D-man. I also am really excited by the back-and-forth that your group has invested in around this move.
How I long for the days with Nelson, when the most thinkin’ I’d do would be in combat; when this scar on my face meant something more than “This old timer stood for something once”.
I love how much interpretation you fit into this move: the idea that the Dansker is very lively and verbose on the inside, the comparison between Nelson and Vere.
Love the use of the strikethrough to capture things thought "under erasure": nice use of the blogging medium to do things that are not customary in print.
ideo gameplay (and this was especially true in an arcade of the 1980s) is necessarily a hybrid experience, bodily as well as mental.
This is the thesis, in brief. And it's useful: we should dispense with words like "disembodied," which occlude our understanding of the ways our bodies inhabit virtual spaces via real interfaces in material ways.