What Theory Would Say....

I just read an assertion that people like other things, but love poetry.  This may be true, it may be not, but what 'theory' would say to this is : people SAY they love poetry. It is an enunciation. And they may be saying this to gain cultural capital. They also may actually love it--I hope he's right, we need as many people loving poetry as possible. But 'theory' would not just take greater Google hits of what people say as evidence of something actually existing as opposed to a discursive formation.

Perusing the Physical Book

I love e-readers--though my Kindle has mysteriously broken twice; I am awaiting my third--and love nothing more than standing around at dead time in the airport rereading something like Dombey and Son--but the physical book also has its incidental virtues. Keeping a book--a physical book--by your computer that you can dip into when you're bored, or can't face your own writing, is a great way to re-experience an author. I have my collected Robert Frost here for some reason and I'm finding tons of poems I never knew he wrote, and am reoriented how intellectual and political (not always wisely) he was....the lyrical Frost of the deathless, thoughtful meditaitons stands side by side with satirical jabs that would have sometimes been better jettisoned....only when you are bored and want to be distracted does one pick up such things otherwise one just flips through the book, alights on something one already knows and reconfirms it....

New blog

The American Association of Australasian Literary Studies has voted to set up a new blog and I will be doing the first few posts. This will further take my energy away from this already very intermittently maintained blog, but soon others will take up the slack with the Australian blog and I can return here to some extent 

Shakespeare and the Greeks

It is very interesting for me teaching an online course on classical Greek drama as well as, concurrently, doing an on-site course on Shakespeare--one sees the similarities and differences so vividly. Shakespeare did not know the Greeks--only as refracted through the ROman tradition as in Seneca--but he was their indirect legatee. In Shakespeare, since it is in our language, one concentrates so much on language, whereas one cannot with the Greeks. Certain nineteenth-century thinkers would not see this as a loss; Thomas Carlyle, for instance, thought only the ideas, not the language, mattered with respect to Greek drama, and German critics like Gervinus and Gundolf said the same of Shakespeare.

Another difference is that Shakespeare plays are so much longer, have, in many cases, subplots or counterplots, and have a five-act structure with multiple actors being on stage at the same time. In addition, there is no plural chorus in Shakespeare plays, although in rare cases, such as the role of Gower in Pericles. Prince of Tyre, a commentator acts as a kind of sole chorus, which is the case with the Choruses in e. g. Henry V or Romeo and Juliet,  or one can see the witches in Macbeth as a kind of anti-chorus. The many songs in Shakespeare plays  of course supply a choral element.

Shakespeare also writes both tragedy and comedy, whereas in Greece you were either a comedian or a tragedian. "Aristophanes here is our ha-ha man, whereas Sophocles here is the marry your mother, murder your father and blind yourself man." Shakespeare also develops a third genre, the history play, which was sampled in ancient times (Aeschylus' The Persians, the unpreserved works of Phyrnichus, the praetexta called Octavia and probably falsely, ascribed to Seneca) but seldom sustained both because of Aristotle's proscription of history as a subject for being insufficiently universal and because talking about history at all was bound to be politically subversive. Shakespeare in general gropes for tragicomic genres (not just the history play but the problem play, the romance) which bespeak his independence from the Greeks' generic norms.

That said, the similarities outweigh the differences, the theory of drama (no doubt mediated through the medieval Christian mass) is similar, and details of implementation, like women's roles being played by men, as well as undeniable physical limitations (having to perform their plays publicly in full daylight etc) are held in common. They are different parts of the same story, so far away from each other. Yet it is a kind of bogus universalism to stress only the similarities and not to consider the differences.

Conference Meta-Paper

Three years ago, I wrote a short paper on how to present conference papers--the intended audience was graduate students in Slavic studies and in nineteenth-century British, both areas in which a few people requested I address them on this topic. I subsequently re-tailored it for a broader audience--it has reverberated as far as the Republic of Georgia, i.e. Saakashvili Georgia, not Sonny Perdue Georgia) --and offer it here. Surprisingly, it has proven controversial, as my modest advocacy of complexity has upset people who want everything to be simple and lucid, or at least to insist that others strive for, or limit themselves by, such admonitions. I think the idea of research in the humanities is to struggle with complexity--not to be obfuscatory or incomprehensible or mystifying, but to be complex as the questions we answer warrant--and this paper is designed to show how the twin goals of complexity and rhetorical effectiveness can work in tandem.

Banalata Sen

My translation of the Bengali classic poem Banalata Sen, by Jibanananda Das. As one can see, my strategy was ot lean ehavily on borrowings from the English poetic tradition to conjure a sense of "antiquity"--always a difficult quality to project across languages and cultures!

Why is the NEW YORK TIMES so anti-theory?

It's interesting that the New York Times has this article extolling quantitative analysis solely because it is not deconstruction--in other context the Times would cavil at including so many noncanonical figures, and I myself an mainly interesting in knowing what the important Victorians thought--and in another article today the Times, or its critic, seems to think there was a serious, large-scale interpretive structure for literature before theory--if there was, theory would not have been needed. It is always the tactic of the anti-theorist to act as if pre-theoretical criticism was better than it was--and Lord knows I wish it had been. But we might also ask why the Times takes such an anti-theory line?  Is it to compensate for what are its left-wing politics in other areas, to make sure they do not go overboard? Or are they really more moderate or accommodationist in their politics and more overt about this when discussing theory? Do they object to any model of critical thought that stands in the way of a more directed consumer preference? Do they just wish all language to be on an easily comprehensible, journalistic plane? What is good about theory--and as I have said repeatedly, I am not a unilateral enthusiast about theory, particularly deconstruction--is that it foils such an understanding of language.