Like most of us, I had to page back through my own posts from this quarter to remember what topics I chose and why. This then became an unavoidable study in the biases I had cultivated over time towards certain aspects of scholarly work. What fascinated me most (if I can be allowed to embrace the thrilling perversity of being fascinated by myself) is the apparent resistance to close-reading. Even in my heavily idealized and hypothetical teaching posts, there is a marked distaste for creating lessons out of small, particular moments of textual analysis in Woman on the Edge of Time. In most cases, my engagement with our articles from this quarter emerges from a place of structural interest and a constitutive need to see why this thing of all the things in the article matters.
So, in continuing service of the aforementioned perversity, I'm going to somewhat grossly reduce my posts (excepting the collaborative) to a single descriptor each and use that to indulge in more wanton structural play.
- Week 2, "Can literary criticism create its own object of study?", in which I take an offhanded comment in Chakrabarty and use it to ask how we make the concept of literature an object with a pre-defined purpose
- Week 3, "Cutting the body and text," in which I have a visceral reaction to Smyth's use of the word and end up existentially wondering if it's ever really possible to avoid doing violence to a text or a body
- Week 4, "The Obligation to Instruct," in which I make an entire post out of Raley's lifehacking footnote and implicitly add to my own first post by suggesting we make the concept of literature at the same time it's always already a concept
- Week 7, "Teaching in Concentric Circles," in which I give up pretending my interest isn't completely structural and create an impossibly abstract lecture out of Spivak's idea of reading for a class that would hate it even though I started with a gesture at close-reading
- Week 8, "The Porous Body," in which I use the structure of Chen's critical/personal piece to build a lecture around my own political motivations and discover a strange value in using a fictional, 1970s ungendered (though not unproblematic) pronoun
(I have not listed the two collaborative posts with Katherine and Rebecca here so that I can avoid reducing collaborative work to my own interpretation of that work, and also because it would be curious to see a different structural analysis on the way those collaborations were pursued and enacted).
This brings me to my larger point--because of course there is one [insert bad meta-structure joke]--about the one issue I've developed this quarter. For all the variety in the articles and the richness of the text in Woman on the Edge of Time, my topic has been the same in each post: the value of The Question. For me, structural, theoretical, or merely abstract analyses are an alternative way of approaching my own frequent frustration with my work and scholarly analyses in general, which manifests as a desperate "why should I care," or even "why do I care."
Though this is something I think probably depends on an individual's ability to reconcile the practice of studying literature with the value questions asked of those studying literature, I personally find that there is great utility in asking myself what the point of doing this actually is. It's apparent to me from my posts over the span of the quarter that I have been using Woman to ask this, and, in many ways, watching it answer my question via the continued push into structure.
Several of you are already aware that I have decided to exit the program after this quarter and pursue an "alt-ac" career for the time being (and for those of you who weren't aware until now, please forgive the crassness of finding out via blog). I mention this because I think it has bearing on the topic that has been coming out of my novel and the articles for the past couple months. I would suggest that my creative process has been an attempt not so much to get at the "point of it all," as it were, but at what I think is a more crucial question in pursuing higher education: "what is the point of this for me and right now?"
If the Chen article taught us anything, it was that the critical can be deeply embedded in the personal, and I think that always defaulting to close-reading can make us forget to ask ourselves the more difficult, abstract, or structural questions about our work. In our obsession with the criticalness of literary criticism, it's all too easy to ignore that, at the same time literature is Chakrabarty's object of study, it's also an experience, a medium for self-analysis, and a strong marker of our own temporality. Graduate students are often told that they will go through phases of crisis and self-doubt, but I rarely (if ever) hear someone suggest turning to the very texts that cause this crisis and letting them show you the structure of your own relationship to your research. I think we'd all find a surprisingly ally in our work no matter what direction it seems to be taking.
Cassie, this is a beautiful post. You ask a really important question, and your analysis of your own blogging makes a powerful statement. I knew these blog posts would be a good exercise in writing regularly, but who knew they would raise such big questions? (At least I didn't anticipate it...)
ReplyDeleteOn the topic of personal bias, I've been thinking more about my own biases in my blogging since posting my blog entry a few days ago. In my post I indicated that I had moved beyond my initial bias (only wanting to talk about maps and spaces, as I'm wont to do) but also that my ability to find such an overarching theme in my posts meant I was still operating within a certain framework in considering my text. My comment about how I chose general themes to focus on each week before even reading the critical articles I think reveals how difficult it was for me to do what I thought had been part of "the point" of the blogging exercise: to approach one primary text from many different angles, some of them strange, against-the-grain ones. The more I think about how I challenged and expanded my interpretations of By the Sea, the more I realize that there are infinitely more elements of the novel that I have still never thought about at all. The question you pose (and your statement that we will find a surprising ally in our work) makes me want to figure out what my bias in approaching the text (or any text) even is—I think it's a really important thing to have an answer to and to be aware of its evolution over time.
Cassie, I love the way you've managed to call attention to all the layers of the idea of "questioning" without collapsing it. Your observation of the intimate connection between the interpretive and the personal is insightful and left me with a lot to think about (mostly in the form of just this sort of potentially fruitful questioning). Thank you for this!
ReplyDelete