Infinite Jest Course August 16, 2009
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If you’ve come here looking for the Infinite Jest course, you’re in luck. Click on over to the course site. Enjoy!
Wallace and Ellis? August 11, 2009
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There are any number of literary allusions in Infinite Jest. In addition to the ubiquitous Hamlet references, we get glimmers of everything from Joyce’s Ulysses to Wittgensteinian logic (Stephen Burn tracks these like a pro). And while I’d like to note the classics, now and again, I’m slightly ashamed to note that the probable allusion that caught me was to one of Wallace’s contemporary, namely, Bret Easton Ellis.
In the last half of the novel (pp 538 or so), we get spend an extended amount of time with Randy Lenz, one of the residents of Ennet House. [Spoiler Alert!] Lenz, the narrator tells us, “has found his own dark way to deal with the well-known Rage and Powerlessness issues that beset the drug addict in his first few months of abstinence” (538). In the following section, we watch Lenz stalk and kill first rats, then cats, and move on to dogs. The apotheosis of his process (and a crucial plot point for the Gately narrative) is a blow-by-blow description of Lenz luring and then slitting the throat of a dog.
Sound familiar? Lenz, in his dress shoes and his Polo top coat, with his raging coke addiction only needed to add animale torture to his character profile before he began to sound a lot like Patrick Bateman in Ellis’s American Psycho. In this Google books Link to the novel, you can see versions of Bateman’s own rage and powerlessness issues, despite the fact that they stem from very different causes than Lenz’s. It’s not an exact description-for-description fit, I grant you, but Wallace did have some choice comments about Ellis’s work that make it clear that he’d read the book and it left an impression.
I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend “Psycho” as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.
[from Larry Mcaffrey's 1993 interview with Wallace, first published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction]
Ouch. Suppose, for a moment, that Lenz is a kind of reference, if not homage, per se, to Ellis’s character or worldview. What I like about the possibility is, of course, the way that Lenz—as a feature of Ellis’s blank, black world—works to catalyze Gately’s struggle with violence and recovery. Allegorically, it positions a dark and stupid world, and the cynical attitude that accompanies it, as a potential vehicle for a struggle to be responsible and human, and to make choices that bring people into the difficulties of the world, rather than standing outside of it. In other words, Lenz a la Ellis sets up the conditions in which an “illumination of the possibilities for being alive” can occur.
I’m not sure that I fully buy Wallace’s assessment of American Pyscho, for the record. But I do like the idea that their characters might exist and affect each other in the same literary universe.
Not-so Infinite Summer August 5, 2009
Posted by kmiddleton in Uncategorized.Tags: infinite jest, infinite summer
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So while the good people over at Infinite Summer are sedately working their way through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest at the reasonable pace of 75 pages per week, the students in my ENG 590 class have committed to reading all 1079 pages of the novel in three weeks. Where’s their prize for the speed round?
In keeping with their hard and earnest work with this behemoth (which they’re assiduously blogging and wiki-ing as well!), I thought I’d try to keep up with them, so here are my rather scattered thoughts on pp. 198-299. Primarily, this section gives us detailed information about Joelle Van Dyne and the lead up to her suicide, as well as Hal’s reaction to his father’s suicide. [Basically, there's a whole lot of suicide going on.] In addition, however, we get the back story on Orin—his shift from tennis to football, his relationship with Joelle; we also get our first clear look at the culture and rhetoric of AA at Ennet House. From a pedagogical perspective, I had a brief moment of panic: what are we going to talk about in class?!! Not much “happens” in this section. Needless panic, of course. Judging from the blog posts, the students are off and running with their own theories about characters and relevant themes and the overall reading experience of the novel itself.
For my part, I find that I now want to go back and re-examine prior passages to see if new information lends them new significance. In particular, I can’t get this description out of my head:
“locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern… a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely—of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth—each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses 2n possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone…as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skil and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of the self.”
Since we’ve been talking a bit about form and the experience of reading the novel, and since some of the students have pointed out the ways in which tennis can stand in, on a meta-level, for reading strategies, I wonder if there isn’t room to think a bit about how the quote above outlines a model of an infinite text. For all that we’re encouraged to see the deep structure of the novel (e.g., Sierpinski gasket, etc.), here we see a “game” that’s both infinite and contained by the self and its own boundaries—the infinities of choice and reactions to those choices. Incandenza spectrally speaks to the aesthetics of expansion without pattern—unmappable excess that can still have limits. Readers certainly find their own reflections of their own proclivities in this novel and its encyclopedic tendencies. Is it a text that promotes reading as a system of choice? If we’re good readers, we’re bound by the limits of the text, and yet have choices and responses to those choices that guide our interpretations, our foci within our individual experiences of reading. The self bounds the text, as the text reciprocally bounds the self?
Postmodern Listy-ness July 21, 2009
Posted by kmiddleton in reading.3 comments
It’s really all about the list, no? Somewhere, someone is articulating a complex theory on our media fascination with the list. In the meantime, however, I couldn’t help but post a link to the LA Times list of “61 Essential Postmodern Reads.“
The list is interesting for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it’s annotated! With graphics! And while my punctuation here might indicate a sarcastic appreciation for the aforementioned qualities, it is an easy way to understand why a particular book made the list, and also a quick and dirty representation of their criteria for inclusion. I’m a bit surprised to see that all of the criteria focus on form (e.g., “author is character,” “includes historical falsehoods,” and the needing-of-more-detail “plays with language”). Formal criteria allow the lister, Carolyn Kellogg, to include a number of intriguing picks that don’t always get included in the postmodern canon—Tristram Shandy, for instance, which gets a hearty “amen!” from me—or The Metamorphosis. But it also allows for a couple of real head-scratchers—The Scarlet Letter, anyone?
As any of my poor, put-upon students in the postmodernism seminar can tell you, I’m highly suspicious of a postmodernism defined solely on the basis of form. You don’t have to worship at F. Jameson’s feet to consider the idea that content might be part of the postmodern equation. And you don’t have to buy everything Linda Hutcheon ever thought to mull over the notion that an attempt at political/ideological intervention can be part of a postmodern aesthetic movement.
Those caveats (or screed. call it what you will) aside, however, the list does what many good lists do: it provides a basis for readers to debate inclusions, exclusions, and criteria. A look at the ever-expanding comments is a testament to Kellogg’s work. Take a look-see.
Not So Triumphant Return July 14, 2009
Posted by kmiddleton in Whatcha gonna do with that?.2 comments
What’s this? A blog? Who left this thing here? [blows dust off it.] Why, with a bit of attention, this might be usable!
It’s been awhile, folks, and for that I’ve got no big excuses, rationales, or apologies, really. Sometime in the lead up to the tenure process, it just seemed like I had very little to say. I’m not sure that I have brilliant things to say now, of course, but writing has to start somewhere.
Once upon a time, I had a little series I liked to call “Whatcha Gonna Do With That?”, which highlighted the multitudinous vocational and existential possibilities of an English major. So as a celebration of my return to the blogosphere, I give you this excellent addition to WGDWT: “In Defense of the English Major” by Alex Tunney, recent Saint Rose grad, writer, blogger, jack-of-all-trades.
Enjoy!
Virginia Woolf Speaks! October 23, 2008
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Courtesy of The Guardian UK, The BBC announced this week that they’re releasing CD’s that feature audio recordings of famous authors, including Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a drunken Raymond Chandler (surprise), and the only known surviving recordings of Virginia Woolf. At the link itself, you can hear a snippet of her discussing writing. I have to confess that she sounds nothing like I expected, and I suspect that’s entirely because of my modern ear. I think I wanted something at once more dulcet and a bit less posh. But there is a frisson of hearing her characteristic prose in her own voice. Here’s a brief self-transcribed snippet from the bit you can hear at The Guardian (which begins at about 1:40 or so).
Do we write better? Do we read better than we read and wrote 400 years ago, when we were unliteratured, uncriticized, untaught? Is our modern, Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Well, where are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors, not on our reviewers, not on our writers, but on words. It is words that are to blame. They all the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all of these. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind…
There are some complicated thoughts here about the place of the modern writer in the teleological trajectory of literature, and it would be no small task to articulate Woolf’s representation of the Word itself. I’ll leave this for the Woolf scholars to sort. In the meantime, I think I’ll call up the library and ask if we can order the CDs. I can’t wait to hear the full 8 minutes of Woolf’s recording, as well as the others.
As a sidenote, this came my way via Tina Brown’s new venture, The Daily Beast. (Some might remember Brown as a former editor of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. As with all things Brownian, it’s big and theatrical and snarky. But it’s also looking for the intersections of politics and culture in ways that I think many political blogs (like the Huffington Post) don’t quite manage. Give her a read.
The Times on “Teaching” September 20, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in pedagogy, pop culture.Tags: Add new tag, pedagogy
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Reading the New York Times Magazine’s College Life issue this morning was nothing if not a reminder that representations of cultures are seldom analogous to the material realities of those who live in them. I’ve written here before about popular representations of professors (and how those resemble approximately 2% of my colleagues), but the Times today expands its reach to include not just professors, but teaching and writing as well.
It begins with an article titled “Those Who Write, Teach.” The title suggested to me, as it would to many in the profession (particularly those of us at teaching institutions), the long-standing conversation about the connections between scholarly work and teaching. In essence, how does your research inform what you do in the classroom, and vice versa? How might you address the very real difficulties of carving out time to stay current in your field while attending to your students’ learning processes?
Instead, “Those Who Write” is a first person piece by David Gessner, in which he describes the plight of the writer “in captivity”—i.e., trapped by an academic job that slowly sucks the wildness out of him and his writing. To be fair to Gessner, there’s not a teacher alive who doesn’t fantasize about what she could be doing if she weren’t grading papers, fielding student questions, preparing for class. But I can’t help getting my feathers ruffled by two things here: first, the ambivalence of the title worries me. Is it referencing the old inspiring saw “those who CAN, teach,” and thus making writing (here strictly defined as creative writing) the equivalent of ability? Or is it more insidious, calling to mind instead the insult “those who CAN’T, teach” and thereby insinuating that writing within the confines of the academy eventually leads to a lack of ability?
Second, Gessner’s image of the work of teaching troubles me. Even as he critiques an earlier era of creative writing pedagogy (“learn by osmosis” from the “great man or woman”), he cites his love for teaching as one that’s grounded in sharing his work, in being a great entertainer, in being surrounded by people committed to writing. On top of this, the job provides a stable daily structure, a “badge” of legitimacy, and the aggregate of all of this moves toward balancing the ways in which he must trade “reading great literature and communing with writers of the past” for “apprentice writing.”
There’s something crucial that’s missing from Gessner’s description of teaching, and that is arguably it’s most important characteristic: the one where you learn from your students, and learn to teach them to learn. I’m in deep cliched water here, I have no doubt, but it’s very simply true: there is great joy and daily reward from the surprise of what students see that you’ve missed; in experimenting with various approaches to connect what they already know with what you hope they’ll take away from any given text.
The innate reciprocity of teaching is also missing from the Times’ second article: Virginia Heffernan’s study of professors on YouTube. I’ll spare you the close textual analysis here, but suffice to say that as she ranks and assesses the available videos, she constructs a very particular equation: virtuoso teaching=charismatic lecture=box-office gold. I have no interest in rehashing ye olde lecture vs. seminar debate. A great lecture is all of the things that Heffernan so closely observes in the videos she cites. Yet I can’t help but flinch at such a medieval definition of teaching. A “sage on the stage” is still that, even if the stage has become an international and digital one. There’s a special irony here too, of using one of the most popular forms of Web 2.0 technology—a designation that highlights the interactivity of the medium—to relay content without reciprocity.
The “college life” issue is one of many recent representations of college life (see Smart People, Elegy, the movie College for god’s sakes). Any more, and a careful cultural critic might begin to suspect that we’re hell-bent on representing a single professor and his/her well-wraught pedagogical urn in order to distract ourselves from all of the other types of college experiences out there.
