Hemingway and I

Hemingway wrote stories in only six words, mini short stories in a sense. "For sale: baby shoes, never used." It was a prompt in a writing community, and I've been toying with 6 word stories since. They're wonderful ways of practicing the 'show, don't tell' mantra (which I've a newly gleamed understanding off, gained partially from Shklovky's ideas about defamiliarisation and reading a lot of really bad fiction). And they're pieces I have the heart and time to finish. Though mine tend to have eight words. Not using colons and semi-colons is so difficult.

They remind me of William Carlos Williams' poetry: images and short glimpses you can do what you will with. It's not so much what the writer intended, but what the reader sees (Fuck, I sound like Stanley Fish: there is no text, there are only readers).

I'm evidently not dead yet. I'm just buried in literary theory. Which has crystallized my need to get away from this hornet's nest of a field. I am a philologist at heart, and I will always be, but I cannot work with it. Had I not tried I would likely always have regretted it, and I would have missed this experience. While it has not been what I wanted, it turned out to be edifying. Though I will always long to study at Oxford. Perhaps I will, once. When I am old and grey, and finally have time.

Drinking coffee now, trying not to spill all over the Greenblatt text. He's one of the only theorists I can stomach. So many of them are bad writers, or terribly vague. They use stilted jargon to hide bad reasoning, or complete lack of reasoning (Foucault, I want to strangle you). I find it heartening that a Norwegian intellectual agrees, Jon Elster caused an uproar a few years back for calling Kristeva, Foucault, Derrida (and a good deal of others) notorious charlatans. Elster claims most of their works are based on faulty abstractions, and that they lack proper reasoning. I think he even went so far as to call it 'bad quasi-philosophy'. I'm tempted to mail him and tell him just how refreshing I find that view, or quote him on my exam. (Though that would get me failed, they do not call for critique beyond correction of misspelled names.) I met him briefly in Ebbe's funeral, and my last name would likely go down well.

Elster actually closes any books that voices sympathy towards any of these theorists. He claims all sensible people agree with him, and that life is too short to read drivel. I think I'll copy that. I will read the originals, or anything critical, but nothing else. Life really is too short to read useless literary theorists.

The problem about it all is that most of literary theory (perhaps excepted narratology), is based on these abstractions. Either through the works of structuralists and formalists directly, or by way of representation theory. If you remove these foundations, there is no raison d'être left for the literary sciences.

But I'll get back to my sortie later. I'm writing a suicide letter (quite harmless, really, but it is a literary studies suicide). I just don't quite know where I want to address it. [I can't help include my cheesiest tag ever: 'Alexandra's sortie', there is no such thing as too much drama. And I am part Russian, after all.]

Hemingway and I

Hemingway wrote stories in only six words, mini short stories in a sense. "For sale: baby shoes, never used." It was a prompt in a writing community, and I've been toying with 6 word stories since. They're wonderful ways of practicing the 'show, don't tell' mantra (which I've a newly gleamed understanding off, gained partially from Shklovky's ideas about defamiliarisation and reading a lot of really bad fiction). And they're pieces I have the heart and time to finish. Though mine tend to have eight words. Not using colons and semi-colons is so difficult.

They remind me of William Carlos Williams' poetry: images and short glimpses you can do what you will with. It's not so much what the writer intended, but what the reader sees (Fuck, I sound like Stanley Fish: there is no text, there are only readers).

I'm evidently not dead yet. I'm just buried in literary theory. Which has crystallized my need to get away from this hornet's nest of a field. I am a philologist at heart, and I will always be, but I cannot work with it. Had I not tried I would likely always have regretted it, and I would have missed this experience. While it has not been what I wanted, it turned out to be edifying. Though I will always long to study at Oxford. Perhaps I will, once. When I am old and grey, and finally have time.

Drinking coffee now, trying not to spill all over the Greenblatt text. He's one of the only theorists I can stomach. So many of them are bad writers, or terribly vague. They use stilted jargon to hide bad reasoning, or complete lack of reasoning (Foucault, I want to strangle you). I find it heartening that a Norwegian intellectual agrees, Jon Elster caused an uproar a few years back for calling Kristeva, Foucault, Derrida (and a good deal of others) notorious charlatans. Elster claims most of their works are based on faulty abstractions, and that they lack proper reasoning. I think he even went so far as to call it 'bad quasi-philosophy'. I'm tempted to mail him and tell him just how refreshing I find that view, or quote him on my exam. (Though that would get me failed, they do not call for critique beyond correction of misspelled names.) I met him briefly in Ebbe's funeral, and my last name would likely go down well.

Elster actually closes any books that voices sympathy towards any of these theorists. He claims all sensible people agree with him, and that life is too short to read drivel. I think I'll copy that. I will read the originals, or anything critical, but nothing else. Life really is too short to read useless literary theorists.

The problem about it all is that most of literary theory (perhaps excepted narratology), is based on these abstractions. Either through the works of structuralists and formalists directly, or by way of representation theory. If you remove these foundations, there is no raison d'être left for the literary sciences.

But I'll get back to my sortie later. I'm writing a suicide letter (quite harmless, really, but it is a literary studies suicide). I just don't quite know where I want to address it. [I can't help include my cheesiest tag ever: 'Alexandra's sortie', there is no such thing as too much drama. And I am part Russian, after all.]