“Inventing the University”

Hattie recommended David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” in Rose, Mike (ed.), When a Writer Can’t Write (New York: Guilford, 1985) 135-165. The book was not in the library so I ordered a used copy, often the cheapest thing to do. It was not a good copy so I am giving it away and ordering another.

It is a good article on how students, as they acquire the skill of writing for and in a particular discipline, have to speak in a false voice, bluff, at least at first. To write as a student is to write without authority in the voice of one who has. One must do this so as to pass courses, get degrees, and so on.

This way learning “becomes more a matter of imitation or parody than a matter of invention and discovery” (143). The writer needs to “get inside of a discourse that he [can] in fact only partially imagine” (160).

That is why I say that, once one has in fact learned to write, the Boicean imperative to start writing before you feel ready, is so wrong.

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Dana Gioia

The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.

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General Bibliography

I am cleaning out files and I cannot keep everything. Yet I note that:

1. Gerald Graff in Profession 2007 talks about “our undemocratic curriculum” and how standardization could democratize it. I have a somewhat related post on the profession at my other blog.

2. Gustav Jahoda has a very interesting book, Images of Savages. Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (Routledge 1999). He starts out by talking of the monstruous races of Pliny the Elder … who created a compendium of humanoid creatures so far invented. There is much other interesting information including about Medieval views of ‘Blacks’. I have ordered this book.

3. Jeff Browitt’s article “Tropics of Tragedy: The Caribbean in GGM’s One Hundred Year’s of Solitude” (Shibboleths: a Journal of Comparative Theory 2.1 [2007] 16-33, available on line in full text) is worth reading slowly.

The piece reminds us that in the 1960s “the stage was set for a marketing assault on the international audience for prose fiction” because of the sense of exhaustion (John Barth) in Euro-North American fiction and the attraction of the exotic. It questions the novel’s chronicling of a “failure in the quest for community framed within fatalistic and tragic structures.” It points out that this failure is commonly attributed to the apparent inability of Latin americans to develop a historical consciousness. The author disagrees with this conclusion.

GM has always said that solidarity is the opposite of solitude and that Macondo suffers from the lack of love. Gerald Martin, among others, takes this at face value.

There is this interesting footnote (number 2): Angel Rama challenged the thesis on individual creation which underpins Vargas Llosa’s HISTORIA DE UN DEICIDIO. Vargas Llosa said Rama’s criticism was indicative of “the ideological blackmail of a new Inquisition that has arisen at the heart of the left” (54, in I am not sure which Vargas Llosa book).

The idea of predestination underpins the novel structurally and philosophically. The characters do not learn from history and the novel, in the end, symbolically kills a class parasitic upon the majority of the population.

GM cites as sources European modernist texts, but his actual sources are Latin American.

National failure in this and other novels (cf. Carpentier) is often presented as a failure of human nature (corruption, moral failure, pride) or to physical Nature. The actual problem is that national success is expected to follow Northern models when in reality Northern countries continue to plunder LA. The author cites TULIO HALPERIN (in 150-55 of I am not sure which book) on these matters. HALPERIN shows how the ambiguous attempt to define LA identity either with or against geography leads to contradictions at a fundamental level.

Faulkner never claimed his tales of Southern decline applied universally but GM applies his to the entire region … or even the West since the Enlightenment. RICARDO GULLON suggests he applies it to all of creation. This is TRAGIC REALISM (Goldmann, Orr) not magic realism.

The novel’s structure of feeling is romantic-conservative. Past is favored ovr present, rural against urban, communitarianism against individualism, established order against ambition. The aristocratic provincial order is destroyed by the outside influences of industry, national government, and the proletarian masses, i.e., by capitalist social relations.

Gerald Martin thinks the apocalyptic end means the end of idealism. (See footnote 13, however: HALPERIN is more interesting because he says the Boom novels imitated their naturalist predecessors in terms of biologism and racial determinism and their pessimistic appraisal of the capacity of the popular classes to enter modernity. This is why they exhibit the same fatalism.) This writer, however, sees nothing in the novel to support that. “If the novel were no more than an account of the destruction of an inauthentic past, then the tragic structure would be inappropriate” (26).

The writers says the novel is the aesthetic destruction of an inauthentic past, but it is ALSO framed in a tragic strucure which provides a particular way of looking at the world and at history. GM’s gaze, and Martin’s, is still essentially European and elitist: Macondo is condemned for not living up to European conceptions of the modern community.

It is possible that magical realism does not reveal a better, more accurate understanding of LA historical reality, but rather masks a catastrophic imposition of Western European ‘empire’ that has infused the very fictional logic of much LA writing in its attempts to demonstrate, via fiction, why LA cannot ‘get it right’ with modernity and nation-state formation, the lack of which leads to a false conclusion – the inability to develop a historical consciousness.

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Petrey on Berman

Literary versus cultural studies?

To impose a choice between literary studies and cultural studies strikes me as horribly misguided, something like imposing a choice between breathing and eating.

Yet that choice is being imposed with more and more insistence, its suicidal consequences accepted with less and less concern. At times, those preaching an either/or approach have done so in defense of literature, and I refuse the idea that literature is Emerson’s “jealous mistress” who tolerates nothing else in her domain. To study either high culture or popular culture as if the other were unworthy of concern impoverishes both, which means the literary studies/cultural studies binary is pernicious no matter which side defends it.

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Hart on Vallejo

To test my new copy of Microsoft Word, I took a few notes on a fascinating article I wish to remember. I must say it is a wonderful, guilty pleasure to have MSW again … I know I should prefer Open Office but I just don’t, particularly because it is so complicated to make accent marks in it unless you have a separate numbers pad and just punch in the ASCII codes (reason enough to acquire a desktop computer). Here is what I wrote as MSW started up: Vamos a ver si funciona este programa. Si funciona me encantará. Qué maravilla – está funcionando. Nunca estuve tan feliz. Es adorable.

You would be absolutely amazed, however, to see how code heavy MSW is. Shocking. And now, on to the article.

HART, Stephen. “Vallejo y sus espejismos.” Romance Quarterly 49:2 (Spring 2002): 111-118.

This is an article on Vallejo, the literary phenomenon. An espejismo is an optical illusion caused by the reflection of light as it crosses air layers of different densities. Vallejo, the literary phenomenon, is full of these.

It is worth quoting in full Hart’s entire first paragraph. He is interested in looking at the espejismos of Vallejo life and death, those that traverse his work, and his self-projection as a mystery, an enigma, an espejismo.

There are many known espejismos: the uncertainty about Vallejo’s date of birth (note: he could have hidden/changed it to hide his identity in Europe), the mystery of his cause of death, the question of whether he was really innocent, or not, of arson and murder.

Note also Georgette as an unreliable narrator. Because she did not know everything about Vallejo’s life but felt she should, she would say partially invented things, and then invent more when new facts came to light to fit the new facts into her original narrative. [This is just like my colleagues in French, it is amazing.]

Georgette invented titles including Contra el secreto profesional and also El arte y la revolución.

Vallejo presents himself as an espejismo when in his poems, he refers to himself by name. He creates an abyss between the speaking subject and Vallejo the author (how different is this from Borges y yo, though?). There is the I who speaks and the I who feels.

In “Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca” note that the speaker seems to be in two places at one time, or at two times in one place (present and past, “le pegaban todos sin que él le haga nada”). When he wrote these words he was alive, but he wrote as though dead. So he sees himself as a mysterious being, a ghost, an espejismo.

There is much more in this article and there is good bibliography.

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The Racial Other

Course at Cambridge University. See their other Spanish tools as well.

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Vicky Unruh

Note the chapter on language and the prelinguistic, and the remarks in it on architecture, in Unruh’s 1994 book on the Latin American avant-gardes (UC Press).

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I Wish I Could Understand My Notes

They are on two unrelated writing projects. They say:

+ Cadena would say race does not exist in LA as it does here, but how was THAT idea produced given that thinking about race is so prevalent there?

+ Look at Piedra.

*

+ I may be able to figure this out if I forgive myself for not having been able to figure it out yet.

+ Material circumstances matter and the exhortation to “rise above them” is idealist. The whole Professor Zero blog is about this. PZ used the blog to combat depression and procrastination that did not have to do with spiritual attitude or poor work skills but with material circumstances and material projects.

+ I am looking at the Boice book, Professors as Writers, on this. It is about writing and he is perfectly correct on every point. But he does not address what I would address. Those are things like: are you following advice or guidelines you know are not correct? do you really like your project, as in, you would like it even if it were not the “practical” thing to be writing? if not, is the reward for it (i.e. getting to pass a course, getting to stay in a graduate program you want to stay in) attractive enough?

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Walter Benjamin

In 1912 Benjamin began his university studies in Freiburg, where he encountered some of Wilhelmine Germany’s most distinguished faculty. He attended history lectures by Friedrich Meinecke and took courses in philosophy with Heinrich Rickert. Generally bored by academia, however, he likened his experience with the professoriate to “a mooing cow to which students were compelled to listen”; in his later essay “The Life of Students,” he asserted, “scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it.”

Benjamin would maintain a deep skepticism toward academia throughout his life. Though he managed to earn his doctorate (The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism), summa cum laude, in 1919, he complained to Scholem that he had to “hack through” his courses, and the two friends, both based in Switzerland at the time, joked incessantly about establishing their own parody institution, the University of Muri.

In the mid-1920s Benjamin confided to Scholem that the theoretical introduction to his postdoctoral thesis, on the origin of German tragic drama (his halfhearted attempt to launch an academic career), was an act of “unmitigated chutzpah.” Benjamin never warmed up to the idea of being attached to a single institution, academic or otherwise, and scholarly specialization was generally anathema to an intellect as omnivorous as his.

That is the amusing part of the article, but there are new books out on Walter Benjamin – of whom I am a fan – and these are the larger points.

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Lecturas Claves

Students in the English department wishing to study Latin American literature in translation for their PhD are allowed to write their own reading lists and not required to take coursework. As a scholar I disagree with this policy. But as an American I find that we should read texts from other countries – as long as we are not simply committing one more act of cultural appropriation.

After my most recent adventure I am making a required list to which students may add, but from which they may not subtract. It is to be representative and limited, but deep, and there will be required critical readings as well. Everything must be available in a good translation. I am starting with Independence.  Please comment.

REQUIRED PRIMARY [stating list]. Yes, it has no ‘boom’ novels or ‘post-boom’ ones. It is very canonical and does not include a great many texts by women or racial ‘others.’ It neglects theatre. This is a list to add to.

Bolívar, Simón. Message to the Congress of Angostura
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo
Matto de Turner, Clorinda. Torn From the Nest
Martí, José. Our America
Darío, Rubén. To Roosevelt
Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel
Azuela, Mariano, MACUNAIMA, M. de Andrade, MACUNAIMA, J.E. Rivera, THE VORTEX, or another novel from this period
Huidobro, Vicente. Altazor
Vallejo, César. Spain, Take This Cup from Me
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths
Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo
Carpentier, EXPLOSION IN A CATHEDRAL, Castellanos, THE NINE GUARDIANS or Cortázar, HOPSCOTCH, and one other novel from this period
Morejón, Nancy. Black Woman
At least one additional text

REQUIRED SECONDARY [starting list]

Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions
Silviano Santiago, The Space In Between: Essays on Latin American Culture
Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities
Angel Rama, The Lettered City
Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban
Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre
Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas

RECOMMENDED HISTORICAL BACKGROUND [starting list]

Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America
Tulio Halperín, The Contemporary History of Latin America

ADDITIONAL CRITICAL BACKGROUND [starting list]

Andres Bello – Renato Ortiz – Beatriz Sarlo
Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture

SUGGESTIONS FOR ADDITIONS TO THE MAIN READING LIST

Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar
Clarice Lispector…

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