Jane Gallop: "There is a certain pederasty implicit in pedagogy."

Reading Jane Gallop, thinking through Ronell, reflecting on graduate education, mentorship...
Jane Gallop, The Father's Seduction:

“There is a certain pederasty implicit in pedagogy. A greater man penetrates a lesser man with his knowledge.  The homosexuality means that both are measurable by the same standards, by which measure one is greater than the other...  These structures necessarily exclude women, but are unquestioned because sublimated-raised from suspect homosexuality to secure homology, to the sexually indifferent logos, science, logic” (1984: 63).

"Irigaray impertinently asks a few questions, as if the student, the women, the reader were not merely a lack waiting to be filled with Freud's knowledge, but a real interlocutor, a second view point.  And in her questions a certain desire comes through, not a desire for a 'simple answer,' but for an encounter, a hetero-sexual dialogue.  Not in the customary way we think heterosexual -- the dream of symmetry, two opposite sexes complementing each other.  In that dream the woman/student reader ends up functioning as mirror, giving back a coherent, framed representation to the appropriately masculine subject..." (1984: 66).

"In the transcribed seminar, Irigaray says: 'What I desire and what I am waiting for, is what men will do and say if if their sexuality gets loose from the empire of phallocratism'" (1984: 66).

Michael Warner: Uncritical Reading

"Uncritical Reading" by Michael Warner

Students who come to my literature classes, I find, read in all the ways they aren’t supposed to. They identify with characters. They fall in love with authors. They mime what they take to be authorized sentiment. They stock themselves with material for showing off, or for performing class membership. They shop around among taste-publics, venturing into social worlds of fanhood and geekdom. They warm with pride over the national heritage. They thrill at the exotic and take reassurance in the familiar. They condemn as boring what they don’t already recognize. They look for representations that will remediate stigma by giving them “positive self-images.” They cultivate reverence and piety. They try to anticipate what the teacher wants, and sometimes to one-up the other students. They grope for the clichés that they are sure the text comes down to. Their attention wanders; they skim; they skip around. They mark pages with pink and yellow highlighters. They get caught up in suspense. They laugh; they cry. They get aroused (and stay quiet about it in class). They lose themselves in books, distracting themselves from everything else, especially homework like the reading I assign.

Frank Lentricchia on the Poem vs. the Corpus in analysis

Frank Lentricchia on the Poem vs. the Corpus in analysis...

“To move, as I just have, from the single poem as closed, isolate, verbal system, a world unto itself, to the poem as microcosmic fragment of a poetic corpus, is to move, in a sense, not at all: for the corpus so conceived, as a synchronic whole, is likewise closed and isolate.” [Ariel and the Police 15]

Frank Lentricchia on the Poet as a unit of analysis...

Frank Lentricchia on the Poet as a unit of analysis...

“To invoke an agent called "the poet" as creator of a corpus is to invoke a subject who always contained and expressed it all, so that those temporal distinctions of career ("early," "middle," and "late") are truly gratuitous— they make no difference. Not even "career," in this interpretive context, makes much sense since the term suggests a determinate act of will to shape a life, to set an ordered narrative in motion and thereby bring your life into control [into art] by making it a story.  “The poet" so invoked as an originator is a necessary fiction (we have to invoke an individual at some point), yet at some other level he must be real [“Wallace Stevens” after all is the name is the name of a person who was born, went to Harvard, liked his mother better than his father, married, worked for an insurance company and loved it, often took vacations in Florida alone, listened to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera House, did not did not get a divorce, made a lot of money, died of cancer, and maybe converted on his deathbed if you want to believe the nuns who attended him at the end, which I do.” [Ariel and the Police 15-16].

Maria Sanford on "Fight Films"

Other Sources of Income for the First Woman (Rhetoric) Professor in Minnesota: Gold Mining

Maria Sanford Invests in Rubber

Maria Sanford on Gold Mining

Maria Sanford in the Papers

Maria Sanford in Brainerd

Margaret Atwood on Caravaggio

"No wonder St. Matthew looks so apprehensive in Caravaggio's painting of him, clutching his pen while a rather thuggish angel dictates to him what he must write down: the act of writing comes weighted with a burden of anxieties. The written word is so much like evidence - like something that can be used against you later" 

Maria Sanford and University Extension

Maria Sanford invests in Grapefruit

Margaret Atwood on the Identity of the Writer when not Writing...

Margaret Atwood on the Identity of the Writer when not Writing...

“What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of ‘the writer’? The particular writer. By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward, and that other, more shadowy and altogether equivocal person who shares the same body and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing.”

Margaret Atwood on the Cultural Role of the Writer, from Negotiating with the Dead

Margaret Atwood on the Cultural Role of the Writer, from Negotiating with the Dead

“As for writing, most people secretly believe they themselves have a book in them, which they would write if they could only find the time. And there’s some truth to this notion. A lot of people do have a book in them – that is, they have had an experience that other people might want to read about. But that is not the same as ‘being a writer.’  

"Or, to put it in a more sinister way: everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave-digger. The latter takes a good deal more stamina and persistence. It is also, because of the nature of the activity, a deeply symbolic role. As a grave-digger, you are not just a person who excavates. You carry upon your shoulders the weight of other people’s projections, of their fears and fantasies and anxieties and superstitions.”

On The Moment Atwood Became A Writer, from Negotiating With the Dead: a Writer on Writing

On The Moment Atwood Became A Writer, from Negotiating With the Dead: a Writer on Writing

“Nobody talked about writing as a process or a profession – something real people actually did. Given such conditions, how is it that I became a writer? … It simply happened, suddenly, in 1956, while I was crossing the football field on the way home from school. I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and after that writing was the only thing I wanted to do. I didn’t know that this poem of mine wasn’t at all good, and if I had known, I probably wouldn’t have cared. It wasn’t the result but the experience that had hooked me: it was the electricity. My transition from not being a writer to being one was instantaneous, like the change from docile bank clerk to fanged monster in ‘B’ movies.”

Margaret Atwood on Meeting Writers...

Atwood on Meeting Writers...

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board pinched from a magazine — "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté."

Sabbatical reading... Shelley & Goodloe is well-done.

Margaret Atwood on a self-identity for the writer that combines responsibility with integrity

 Margaret Atwood on a self-identity for the writer that combines responsibility with integrity...

What to do? Where to turn? How to proceed? Is there a self-identity for the writer that combines responsibility with artistic integrity? If there is, what might it be? Ask the age we live in, and it might reply—the witness. And, if possible, the eyewitness.”

What does it feel like to write? Margaret Atwood, from Negotiating with the Dead

What does it feel like to write?  Margaret Atwood, from Negotiating with the Dead 

“Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, twilight, blackout, often combined with a struggle or path or journey – an inability to see one’s way forward, but a feeling that there was a way forward, and that the act of going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision – these were the common elements in many descriptions of the process of writing.”