hildy

I had this weird idea that I would post something. Since I haven't done it since forever, it's obviously a weird idea. I should be writing my conference paper, which I am clearly not. Partly that's because I had to write comments on a student paper--which was very bad indeed and has put me in a grumpy mood. Then I had to write a letter of recommendation--a thing I do not love doing--how many ways, exactly, am I supposed to be able to say "this person is average but accept them into your program, which is also totally average, anyway"? So, clearly, the answer is to post something here. Only I don't know what to say. So I thought I'd share the most useful definition of postmodernism I've seen in a while:


We may start with McHale's notion of postmodernism as being centered on ontological issues (which I believe is an excellent point of departure) and go on to give it a distinctive narratological corollary and claim that the literature we call postmodern violates the boundaries essential to nonfictional narrative or high modernism. (Works of high modernism, that is, novels like To the Lighthouse [1927], typically do not create impossible or logically contradictory situations--the same character doesn't die twice; rather, they use innovative forms to arrange often ordinary material.) In the realm of the postmodern, the distinction between the real and the unreal is problematized, as are the correlative lines that attempt to separate fiction and nonfiction, history and fabrication, homage and parody, subject and object, self and other, text and world. This extends to the blurring or collapsing of another set of differences in the narration itself between narrator and character, dialogue and monologue, the "he" and the "I." Linear progression, consistent meaning, and any pattern but the flagrantly random or starkly parodic are resisted. All unity, essence, hierarchy, and order are challenged. (Modernism, by contrast, supplants existing orders with ones of its own creation, and invents formal arrangements to replace the inadequate ones found in the phenomenal world.) (1038-39)

Brian Richardson, "The Genealogies of Ulysses, the Invention of Postmodernism, and the Narratives of Literary History," ELH 67.4 (2000): 1035-54.


There, now I've been useful. And I can, in good conscience, play with the dog. Conference paper? what conference paper.

Dreamwidth gave me some more invite codes--how cool are they? Anyway, anyone know anyone who needs/wants one?

I have posted the grades, so it's all over but the crying. More people failed than ever before. On the one hand, this means I am tough, I am keeping my standards up, and I am trying to teach them something. On the other, I'm kind of dismayed. Most of them failed for attendance reasons--yes, I teach at a place where I have to penalize them for not coming to class. They are first years and many were under-prepared for college--which, fine, is the excuse they get to use in the fall semester, not in the spring. They were also taking a gen ed class that they must take in order to graduate (sometime, in the *distant* future for some of them) and therefore not something they wanted to be taking. Still. Show the fuck up, it's not that hard. I am dismayed. I am also a little anxious about the crying--by which I mean any emails/phone calls I may get asking why they failed. I hate having to deal with things like that. It's my own conflict-avoidance issues, I know, but I still don't want to talk to them about it. I will do so, don't get me wrong. I just don't want to. Why is it that they fail--they don't hand in all the assignments, they don't come to class--and I'm the one worrying about it? I feel that is not right.

I'm singing this little song in my head--it only has one verse and no tune because I made it up in the shower this morning and I can't sing. At all. But it goes like this:

Sam in the panic room, all locked up
Sam in the panic room, all locked up
Sam in the panic room, all locked up
Oh, oh, the angst

And that is how I feel about today. Oh, sure, I have two final classes to teach and undoubtedly other things to get through but all I can think about is tonight. Oh, Sam! Oh, Dean! Oh, oh, the angst.

Murderous rage is continuing. Usually, by the last week of classes, I manage to get over most of it. But this semester, it is on-going. Just when I think I've calmed down, someone else does something annoying. Let me rephrase that, ANNOYING. I don't accept late papers and so far today I have had two students submit late (way, way, waaaaay late) papers to me, without consultation, just emailing them to me--did they miss me ranting and raving about this all semester? Apparently, I am a failure this semester because the little bastards have learned nothing. NOTHING. Is this what I have to balance the fabulousness of my 400-level class? Multiple sections of completely hideous 100-level set against one of the best 400s I've ever had--some days it's worth it, sadly, not today.

"I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings; instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path--a slender gap--the point of its possible disappearance."
Michel Foucault
"The Discourse on Language"

This is the first thing I ever posted to lj. It seemed fitting--I felt like I was slipping into a conversation that had been going on for some time and that would last long past me. I repost it now, bringing that same feeling and good wishes to dreamwidth. (Why, yes, I am more sentimental than I like to admit.) Also, I repost this because dreamwidth just imported my lj content for me--how cool is that?

New account, same old whining from me, I suspect. Now all I have to do is go out and find all the cool people's pages to read.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died on Sunday. I only met her a couple of times, at various guest lectures, and she was always surrounded by adoring fans--of which I am certainly one. She was a rockstar, you know? And yet she was warm and generous and brilliant--even to know-nothing little grad students like me. Anyone ever tells you they're brilliant and then they don't behave with her grace, well, they're wrong. The world's a sadder place without her. I'm going to go cry a little, can't seem to help it, and then celebrate her brilliance--I think class today should be reading her work--not on the syllabus but whatever.

Yesterday, I was reading Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," as one does. Why don't I read Orwell all the time? Every time I pick him up, I think, holy shit, how good is this, must read more and more often. And then I get distracted by something--usually some stupid school thing. Anyway. I was just amazed, though, by the ways in which an essay written in 1946 still rings so true. People! stop using language in sloppy ways! don't rely on tired phrases which have lost all meaning! Think! Ah, I love Orwell.