6/7/08

I'm only now realizing that it's 06/07/08. I can't wait until 23:45 to come around--this is the first use I've found for military time.

No reading today--I was moving, and so I took the day off, literarily. I did try to explain my idea to Katie yesterday. Basically, what I pointed out was that in both the Puttenham and the Gascoigne examples, the bad, whatever that is, has the ability to wrench the world into a particular shape. I think I was talking about that the other day.

What's interesting about that for me is that it suggests an intensity to the power of literature. I don't know how else we'd find evidence for that, but I can't help thinking of that first audience watching that film of a train and running out frightened. Could it be that the vernacular written word had a little bit of that effect?

Perhaps not. Sean raised the question of value w/r/t my Anxiety of Influx post. He asked if it was really as easy as I was making it sound to talk about "Romantic" and "Pre-Romantic" ideas w/r/t something like Godzilla. Maybe it is, he said. I don't think it is, necessarily, but not because of value, really. My issue is that we don't adequately understand the concept of mind supporting something like Godzilla--it's not really part of the same discourse. Godzilla is post-modern in a way that is looked down on by most theorists. (I disagree with that sentence, but no deleting.)

My concern--I don't want to use value as a way of excluding texts. I like a number of texts that aren't valuable in the way that traditional value hierarchies work, and I'd like to apply the tools--or some of them--of literary study to them. Sean wants to free teachers up to teach and work on the canon in interesting ways. I support that wholeheartedly, but I also want to be able to think about that conjoined twins ballad, because I think it tells me something that's quite interesting about how early modern folk liked something like poetry.

More to the point, I think the ballad tradition is every much as valid a part of the EM experience of poetry as the stuff that would later become the canon. It wasn't canonical then, and people like Nashe, as well as E.K., Marston, Harvey, Sidney, and so on were making a massive effort to decide what the canon would be. I think there was a later re-reading in the 1620's or so, that excluded a number of people who seemed in the Elizabethan period to be essential, and I think the big-canon started then.

Of course, I'm pushing things I don't know into a period I don't know. Which seems like a worthwhile strategy, but not a good way of doing academic work.

I should post the conjoined twins ballad here. And maybe have the Mac textpad application read it to me--I need to get it more in my head, if I'm going to be able to write about it meaningfully. Of course, "meaningful" is the question of value again.

Let me try breaking out that value question into as many subquestions as I can.

What makes a text worth reading? Continued reading?
What did early readers think of this text? Which readers? How many of them?
Why should I care about this text?
How "good" is this text at adapting the traditional literary devices to accomplish a structure or meaning?
How "good" is this text at subverting structure or meaning?
(Does my ability to claim a structure that the text doesn't subvert 'beat' the text? Or am I just pigeonholing there?)
How interesting are the readings that can hang on this text?



I could keep going, but the most interesting one for me right now is the parenthetical one. It seems to certain critics like pointing out where a text confirms social structures wins. I'm reminded of Culler's point that a key question in literary studies is where to stop interpreting. I'm a little bit bored of the end of interpretation (end bearing a couple meanings there) in a number of current schools. That probably just means I need to read more, but that's okay.

I know I need to read more. The question is what do I do in the meantime. (I hoped that my time would run out right at the end of that sentence.)