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the seductions of text
Mar. 21st, 2007 03:18 pmThe thing that I really love about Shakespeare is that I can just sort of move around through it, swim through the text with ease. Not that it's simple, but that it somehow seems to open up to me, show all of its complexities and doublings and shiny bits. And I can juggle it around, find the right spaces to sink down in, breathe it and understand things and make it go. The girls and the fools and the scansion and the unsexing and the Sedgewick triangles of both genders, the Greenworld theory and the racial issues.
Chaucer, on the other hand, baffles me. Sure, I can talk about the individual Canterbury Tales, but I can't do a damn thing with stringing them together. I love Chaucer, but I have nothing to say. It feels like the text actively resists me, pushing back when I push in. Both of my Chaucer papers last term were cop-outs, Loti taking the easy way out. Not that they were bad papers or anything, bit I have some bigger issues that I have thus far failed to wrestle with. What I really want is to write a paper about the specific ways in which Chaucer resists interpretive readings.
Maybe I have an easier time with Shakespeare because my brain starts in the space of the performative tradition. I give myself permission, with Shakespeare, to go there. The author is dead, man. I can put any reading I want up on stage, an nobody's going to bitch if it's not period. Chaucer I worry about--can I really put deconstructionist theory in the mouth of a mediaeval writer? But I'm downright blithe about the Bard, more than happy to mix it up and turn it around.
I must have really nailed my three big end-of-term papers last month, because I got A's in two classes that I definitely had B's in pre-paper. Which is gratifying, because I totally worked my ass off, and I think maybe what I'm getting a handle on is where to work, and how, seeing the flaws in my own writing and learning how to target them. The sort of essay my daddy taught me how to write, straight litcrit, I'm doing well with that.
The thing that I don't know how to do, and that I really want to work on, is the literary-personal essay. "A Room of One's Own". The sort of essay that's both about the reading and the reader, that works with the idea that a reading of a text is a collaboration between the writer-at-the-time-of-writing and the reader-at-the-time-of-reading. A narrative of me reading a book, of me running in to quandaries and coming to moments of clarity. It's what I like best to read myself, and I'd really like to figure out how to do it. I'm trying right now to get into a Creative Nonfiction workshop with a visiting prof who The Boy really likes, and I'm hoping maybe I can talk to him about it, because I know what I want to make but I haven't the slightest idea as to how to go about starting.
Chaucer, on the other hand, baffles me. Sure, I can talk about the individual Canterbury Tales, but I can't do a damn thing with stringing them together. I love Chaucer, but I have nothing to say. It feels like the text actively resists me, pushing back when I push in. Both of my Chaucer papers last term were cop-outs, Loti taking the easy way out. Not that they were bad papers or anything, bit I have some bigger issues that I have thus far failed to wrestle with. What I really want is to write a paper about the specific ways in which Chaucer resists interpretive readings.
Maybe I have an easier time with Shakespeare because my brain starts in the space of the performative tradition. I give myself permission, with Shakespeare, to go there. The author is dead, man. I can put any reading I want up on stage, an nobody's going to bitch if it's not period. Chaucer I worry about--can I really put deconstructionist theory in the mouth of a mediaeval writer? But I'm downright blithe about the Bard, more than happy to mix it up and turn it around.
I must have really nailed my three big end-of-term papers last month, because I got A's in two classes that I definitely had B's in pre-paper. Which is gratifying, because I totally worked my ass off, and I think maybe what I'm getting a handle on is where to work, and how, seeing the flaws in my own writing and learning how to target them. The sort of essay my daddy taught me how to write, straight litcrit, I'm doing well with that.
The thing that I don't know how to do, and that I really want to work on, is the literary-personal essay. "A Room of One's Own". The sort of essay that's both about the reading and the reader, that works with the idea that a reading of a text is a collaboration between the writer-at-the-time-of-writing and the reader-at-the-time-of-reading. A narrative of me reading a book, of me running in to quandaries and coming to moments of clarity. It's what I like best to read myself, and I'd really like to figure out how to do it. I'm trying right now to get into a Creative Nonfiction workshop with a visiting prof who The Boy really likes, and I'm hoping maybe I can talk to him about it, because I know what I want to make but I haven't the slightest idea as to how to go about starting.