So - here I am, a week into summer, ready to go to sleep and hybernate. Ever have one of those days where you can't seem to say anything right?? I'm having one of those lifetimes... :( |
Friday, May 18, 2007
Summer: The Season of Heat
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Friday, May 4, 2007
On the To-Read Shelf
That's right - I devoted an entire shelf to the to-reads of the summer. I have already shoved two books in the top space... here they all are, in no particular order (except that these are the ones I see in this order... so really, there is a particular order):
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Wednesday, May 2, 2007
A Voice, Crying in the Wilderness...
So, I'm presenting Homi Bhabha's "The Commitment to Theory." Homi Bhabha is a man from India who recognized the lasting and all-consuming cultural effects the British left on India. I am not a historian, but from reading Bhabha, I figure that the British invaded and claimed India at some point in time and then forced English and Christianity on an Hindu culture. The missionaries of the time took the Hindu religion very lightly, so they could not have realized that the language barrier would cross paths with the religious barrier, but sure enough, in the end, neither the British language nor people made any sense to India. Gross misinterpretation across cultural, religious, and lingual boundaries--boundaries reinforced by Britain--caused tension. * * * So, I finished a few papers. One was a semi-linguistic, but in truth, it was a Postcolonial Feminist Queer take on conservative christianity mumbojumbo I found online. I did a bit of freewriting/stream of conscience writing for the LitCrit paper. Finished the Bhabha handouts. I love Bhabha. Now, all that's left for the grades is the 15-20p research for women writers and 2 tests. I think. |
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Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Paper Topics of the Moment
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Posted by me at 8:09 PM 2 comments
Saturday, April 7, 2007
The Future Anterior
The past that will have been. - Lynda Hart . . . the future anterior is a locution in which one finds the future retroactively, "a memory curious about its own future . . . which refuses simply to repeat the old saw 'once upon a time' over and over again . . . as if nothing had happened, the future anterior alters history; it is the miraculous tense, the tense of healing. - Catherine Clement
- me |
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Labels: future anterior, theory
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
The Lies We Tell Ourselves
Certain members of society would rather choose to ignore the reality of child molestation and incest; they live in a reality where—by their own choice and in order to maintain the illusion of humanism—incest does not exist. Sociologists and anthropologists have traditionally regarded incest as disruptive of the family and therefore disruptive of the social order. By contrast, feminism has suggested that, paradoxical as it may seem, incest is actually produced and maintained by social order: the order of a male-dominated society. The patriarchial social order generally sides with those certain members of society in accepting the reality wherein incest does not occur. But if there is no such thing as incest, what happens to the incest victim? If she knows that she was violated, and yet all those around her demand that incest is not real, where does she turn for help? [T]his feeling of “unreality” is not merely the effect of the incest survivor’s history. That is, it is not the “return of the repressed”; rather, it is also an artful reconstruction of the survivor’s present, a set of coping mechanisms or survival strategies however “psychotic” they may appear and however self-destructive they may seem, which are actually clever ways of surviving within a dominant order that produces the incest survivor as an impossibility. If, then, there is no such thing as incest and incest victims, there is no room in reality for incest survivors. Not only is incest marked as a founding taboo and therefore presumed not to happen if the culture is to retain its illusion of coherency, but also, then, the survivor is not meant to survive. The fact that she does is due to her ability to create her own system, her own symbolic if you will, that is necessarily discordant with the dominant order’s symbolic. In other words, the incest survivor knows that reality is a ruse that masks the Real, but she is forced to articulate this knowledge through a conceptual system that cannot be interpreted by dominant codes as other than pathological.[. . . .] For of course this sharply divided reality for the survivor is generated and maintained by its reference to an ideological system that insists upon choosing between the two [i.e. two seemingly mutually exclusive ideas, like how could “he” both love me and hurt me?]: whereas the person who inhabits both spaces simultaneously—or worse yet perhaps—balances perpetually on the border between them, is rendered psychotic. In the end, for me, my family renders the following communities of people unreal. To say it another way, my family believes the following groups of people are lying about the thing that they all have in common (which makes them all psychotic) or they are all psychotic: non-believers (that is, people who don’t believe that belief in Jesus is the only way to Heaven), homosexuals, incest victims, and incest survivors.
Hart, Lynda. “Bearing (to) Witness: The Erotics of Power in Bastard Out of |
Posted by me at 5:27 PM 2 comments