Hello little boy, let’s get it on and then be good friends! I don’t love you, but that’s okay, because if I did it would be worse for everyone! It’s really better to just be friends and have sex. Have I convinced you yet? No?
1 Comment » Posted by Kyle / criticism and humor and literature and philosophy
The gestation of this post revolves around the realization that in a few weeks I am going to have to turn in a respectably well thought out, cogent paper applying Jacques Derrida’s not-method of deconstruction to a literary text of my choosing. Until recently I have been consumed by something approaching intellectual panic regarding both the choice of text, and something more fundamental: the purpose of deconstructing a literary text, given Derrida’s own thinking surrounding différance and deconstruction, namely the concurrent lack of origin and endpoint. If deconstruction can never arrive at a conclusion, why begin?
No Comments » Posted by Kyle / criticism and literature and theory
The bits hit the virtual fan yesterday when the omgwtf-machine was whipped into a frenzy over the announcement, straight (no pun intended) from the mouth of our dear and glorious leader J.K. Rowling, that Dumbledore, beloved imaginary wizard of the Harry Potter-verse, was, to the author's mind, gay. Fans go wild; the religious right goes, well, apeshit.
No Comments » Posted by Kyle / criticism and culture and fantasy and fiction and literature and religion
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In _Rabelais and His World_, Bakhtin tackles what he considers shortcomings in early 20th-century scholarship on 16th-century French author François Rabelais. The particular value of this book, though, lies not in his reflections on Rabelais _per se_, but on his lucid consideration of the generative function of the grotesque, the history of laughter, and their encounter in the popular context of the marketplace, reflections that remain remarkably relevant to literary criticism today.
No Comments » Posted by Kyle / criticism and culture and literature and theory
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How do you approach a novel that seeks to destabilize, even to negate, not only its value as literature, but the very force that drives its composition? Cortázar’s _Rayuela_ seems to find an equally radical solution to this revolutionary (for the time) proposition: it never begins.
No Comments » Posted by Kyle / criticism and fiction and literature