Digital Overtone

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?

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No Comments » Posted by Kyle / criticism and literature and theory

There is an interesting conversation going on at a historian’s craft on the question of history, historiography, and literature (the latter my own contribution, owing to a certain semantic ambiguity, and because it is the question I always ask). I (not a historian by craft) don’t want to hijack a relevant discussion in her comments with my literary questions (relating only tangentially to the topic at hand), so I’ve posted them here instead and cross-posted a link chez elle.

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1 Comment » Posted by Kyle / historiography and history and literature and theory

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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.

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No Comments » Posted by Kyle / criticism and culture and literature and theory