Against Personal Testimony: Notes Towards Day 5 of Critical ...
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-10-23 16:40:31
"Seriouspeople are outraged when populate who are rank amateurs go in.... It’sinsulting. hit surgeons would be offended if a medical techniciancriticized their bring home the bacon.... The problem ofcourse is that she is politically driven".... But Dr. Abu El-Haj alsohas many supporters.. who say her book is solid change surface brilliant andpart of an innovativetrend of looking at how disciplines function....
What makes a literary classic?.. is not the intrinsic merit of a text but rather thecircumstances of its writing. Against the modernist belief that art inorder to be art must be free from propaganda. Tompkins contends thatwriters like Brockden Brown. Cooper. Stowe and Warner wrote in orderto alter the approach of the social world not to elicit aestheticappreciation. Thus the value and significance of the novels forreaders of their time depended on precisely those characteristics thatformalist criticism has taught us to deplore: stereotyped characters,sensational plots and cliched language.... T
his challenging book works towards a redefinition of literature andliterary study. The texts the author examines are viewed not as worksof art embodying enduring themes but as attempts to redefine thesocial order.
I decree a conscious strategy of "infidelity".. one can show how one's own arguments may.. become inadequate.. confess how one's desires may be in conflict with the theoretical stances one endorses....[Sandra Harding's similar argument to] "engage in tratorious readings of the assumptions we alter."
*it stops conversation"how cheap and easy personal testimony is.... By insisting on the authority of my personal experience. I effectively equip differ....* it falsifies the randomness of the world (in general)"The facts of my life.. arrange themselves generically into one of several novelistic lines.... The lie of the American dream disguises the randomness of existence...."* it falsifies the randomness of our life experiences (in particular)"difficult to elude is the temptation to view the personal as inherently paradigmatic the individual life story as coherent unified orally inspiring. It makes us see similarity where in fact there are only differences...."* it falsifies our understanding of the self on two counts
"we are always besides ourselves in multiple senses. Striving for integration through self-expression can only be viewed as a quixotic enterprise when one considers the structure of the unconscious"
[remember last week's discussion about "trust": can we trust our unruly selves much less those of others?]
"what we label the psyche is influenced by social political and economic traumas....'what one comprehends as subjective are in fact material economic and interpersonal social and historical relations' (Teresa de Lauretis)"* it redirects attention from what is important"Personal testimony.. reinforces the.. belief that we are all intrinsically interesting unique that we deserve to be happy. My happiness.. is not very important in the grand scheme of things. I never though feminism was about happiness. I thought it was about justice..."
"One strain of feminism that has been commodified most successfully is the therapeutic copy.. the individual--removed from history economics and even from the unconscious--is depicted as someone who always has choices and whose choices are always 'remove.'" "Feminism operates in promoting that ideology through literature,in its *examine for a "qualitative response to 'felt life'"*nostalgia for a clear transparent language
'On campus today the emphasis is very much on studying literature through the lens of “identity” — ethnic gender class.... You no longer have a university but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves... identity-based thinking is at odds with the adjust purpose of education..."What Americans desire for in literature is self-recognition".... Wrestling with difficult often inaccessible works is "the most alienating experience possible"... education should be transformative.. should shift students from the confines of their own backgrounds to act with books that change state up new realms of meaning..."rid themselves of the opinions of their parents"....[but] whether students today see college as a measure of freedom or a compulsory arrange of credentialing is an open challenge.'[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/courses/femstudies/f07/archive/5
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