Fear and War

academiccoachtaylor:

Academic Coach Taylor is frustrated with you.

Academic Coach Taylor is frustrated with you.

"It may be reassuring to observe that even in some untrammelled and ‘postmodern’ reign of narrativity as such, we may expect some narratives to be less persuasive or useful than others: that is, even if the search for some true or even correct narrative is vain and doomed to every failure but the ideological one, we can certainly go on talking about false narratives, and we may even expect to isolate a certain number of themes in terms of which the narrative of modernity must not be told (see Chapter 4). Meanwhile, there exists something like narrative elucidation, and we may presume that to use the narrative of modernity in this way, as the explanation of a historical event or problem, puts us on a more productive track. Causality is itself, after all, a narrative category; and its identification as such clarifies both its appropriate use and the conceptual dilemmas it inevitably brings with it. In any case, this new secondary or auxiliary status of ‘modernity’ as an explanatory feature rather than an object of study in its own right helps exclude a certain number of false problems."

— Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (via hookedonsemiotics)

"[W]hen I’m pushed these days with the old criticism – ‘Oh! Spivak is too hard to understand!’ – I laugh, and I say okay. I will give you, just for your sake, a monosyllabic sentence, and you’ll see that you can’t rest with it. My monosyllabic sentence is: We know plain prose cheats."

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Gayatri Spivak (via fearandwar)

As I was reading through Pritch’s archives (which I do all of the time) I saw he mentioned this quote from Spivak.

It’s always bothered me that Turabian style wants you to do something different for journal articles you’ve accessed through an online database. Why? There’s no difference between me going to the library, finding the issue of Signs I need and me going on JSTOR and downloading the exact article.

semperaugustus:

“We should begin by taking rigorous account of this being held within [prise] or this surprise: the writer writes in language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce.”

From Derrida’s Of Grammatology: The Exorbitant. Question of Method, 1967

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Gayatri Spivak (via fearandwar)

Fair point, but if she ever tried to defend Bhabha I’d throw her into the abyss of days

(via sonofapritch)

Sometimes when I read Hamid Dabashi, I can’t tell if he’s just covering up bullshit with jargon. I’m still iffy on the whole style thing in most postcolonial writers.

(via fearandwar)

No Bhabha is cool. Keep reading.

Dabashi is cool, but he def doesn’t have enough substance or swagger to engage in the vitriolic rhetoric he so often does. Don’t tell him I said that though because he seems pretty keen on taking me on as a student and being an advisor. wish me luck :)

(via metonymia)

That’s awesome. I’m at least two years away from being ready to apply to a PhD program and Columbia is one of the schools on my short list. I love his fiery rhetoric. It’s like he recognizes that the discourse around Israel is so far to Israel’s side that the only way to change it is to just be incredibly incendiary. I want to see him and Finkelstein debate Dershowitz.

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Gayatri Spivak (via fearandwar)

Fair point, but if she ever tried to defend Bhabha I’d throw her into the abyss of days

(via sonofapritch)

Sometimes when I read Hamid Dabashi, I can’t tell if he’s just covering up bullshit with jargon. I’m still iffy on the whole style thing in most postcolonial writers.

— Gayatri Spivak

McCaffrey’s career began with Restoree in 1967. She went on to earn a dedicated following for her beloved series, Dragonriders of Pern. At her website, McCaffrey answered letters from dedicated fans through November. This GalleyCat editor will never forget reading her books as a middle-school kid. Share your memories in the comments section…
You can read her complete biography at her site. An excerpt: “Her first novel, Restoree, was written as a protest against the absurd and unrealistic portrayals of women in s-f novels in the 50s and early 60s. It is, however, in the handling of broader themes and the worlds of her imagination, particularly the two series The Ship Who Sang and the fourteen novels about the Dragonriders of Pern that Ms. McCaffrey’s talents as a story-teller are best displayed.”
On her blog, she offered this advice for aspiring writers: “First — keep reading. Writers are readers. Writers are also people who can’t not write. Second, follow Heinlein’s rules for getting published: 1. Write it. 2. Finish it. 3. Send it out. 4. Keep sending it out until someone sends you a check. There are variations on that, but that’s basically what works.”

I read her entire Dragonriders series when I was younger. :(

McCaffrey’s career began with Restoree in 1967. She went on to earn a dedicated following for her beloved series, Dragonriders of Pern. At her website, McCaffrey answered letters from dedicated fans through November. This GalleyCat editor will never forget reading her books as a middle-school kid. Share your memories in the comments section…

You can read her complete biography at her site. An excerpt: “Her first novel, Restoree, was written as a protest against the absurd and unrealistic portrayals of women in s-f novels in the 50s and early 60s. It is, however, in the handling of broader themes and the worlds of her imagination, particularly the two series The Ship Who Sang and the fourteen novels about the Dragonriders of Pern that Ms. McCaffrey’s talents as a story-teller are best displayed.”

On her blog, she offered this advice for aspiring writers: “First — keep reading. Writers are readers. Writers are also people who can’t not write. Second, follow Heinlein’s rules for getting published: 1. Write it. 2. Finish it. 3. Send it out. 4. Keep sending it out until someone sends you a check. There are variations on that, but that’s basically what works.”

I read her entire Dragonriders series when I was younger. :(

"From this valuable work I have extracted many a pearl, though it must be confessed, I was obliged often to dive through an enormous mass of water to procure it."

—

Duncan Forbes

My new favorite backhanded compliment for a book.