Novel Talking: The Autotelic OtioseXlibris Corporation LLC, 2000 M12 20 - 284 páginas Novel Talking; or, The Autotelic Otiose A Menippean satire on television and marijuana. Dialogues and fantasy futures by a Shakespeare scholar concerning the impact of modern media and recreational chemicals on post-literate Bicentennial America. A Review of Novel Talking It is one thing for a temporarily retired academic to retreat to the woods, deliberately regress to personal and cultural adolescence, and dream in silent solitude about stand-up classroom verbal eloquence; but it is another when these dreams become a theory of human nature going all the way back to the primitive Siberian shaman and are urged on us as a description of modern western man. It does not help much that the author, a teacher of Shakespeare, acknowledges each irony in turn: social science theory is nothing but autobiography, writing is a dream of speech, solitude creates fantasy company. Each admitted irony, each existential paradox wafts this quixotic author further from his mundane chore---to write well. To be sure, the author agrees. Marijuana, he says, generates first draft or "epiphanic" thought, and the book is thus a composition text, an illustration of pride and flaw. "If indolence has been the hallmark of my execution (for quite a while, in several areas) should I not make it the focus of my educational effort?" Thus will the "stone soup" of this Peter Pan "preserve", if not communicate, the "creative vision," which he defines as "an idealistic blurring of forms which allows autobiography, cultural history, ethical paradigm and ecstatic witness to reveal common roots in ego and fiction." In method and subject (roughly, being stoned and watching the tube) Novel Talking is adolescent pastoral, aware of itself as an idyll. It is a survey of the four seasonal literary modes, comedy, tragedy, irony and romance, each presented with a behavioral analogue from the social sciences,. The pattern for tragedy: the western body-soul dualism derives from the cultural practice of swaddling. Its first articulation is by the ancient shaman, who performs an imitation of a wrapped (rapt) memory of an imagined unwrapped act, a magic spirit flight from the body, an ineffable claim convincing enough to arouse, sustain and focus to his profit the fight-flight tension (the mingled rage and ridicule) of the gathering within the sound of his voice. In further discussion the swaddle itself becomes an analogue for various contemporary sedentary recreational states, including television and chemical euphoria, which are contrasted with group ritual behavior in order to suggest ways to deal with emerging national patterns of "domestic equality and mutual grooming." This is a rather heavy argument to be founded, as the author says, only on cultural generalizations and, more importantly, on purely autobiographical analogies. He further asserts that it is only because of the fashion of the times that he speaks in this way. He is only a Boy Scout, an acolyte, only a shaman stoned. He has a theory of gentility, of manners, and God is a personal laugh track. He is looking for work. We seek, he says, only what we lack. At the college level of this author's prime pedagogic fantasy (only one of several) this search translates as a form of residential literary and critical counseling ("minor arbitration, general assaying, duck rowing"), a kind of WASP male Uncle Tomming or intellectual groping for pay that can only be imagined, perhaps, after three years alone in the woods. It's going to have to be a no-frills fantasy, this academic niche, because the writing of this book will compel poetic justice, academic logic and Dame Fortune to all insist that its author teach composition for a living. And that would be, after all, the best framework for coaching the logical and literary mise-en-scene of a gathering of shamen. Heaven help his students. &nbs |
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... magic sea-shell, a tin can with a string around the universe; we can make coffee tables out of old cable spools—you know, the whole McLuhan Trip. Naturally this perspective is too sly, too shy. Self-help books usually dress up and strut ...
... magic proceeds from loony premises. So, since we've met here, we three, here's my recipe for stone soup: take a large, seasoned promise (such as “Let the ape and tiger die”), mix properly de- fined television (an electronic guest medium ...
... magical sustenance and which became an expectation, a gathering, a sharing, converting aposiopeses to anacoluthons, analects to apothegms and humbug to amphibolies, with the spirit of an antic wine cellar in the 2381-RILE NOVEL TALKING 27.
... magic words below , the name of a BBC radio comedy show which reaches out to us from the other side of the electronic chasm and thus is fitting to guide us on our way . So , whenever you be- come confused , distracted ; when you lose ...
... magical romance that leaps through the ozone and the ether; and a story about a future. In case you don't remember, both of Robin Hood's encounters were draws, and celebrated the joining of Little John and Friar Tuck to the band of ...