You're either with us...
About a year ago, while studying ENGL 214: Chaucer to Spenser, I wrote a slightly whimsical post about essay writing. I put it out that essay-writing was a cat-and-mouse game of careful quotation, skewed analysis and in the final hurdle verbosity. In my own mind, the essay is half an exploration of ideas, and half a game of finding that line of acceptible hubris. Kathryn Walls' acute mind spotted this, and somewhat vexed by my recalcitrance implored me to stick to exploring the main lines, the well-founded arguments.
Bah humbug, I said, and say still. Essay writing is not a search for truth, but a vivisection of literature: torturing books and authorial personas for your own pleasure and "scientific inquiry." Hark, says I: Angela Carter's blatantly sexist, and with a smirk I sidle off leaving behind correct in all the details, but a montage of lies. And who would argue against my line that Mrs Dalloway isn't so much a character study of post-traumatic stress, but an argument for ecological alternatives to an industrial economy? Two B+s were all those gentle souls could find in riposte! A higher mind may have wrangled them up even higher, but my skills were weak: my hate made me not quite strong enough.
And what's the virtue to be found in an argument merely being the stronger? We've all knelt at the feet of Socrates and Galileo, great losers on the debate's winning side. By far the more impressive intellect is a tobacco lawyer, arguing that day is night, black is white, and cancer just a coincidence.
I practice my art, not for selfish gain, but for the good of humanity, for the very pursuit of truth so antithetical to my every thought. For, runs that argument, how could the truth be sought and proved, if nobody puts the other case. A hung jury is better than a hanged man if you're his lawyer, and isn't that the basis of our justice? Truth, you see, is a slippery quantity, and who's to say that white doesn't have a certain black quality about it? Is it perchance, all colours together when lit and an absence of any when painted?
Oh, but how I am now put upon the rack by that anti-pilferous do-righting logician? Quote, saith he, and engage with the text... pressing me to the very limits of artifice lest I stumble upon some correct point without need of emendation and must give it up for itself. Fear not, I shan't abandon my perfidious career without a fight; indeed, I shall press on my effort to find truths... and subvert them! To find quotations... and debase them. To in all cases and unerringly report the intentions and motvations of the authors... as they most feared they would be described. And if I should fail in my noble endeavour, be disinherited by my uncle Dick, and without hope or consolation be held to the path of scholarship proper, let me at least take heart that the forces arrayed against my unwilling merit shall require my efforts to be doubled, and redoubled again, if any gains are to be consolidated and upheld in these, the last days of the enlightenment project.
Bah humbug, I said, and say still. Essay writing is not a search for truth, but a vivisection of literature: torturing books and authorial personas for your own pleasure and "scientific inquiry." Hark, says I: Angela Carter's blatantly sexist, and with a smirk I sidle off leaving behind correct in all the details, but a montage of lies. And who would argue against my line that Mrs Dalloway isn't so much a character study of post-traumatic stress, but an argument for ecological alternatives to an industrial economy? Two B+s were all those gentle souls could find in riposte! A higher mind may have wrangled them up even higher, but my skills were weak: my hate made me not quite strong enough.
And what's the virtue to be found in an argument merely being the stronger? We've all knelt at the feet of Socrates and Galileo, great losers on the debate's winning side. By far the more impressive intellect is a tobacco lawyer, arguing that day is night, black is white, and cancer just a coincidence.
I practice my art, not for selfish gain, but for the good of humanity, for the very pursuit of truth so antithetical to my every thought. For, runs that argument, how could the truth be sought and proved, if nobody puts the other case. A hung jury is better than a hanged man if you're his lawyer, and isn't that the basis of our justice? Truth, you see, is a slippery quantity, and who's to say that white doesn't have a certain black quality about it? Is it perchance, all colours together when lit and an absence of any when painted?
Oh, but how I am now put upon the rack by that anti-pilferous do-righting logician? Quote, saith he, and engage with the text... pressing me to the very limits of artifice lest I stumble upon some correct point without need of emendation and must give it up for itself. Fear not, I shan't abandon my perfidious career without a fight; indeed, I shall press on my effort to find truths... and subvert them! To find quotations... and debase them. To in all cases and unerringly report the intentions and motvations of the authors... as they most feared they would be described. And if I should fail in my noble endeavour, be disinherited by my uncle Dick, and without hope or consolation be held to the path of scholarship proper, let me at least take heart that the forces arrayed against my unwilling merit shall require my efforts to be doubled, and redoubled again, if any gains are to be consolidated and upheld in these, the last days of the enlightenment project.