(no subject)
"I make this point because recently I started to wonder what it is that allows certain people to make profound discoveries. I was thinking about Jeff's essay on Moby Dick, and I wondered if it was possible for a college student to make a critical insight into something that has been pondered over and over again by those probably more qualified to make such insights."
That quote is from Nick's LJ. goplastic.
I think this is something that a lot of people think about. For me it stems from the first time I read a text and have had no relationship with the scholarship on it. The way the first idea strikes you is very strong. The second one stronger. The third one even more so. But as you distance yourself from that first idea the initial discoveries become base and depressing.
The first english course that I took, other than English 101 and 102, was Tenney Nathanson's Contemporary American Poetry. I had had no real work with explicating, was totally floored when he assigned passages from Freud's Interpretations of Dreams, and the longest paper I had written was 7 pages. But Frank O'Hara's poetry, out of all the poets we read, struck a chord with me and got me really thinking about those ideas that spring from primary texts. Let me say it again: I took the 400 level course first semester of my sophomore year and had no idea what was going on. Still, I was getting these "morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies" working around the text(Moby Dick 153). I didn't really know what to do with them until I started reading articles published about his poetry. Only then did I understand the sort of primal instinct that flutters above all the literati community that everyone pulls from. At first, it was depressing because nothing is really new; everyone draws from the same thing.
I think the key to surviving those depressing distances between your own individual discoveries is knowing that primal instinct is external. Anyone who thinks that it is inside the individual fails to acknowledge a sort of historical development that drives the primary texts that the scholars are working from. Now, I feel that instinct is the wrong word. Somehow I want to link the individual's propensity for scholarly work to a some sort of romantic primal spark that lies over the world. Sounds kind of like a yearning for a pantheistic creativism.
And also as I was writing the phrase "instinct is external" I accidentally typed "extinct". Strange how I want to deny that pantheistic creativism and acknowledge it at the same time. But its existence is in another time. Maybe it has to do with my own development. That spark, or instinct, that we want so badly to exist (that feeling that we have something inside our own self) at the beginning of our careers, (im taking some liberties with careers) now only exists as an idea that a former self had. It is extinct and we are living in its afterglow. And so you work, work, work, work, work against that idea to show that you can persevere in spite of it, and all the people that are denying the fossil remains of that spark.
I don't really know if a college student can make critical insights. I don't even care. I also think that the fields, nick's being in medicine/pharmacy, mine being english literature, work in completely different ways. I recognize the wretchedness of what I write constantly. It's horrible. Sometimes I hate writing. Professor Hayot was talking about an instinct that he has to fight; the one that tells you to get up and walk away when that absurd difficulty arises. Even now I have to recognize how uncomfortable I am talking about a professor's feelings because I most certainly can't completely understand him, and in order to overcome the uncomfortability I have to steal ways that I haven't learned to talk about things. I'm not so much into making critical insights about texts, I'm just finding ways to talk about things in spite of myself and my writing's insignificance.
Professor Hayot, on Thursday, talked about the first idea that you come to in a paper. That initial awe that you feel has to be killed for an endless progression of awesomeness. It never really ends with a finished paper, it just sort of floats after deadlines. Just like Lukac says "Art says 'And yet!' to life," critical insight is the "and yet" to that endless progression that you know has to exist. If that primal instinct is extinct then everything is a fight between work and rest. And most of the time the "and yet" turns into "in spite of" becuase killing your ideas in the name of that endless progression of awesomeness is violent. Sometimes it really hurts.
That quote is from Nick's LJ. goplastic.
I think this is something that a lot of people think about. For me it stems from the first time I read a text and have had no relationship with the scholarship on it. The way the first idea strikes you is very strong. The second one stronger. The third one even more so. But as you distance yourself from that first idea the initial discoveries become base and depressing.
The first english course that I took, other than English 101 and 102, was Tenney Nathanson's Contemporary American Poetry. I had had no real work with explicating, was totally floored when he assigned passages from Freud's Interpretations of Dreams, and the longest paper I had written was 7 pages. But Frank O'Hara's poetry, out of all the poets we read, struck a chord with me and got me really thinking about those ideas that spring from primary texts. Let me say it again: I took the 400 level course first semester of my sophomore year and had no idea what was going on. Still, I was getting these "morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies" working around the text(Moby Dick 153). I didn't really know what to do with them until I started reading articles published about his poetry. Only then did I understand the sort of primal instinct that flutters above all the literati community that everyone pulls from. At first, it was depressing because nothing is really new; everyone draws from the same thing.
I think the key to surviving those depressing distances between your own individual discoveries is knowing that primal instinct is external. Anyone who thinks that it is inside the individual fails to acknowledge a sort of historical development that drives the primary texts that the scholars are working from. Now, I feel that instinct is the wrong word. Somehow I want to link the individual's propensity for scholarly work to a some sort of romantic primal spark that lies over the world. Sounds kind of like a yearning for a pantheistic creativism.
And also as I was writing the phrase "instinct is external" I accidentally typed "extinct". Strange how I want to deny that pantheistic creativism and acknowledge it at the same time. But its existence is in another time. Maybe it has to do with my own development. That spark, or instinct, that we want so badly to exist (that feeling that we have something inside our own self) at the beginning of our careers, (im taking some liberties with careers) now only exists as an idea that a former self had. It is extinct and we are living in its afterglow. And so you work, work, work, work, work against that idea to show that you can persevere in spite of it, and all the people that are denying the fossil remains of that spark.
I don't really know if a college student can make critical insights. I don't even care. I also think that the fields, nick's being in medicine/pharmacy, mine being english literature, work in completely different ways. I recognize the wretchedness of what I write constantly. It's horrible. Sometimes I hate writing. Professor Hayot was talking about an instinct that he has to fight; the one that tells you to get up and walk away when that absurd difficulty arises. Even now I have to recognize how uncomfortable I am talking about a professor's feelings because I most certainly can't completely understand him, and in order to overcome the uncomfortability I have to steal ways that I haven't learned to talk about things. I'm not so much into making critical insights about texts, I'm just finding ways to talk about things in spite of myself and my writing's insignificance.
Professor Hayot, on Thursday, talked about the first idea that you come to in a paper. That initial awe that you feel has to be killed for an endless progression of awesomeness. It never really ends with a finished paper, it just sort of floats after deadlines. Just like Lukac says "Art says 'And yet!' to life," critical insight is the "and yet" to that endless progression that you know has to exist. If that primal instinct is extinct then everything is a fight between work and rest. And most of the time the "and yet" turns into "in spite of" becuase killing your ideas in the name of that endless progression of awesomeness is violent. Sometimes it really hurts.