Oh no's! Moebius strip!
Reading Foucault makes me feel happy. I've had to struggle all weekend through a most difficult book (in terms of keeping my interest) about a recently retired doctor who is spending his retirement studying Flaubert. And to boot, I have to give a presentation and write a mini-paper on it. Until about 5 minutes ago, I was completely ambivalent about the whole thing. Really just dreading it and knowing that I had to do it, but not wanting to touch it, yet knowing that my grades are extremely important right now so I'd better damn well find something interesting about it.
But then 5 minutes ago I put down the concurrently assigned Foucault essay about the function of the author. And now, I've had an idea in my head for 5 minutes that is way more interesting than anything I had before. Essentially, I'm going to try to argue that the idea of "fiction" is a fiction, in 4 pages. Yeah...you could probably do a dissertation on a loaded theoretical concept like that. But in terms of the course, I just have to apply Foucault (and the Barthes I'll read tomorrow) to this book in order to explain how the concept of "fiction" is treated in the novel. It's awfully self-referential if you approach it as a fictionalized account of a literary historian who comes to the realization that all history is a fiction.
Strange loop: moving up the hierarchy from "fiction" to "history" only to discover that you're back where you started: discovering that there's more imagination to history than you realized. It works in reverse too: moving from "history" to "fiction" only to discover that there's more historical truth to fiction than you initially understood.
Goodness, goodness. I'm so glad I took the time to read Godel, Escher, Bach. This next presentation has got me terribly excited in a very non-sexual fashion.
But then 5 minutes ago I put down the concurrently assigned Foucault essay about the function of the author. And now, I've had an idea in my head for 5 minutes that is way more interesting than anything I had before. Essentially, I'm going to try to argue that the idea of "fiction" is a fiction, in 4 pages. Yeah...you could probably do a dissertation on a loaded theoretical concept like that. But in terms of the course, I just have to apply Foucault (and the Barthes I'll read tomorrow) to this book in order to explain how the concept of "fiction" is treated in the novel. It's awfully self-referential if you approach it as a fictionalized account of a literary historian who comes to the realization that all history is a fiction.
Strange loop: moving up the hierarchy from "fiction" to "history" only to discover that you're back where you started: discovering that there's more imagination to history than you realized. It works in reverse too: moving from "history" to "fiction" only to discover that there's more historical truth to fiction than you initially understood.
Goodness, goodness. I'm so glad I took the time to read Godel, Escher, Bach. This next presentation has got me terribly excited in a very non-sexual fashion.