With Barry to guide us through the maze of four critical readings, I must admit I felt a bit smug as I ploughed through this week's assignment. There were references (within the text and the footnotes) to names I actually recognized; criticism I understood; concepts that were familiar.
Foucault, Gramsci, Bordieu, habitus, cultural capital, pantopic-the dominant language of the academy were now frames of reference. "Structures of feelings" (Barry, 173) even made sense.
Perhaps I'm just giddy over "New Historicism" coined by Greenblatt, an intellectual who actually wrote openly and made his theory available for scrutiny. A theorist who actually admits that the initial conception of his book "has been complicated by several turns in my thinking that I had not foreseen" (2).
I'm sure that on Tuesday night I will again be reduced to stumbling over the unmastered dominant language as we discuss literary canon, writing "race, the circulation of social energy, stereotype and Colonial discourse.
But for this brief moment there are flashes of recognition within the dominant language that I can dig.
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I am with you on this one, Marilyn.
ReplyDeleteTo be a little like the over the top Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's sofa--GREENBLATT ROCKS!
Now. There. I've said it. Let me straighten my scholarly robes a bit an get on with it.
Agreed. The Bordieu stuff made previous readings a little more relevent for me as well. I hope I'm not making connections where they should not be made but that book kind of tied everything together for me, especially as we discuss using language to legitimize the "Other" in the literary arena.
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