ow can we

We must fundamentally rethink how we teach grammar in the writing classroom”.

status quo.

some of the things s

Curzan details in her “Says Who?” essay

.. to be continued…

when I walked in

he levator scapulae ventralis

out of touch elites messed it up.

will not change them for intrinsic reasons

mood changes

our discussion

“intellectually lost”

Wilde t

The Picture of Dorian Gray”

structure her prose makes

something that had an end. I never really thought about how and when innocence disappears.

by, namely, imputing the processof abstract determination to the birth of tragedy itself—that is, to theemergence of Greek dramatic practice before Socratic dialectic appeared onthe historical timeline and consequently, as the story goes, ruined tragedy.

I sugges

it is the logical and temporal step before thedialectic of real determination, determinate negation, or identity anddifference.

Meanwhile, to acquire a sense of what it means to be Nietzschean anddialectical all at once

a more sophisticatednotion of dialectics

My claim in thischapter is

If this is the sort of dialectic we’re after in Nietzsche, thenwe will have a very hard time finding it,

usual canard of thesis, antithesis, andsynthesis

Perhaps this claim is truefrom the point of view of Deleuze’s own clichés about Hegel in Nietzscheand Philosophy.

that “it is quite clear thatNietzsche wrote [this work] not as a dialectician.”3

I claim,

I believe,

I claim, as I plan

es:

to combine his erudition in classical studies with his ferventcritique of philosophical fashion, all in the effort to make philology andhistorical scholarship “philosophical” in his new sense of the term.

Untimely Meditations,

So who is this Nietzsche?

But we have,thanks in part to Foucault and especially Deleuze, lost Nietzsche, especiallythe Nietzsche who was deeply and imaginatively dialectical without everworrying how Hegelian he may have sounded.

Deleuze

Foucault

a priori

new city in

peignoir

If you’ve ever played Pokémon Go, you know the problem here.

Answer: Because China is a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.

. But as late as Jan. 15, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention declared on state television that “the risk of human-to-human transmission is low.”

—an “Other”

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

in 2004

1. Select a useful enemy—an “Other”—to convert rage into conflict, even war. 2. Limit or erase the imagination that art provides, as well as the critical thinking of scholars and journalists. 3. Distract with toys, dreams of loot, and themes of superior religion or defiant national pride that enshrine past hurts and humiliations.

Dictators and tyrants routinely begin their reigns and sustain their power with the deliberate and calculated destruction of art

Salman Rushdie

Walter Benjamin.

Pablo Picasso

Oscar Wilde

Ai Weiwei,

prison cells

in gulags

pilloried

Paul Robeson

Primo Levi

“Not well. Not only am I depressed,

re-election of George W. Bush.

I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated my as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.

The stock market, our swaggering symbol of financial health and Trump’s best asset, has become a neurasthenic Victorian lady prone to taking to her fainting couch.

This new component is what is generally called the "death of the subject" or, to say it in more conventional language, the end of individualism as such.

E unibus pluram

death as a subject,''

be terribly self-conscious.

Louise Erdrich

univocal handle on as a literary territory that's gone from Darwinianly naturalistic to cybernetically post-postmodern ineighty years.

syncretic handle.

This kind of window on nervous American self-perception is justinvaluable, fictionwise. And writers can have faith in television.

what we as Audience want to see ourselves as. Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. Fictionallyspeaking, desire is the sugar in human food.

The second great thing is that television looks to be an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people buthates to be watched itself.

espial:

Television does notafford true espial because television is performance, spectacle, which by definition requires watchers. We're not voyeurs here at all.We're just viewers. We are the Audience, megametrically many, though most often we watch alone. E unibus pluram.(1)

Ivy League graduates are now flying straightfrom school to New York and Los Angeles to become television writers and are clearing well over $200,000 to start and enjoyingrapid advancement to harried clip-boarded production status.

prenominate

Syndication is anothernew area of public fascination, not only because huge cable stations like Chicago's WGN and Atlanta's WTBS have upped the stakesfrom local to national, but because syndication is changing the whole creative philosophy of network television.

I, like millions of other Americans, know this stuff only because I saw aspecial three-part report about syndication on Entertainment Tonight, itself the first nationally syndicated "news" program and the firstinfomercial so popular that TV stations were willing to pay for it.

juxtapositions as eerily apposite as anything French surrealists couldcontrive.

He figured it was "better to believe I was a TV character than not to believe I was anybody." Dr.Auschlander takes the penitent patient for a walk in the wintery Boston air and promises that he, the identityless guy, can somedayfind out who he really is, provided he can dispense with "the distraction of television." At this cheery prognosis, the patient removeshis own fuzzy winter beret and throws it into the air. The episode ends with a freeze of the aloft hat, leaving at least one viewercredulously rapt.

convolved

Therd is nothing but television on this episode; every joke and dramatic surge depends on involution, metatelevision. It isin joke within in-joke.

Betty White from everywhere,

And we seem a jaded, jeering, but willing and knowledgeable Audience. This St. Elsewhere episode was nominated foran Emmy. For best original teleplay

The hippest commercials, with stark computerized settings and blank beauties in mirrored shades and plasticslacks genuflecting before various forms of velocity, force, and adrenaline, seem like little more than TV's vision of how TV offersrescue to those lonely Joe Briefcases passively trapped into watching too much TV.

otiose.

in like

metafiction

Radical it may have been, but thinking that postmodern metafiction evolved unconscious ofprior changes in readerly taste is about as innocent as thinking that all those students we saw on television protesting the war insoutheast Asia were protesting only because they hated the war.

mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers

if realism called it like it saw it, metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

That products presented as helping you expressindividuality can afford to be advertised on television only because they sell to huge hordes. And so on.

Since the tension between what's said and what's seen is irony's whole sales territory,classic televisual irony works not via the juxtaposition of conflicting pictures or conflicting sounds, but with sights that undercut what'ssaid.

omelette tells Ed Rabel.

the summer of 1974,

conservative

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be reallysimilar in their vulgar and prurient and stupid interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests. It's allabout syncretic diversity: neither medium nor viewers are responsible for quality.

Sorry to sound judgmental, butthere it is: six hours a day is not good

Television's biggest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding.

Its social accountability seems sort of like that of designers ofmilitary weapons: unculpable right up until they get a little too good at their job

But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems forthe addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes.

It's also true that to the extent onebegins to view pseudo-relationships with Bud Bundy or Jane Pauley as acceptable alternatives to relationships with real humans, onehas commensurately less conscious incentive even to try to connect with real 3D persons, connections that are pretty important tomental health.

The modes of presentation that work best for TV - stuff like "action," with shoot-outs and car wrecks, or the rapid-fire "collage" ofcommercials, news, and music videos, or the "hysteria" of prime-time soap and sitcom with broad gestures, high voices, too muchlaughter - are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more ... well, lively thancontemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows and moves through it.

But the truth is that there's some complex high-dose psychic transactionbetween TV and Audience whereby Audience gets trained to respond to and then like and then expect trite, hackneyed, numbingtelevision shows, and to expect them to such an extent that when networks do occasionally abandon time-tested formulas we usuallypunish them for it by not watching novel forms in sufficient numbers to let them get off the ground.

But the truth is that there's some complex high-dose psychic transactionbetween TV and Audience whereby Audience gets trained to respond to and then like and then expect trite, hackneyed, numbingtelevision shows, and to expect them to such an extent that when networks do occasionally abandon time-tested formulas we usuallypunish them for it by not watching novel forms in sufficient numbers to let them get off the ground.

A Current Affair,

Real People,

The apotheosis of the pop in postwar art marked a whole new marriage between high and low culture.

Put simply, the pop reference works so well in contemporary fictionbecause (1) we all recognize such a reference, and (2) we're all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a referenc

it was making statements like "The Museum is the Mausoleum is the Men's Room,"etc. It was an example of what Octavio Paz calls "meta-irony,"[11] an attempt to reveal that categories we divide into superior/artyand inferior/vulgar are in fact so interdependent as to be coextensive. The use of "low" references in today's literary fiction, on theother hand, serves a less abstract agenda. It is meant (1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy andso "comment" on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and (3) most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.

For younger writers, TV's as much a part of reality as Toyotasand gridlock. We literally cannot imagine life without it.

But the fact is that, for most of the educated young readership forwhom Leavitt writes, members of a generation raised and nourished on messages equating what one consumes with who one is,Leavitt's descriptions do the job.

In one of the graduate workshops Isuffered through, an earnest gray eminence kept trying to convince our class that a literary story or novel always eschews "anyfeature which serves to date it," because "serious fiction must be timeless." When we finally protested that, in his own well-knownwork, characters moved about in electrically lit rooms, drove cars, spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English, inhabited a NorthAmerica already separated from Africa by continental drift, he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references thatwould date a story in the frivolous "Now." When pressed for just what stuff evoked this f.N., he said of course he meant the "trendymass-popular-media" reference. And here, at just this point, transgenerational discourse broke down. We looked at him blankly. Wescratched our little heads. We didn't get it. This guy and his students just didn't imagine the "serious" world the same way. Hisautomobiled timeless and our FCC'd own were different.

It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on lit became-something more than technical. About the time television first gaspedand sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture became high-art viable as a collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian black humorists, the metafictionists and assorted franc- and latinophiles only latercomprised by "postmodern."

the management of spontaneous moments.

"We're not here to capture an image. We're here to maintain one.

Sonys as characters in Heideggerianparables

Realism made the strange familiar.

atavistic

relate to narrative,

It's not paranoid or hysterical to acknowledge that television in large doses affects people's values and self-esteem in deep ways.

But since, at latest, the eighties, the individualist side of the great U.S. conversation has held sway in TV advertising.

New Right's rise

w/r/t

- that ultimately TV, and not any specific product or service, will be regarded by Joe B. asthe ultimate arbiter of human worth.

For, as with TV,whether we happen personally to love technology, hate it, fear it, or all three, we still look relentlessly to technology for solutions tothe very problems technology seems to cause - catalysis for smog, S.D.I. for missiles, transplants for assorted rot.

What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-culturalinstitution?

What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-culturalinstitution?

For, as with TV,whether we happen personally to love technology, hate it, fear it, or all three, we still look relentlessly to technology for solutions tothe very problems technology seems to cause - catalysis for smog, S.D.I. for missiles, transplants for assorted rot

that ultimately TV, and not any specific product or service, will be regarded by Joe B. asthe ultimate arbiter of human worth.

w/r/t

the New Right's rise

But since, at latest, the eighties, the individualist side of the great U.S. conversation has held sway in TV advertising.

It's not paranoid or hysterical to acknowledge that television in large doses affects people's values and self-esteem in deep ways.

relate to narrative,

atavistic.

Sonys as characters in Heideggerianparables

the management of spontaneous moments.

It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on lit became-something more than technical. About the time television first gaspedand sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture became high-art viable as a collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian black humorists, the metafictionists and assorted franc- and latinophiles only latercomprised by "postmodern."

In one of the graduate workshops Isuffered through, an earnest gray eminence kept trying to convince our class that a literary story or novel always eschews "anyfeature which serves to date it," because "serious fiction must be timeless." When we finally protested that, in his own well-knownwork, characters moved about in electrically lit rooms, drove cars, spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English, inhabited a NorthAmerica already separated from Africa by continental drift, he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references thatwould date a story in the frivolous "Now." When pressed for just what stuff evoked this f.N., he said of course he meant the "trendymass-popular-media" reference. And here, at just this point, transgenerational discourse broke down. We looked at him blankly. Wescratched our little heads. We didn't get it. This guy and his students just didn't imagine the "serious" world the same way. Hisautomobiled timeless and our FCC'd own were different.

But the fact is that, for most of the educated young readership forwhom Leavitt writes, members of a generation raised and nourished on messages equating what one consumes with who one is,Leavitt's descriptions do the job

For younger writers, TV's as much a part of reality as Toyotasand gridlock. We literally cannot imagine life without it.

it was making statements like "The Museum is the Mausoleum is the Men's Room,"etc. It was an example of what Octavio Paz calls "meta-irony,"[11] an attempt to reveal that categories we divide into superior/artyand inferior/vulgar are in fact so interdependent as to be coextensive. The use of "low" references in today's literary fiction, on theother hand, serves a less abstract agenda. It is meant (1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy andso "comment" on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and (3) most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.

Put simply, the pop reference works so well in contemporary fictionbecause (1) we all recognize such a reference, and (2) we're all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a reference

The apotheosis of the pop in postwar art marked a whole new marriage between high and low culture.

Real People

A Current Affair

But the truth is that there's some complex high-dose psychic transactionbetween TV and Audience whereby Audience gets trained to respond to and then like and then expect trite, hackneyed, numbingtelevision shows, and to expect them to such an extent that when networks do occasionally abandon time-tested formulas we usuallypunish them for it by not watching novel forms in sufficient numbers to let them get off the ground.

The modes of presentation that work best for TV - stuff like "action," with shoot-outs and car wrecks, or the rapid-fire "collage" ofcommercials, news, and music videos, or the "hysteria" of prime-time soap and sitcom with broad gestures, high voices, too muchlaughter - are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more ... well, lively thancontemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows and moves through it

It's also true that to the extent onebegins to view pseudo-relationships with Bud Bundy or Jane Pauley as acceptable alternatives to relationships with real humans, onehas commensurately less conscious incentive even to try to connect with real 3D persons, connections that are pretty important tomental health

But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems forthe addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes.

Its social accountability seems sort of like that of designers ofmilitary weapons: unculpable right up until they get a little too good at their job

Television's biggest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding.

Sorry to sound judgmental, butthere it is: six hours a day is not good.

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be reallysimilar in their vulgar and prurient and stupid interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests. It's allabout syncretic diversity: neither medium nor viewers are responsible for quality.

conservative

the summer of 1974,

omelette tells Ed Rabel.

Since the tension between what's said and what's seen is irony's whole sales territory,classic televisual irony works not via the juxtaposition of conflicting pictures or conflicting sounds, but with sights that undercut what'ssaid.

That products presented as helping you expressindividuality can afford to be advertised on television only because they sell to huge hordes. And so on

if realism called it like it saw it, metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

as exchanging an old idea of itself as a nation of do-ers and be-ers for a new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomizedmass of self-conscious watchers and appearers.

Radical it may have been, but thinking that postmodern metafiction evolved unconscious ofprior changes in readerly taste is about as innocent as thinking that all those students we saw on television protesting the war insoutheast Asia were protesting only because they hated the war.

We start to "feel" ourselves feeling, yearn to experience "experiences." And that American subspecies into writing starts writing moreand more about...

in like

otiose

For best original teleplay

Betty White from everywhere

Therd is nothing but television on this episode; every joke and dramatic surge depends on involution, metatelevision. It isin joke within in-joke

convolved

He figured it was "better to believe I was a TV character than not to believe I was anybody." Dr.Auschlander takes the penitent patient for a walk in the wintery Boston air and promises that he, the identityless guy, can somedayfind out who he really is, provided he can dispense with "the distraction of television." At this cheery prognosis, the patient removeshis own fuzzy winter beret and throws it into the air. The episode ends with a freeze of the aloft hat, leaving at least one viewercredulously rapt.

juxtapositions as eerily apposite as anything French surrealists couldcontrive

I, like millions of other Americans, know this stuff only because I saw aspecial three-part report about syndication on Entertainment Tonight, itself the first nationally syndicated "news" program and the firstinfomercial so popular that TV stations were willing to pay for it.

Syndication is anothernew area of public fascination, not only because huge cable stations like Chicago's WGN and Atlanta's WTBS have upped the stakesfrom local to national, but because syndication is changing the whole creative philosophy of network television

prenominate

Ivy League graduates are now flying straightfrom school to New York and Los Angeles to become television writers and are clearing well over $200,000 to start and enjoyingrapid advancement to harried clip-boarded production status

Television does notafford true espial because television is performance, spectacle, which by definition requires watchers. We're not voyeurs here at all.We're just viewers. We are the Audience, megametrically many, though most often we watch alone. E unibus pluram.(1)

espial

The second great thing is that television looks to be an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people buthates to be watched itself

what we as Audience want to see ourselves as. Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. Fictionallyspeaking, desire is the sugar in human food

They no longer "quote" such "texts" as a Joyce might have done, or a Mahler; they incorporate them, to the point where the line between high-art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw.

"death of t

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic.

So there remains somewhere behind all parody the feeling that there is a linguistic norm in contrast to which the styles of the great modernists can be mocke

All of these styles, however different from each other, arc comparable in this: each is quite unmistakable; once one is learned, it is not likely to be confused with something else.

a periodizing concept

Wittgenstein

"theory"

s he would have been wrong

And if that were not enough, the Bloomian reader will immediately recognize “yet once more” as the first three words of Milton’s “Lycidas,” a pastoral elegy whose speaker resists assimilation by the conventions he employs in an effort to assert a place and an identity of his own not already occupied by history.

2017

dicast'

manity with

we should no longer wonder

the unrelateable is necessarily ineffable and unknowable.

He asked us to see, as he put it in The Twilight of the Idols, that “the true world” is a fable, a myth concocted by Parmenides and Plato.

But whereas the idealists thought that philosophy could answer questions about the nature of Reality that empirical sci-ence could not, Nietzsche just wanted to stop people from posing such questions.

Both sets of proposals, for a time at least, served those purposes well. The question of whether either or both got reality right need not arise.