I want to do something special in my next seminar on the Monday after Thanksgiving. I have no ideas except that I want it to be a master class of some kind. That, a class in which, if you had never studied with me, would give people the best I have to offer in 3 hours. Any ideas?
Maybe organize it around (one or all of) the Mayhewianisms? (I define a Mayhewianism as as "an expression that is characteristic of Jonathan Mayhew's exemplary scholarly persona" (so, "the best of you" in that sense). They're usually assertive in tone, and have a tendency to draw a line in the sand. They often appear to tell you who you think you are, but really just reveal that Mayhew has a clear sense of who he's talking to.
ReplyDelete#1 "The guy lives in a bizarro universe where Edward Said is not sufficiently sympathetic to the Palestinian cause."
#2 "To really love literature is to love how it rewrites your subjectivity, how it kicks your ass with its transformative power."
#3 "I came of age intellectually during the apogee of Derrida in the American academy, so I know this theory better than you. If you try this argument with me I will crush you."
#4 "...I began to feel brutishly stupid. It was true that I was studying Keats and Wordsworth and watching bad Italian mafia movies from the 70s, but I was not writing, not producing my own ideas."
#5 "What's the point of being Zukofsky if you are going to write like that?"
#6 "I do not play in bands."
#7 "If that quibble seems too basic to you you are reading the wrong blog [/in the wrong course]."
That's possible. But it seems a little self-centered
ReplyDeleteFair point, but someone once said:
ReplyDelete"It would be selfish of me to be too modest, just so you would not think of me as being too arrogant."
Something about why poetry, what poetry is, why it is something other than a trite coded message with icky cutesy rhymes
ReplyDeleteSomething involving the bad poetry project, in other words ... other bad poems, too
ReplyDelete