I will now play the complete sentence game. I have played it many times before, though rarely in writing. The secret of the game is to think, speak, or write complete sentences. You only lose the game when the sentences come to an end. All games of the complete sentence game are destined to be lost, since failing to produce a sentence, or falling asleep, ends the game.
The content of the sentences should be the game itself. This is very important. You must think of sentences related to the playing of the game, or its history, or some other aspect having to do with its implications. The sentences do not have to be well-conceived, but they should be well-formed from the grammatical and syntactical perspective. You cannot go back and revise a sentence, in the written version of the game. Nor, in the vocal or silent thinking versions, can you go back and change anything. You will have thus stopped the flow of sentences.
I have played the game many times. The written version is simply a simulacrum of the more authentic, silent version, which is of extreme difficulty. There, I have demonstrated the way to play the game. I encourage you to play it as well.
Friday, May 3, 2013
On Not Flipping
If you already have a teaching method in which you basically engaging your students, then "flipping" the classroom is redundant and possibly a way of flipping it back. Notice how people want to smuggle in on-line elements and canned (videotaped) lecture in order to flip the classroom from a presumably lecture-based format that is not really the norm anyway. The strawman of bad, teacher-centered education is used to smuggle in even less progressive techniques. It almost makes me want to lecture now! It is easier to talk for an hour than to engage the students in activities. I love to talk I could talk for hours and hours.
Poetics
Interestingly, the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics does not define poetics as the discourse of poets about poetry. The section on "Western Poetics" for example, when it gets to modernism, talks only about literary theory. Modern poetics goes from Croce to Russian formalism to Anglo-American New Criticism, with a brief detour through a series of writers taken to be critical of Croce's expressionism or of Western presumptions of universality generally. This is just bizarre. You would think Ezra Pound would be mentioned somewhere.
It is only at the end that poetics is defined as "the compositional principles that poets themselves discover and apply during the writing process" (1064). This seems only the case for "Postmodernism and Beyond," though (according to this article). This seems like a very narrow definition, too. Poetics is not just discovered and applied "during the writing process." As I see it, it is a kind of "poetry by other means." It could be the internal poetics inferred from reading poetry, an explicitly metapoetic "ars poetica," prose writing set apart from poetry, or hybrid works of prose and poetry like Spring & All.
Poetics, in the preface to the entire volume, is defined as "the theoretical and practical study of poetry."
From one point of view it doesn't matter whether Charles Olson or Roman Jakobson is doing poetics. It is still a theoretical and or discourse around poetry. There is, however, a specific tradition of poets doing poetics, and this tradition does have a certain continuity that is lost by subsuming poetics to literary theory ("about" poetry).
It is only at the end that poetics is defined as "the compositional principles that poets themselves discover and apply during the writing process" (1064). This seems only the case for "Postmodernism and Beyond," though (according to this article). This seems like a very narrow definition, too. Poetics is not just discovered and applied "during the writing process." As I see it, it is a kind of "poetry by other means." It could be the internal poetics inferred from reading poetry, an explicitly metapoetic "ars poetica," prose writing set apart from poetry, or hybrid works of prose and poetry like Spring & All.
Poetics, in the preface to the entire volume, is defined as "the theoretical and practical study of poetry."
From one point of view it doesn't matter whether Charles Olson or Roman Jakobson is doing poetics. It is still a theoretical and or discourse around poetry. There is, however, a specific tradition of poets doing poetics, and this tradition does have a certain continuity that is lost by subsuming poetics to literary theory ("about" poetry).
Ideal
What would my ideal work conditions be?
*I would teach the students I want to teach. They would have to apply to work with me. There would be many applying to work with me and I would teach the best ones. I can fire a student whenever I want. A student can fire me too with no repercussions.
*We would meet in small groups whenever they wanted to. We could have several on-going working groups devoted to particular topics. There would maybe be four groups at a time, with no more than 10 students in each. Each would meet whenever there was a scheduled meeting, of no fixed length. I would have 10 hours of teaching a week, during which these meetings could take place.
*All the work would be for publication. Each student would work on his or her publications, or we could all collaborate on group publications / articles. A student or group of students might want to learn something that would not lead to an immediate publication. That would be fine too. Undergrads and grads alike would do meaningful research leading to publication.
*Lectures would be presentations, in the style conference papers. I could do some and the students could do some. They would be infrequent.
*No grades. No degrees.
So you can see that those are not my current conditions. I am not complaining about my current conditions, either. In many ways they are quite wonderful. What I want to do is to imagine what I think my ideal would be. Now that I've done that, I need to think of ways of moving my current conditions 1/4 of the way there.
My first thought is that independent studies don't work very well, even though they tend to be more "ideal" in the way I've conceived of things. Directing dissertations is not ideal either. I'm going to have to think of this a bit more.
*I would teach the students I want to teach. They would have to apply to work with me. There would be many applying to work with me and I would teach the best ones. I can fire a student whenever I want. A student can fire me too with no repercussions.
*We would meet in small groups whenever they wanted to. We could have several on-going working groups devoted to particular topics. There would maybe be four groups at a time, with no more than 10 students in each. Each would meet whenever there was a scheduled meeting, of no fixed length. I would have 10 hours of teaching a week, during which these meetings could take place.
*All the work would be for publication. Each student would work on his or her publications, or we could all collaborate on group publications / articles. A student or group of students might want to learn something that would not lead to an immediate publication. That would be fine too. Undergrads and grads alike would do meaningful research leading to publication.
*Lectures would be presentations, in the style conference papers. I could do some and the students could do some. They would be infrequent.
*No grades. No degrees.
So you can see that those are not my current conditions. I am not complaining about my current conditions, either. In many ways they are quite wonderful. What I want to do is to imagine what I think my ideal would be. Now that I've done that, I need to think of ways of moving my current conditions 1/4 of the way there.
My first thought is that independent studies don't work very well, even though they tend to be more "ideal" in the way I've conceived of things. Directing dissertations is not ideal either. I'm going to have to think of this a bit more.
4. The poetics of poetry itself shares many of the romantics suppositions of the poetics of cultural exceptionalism.
The cluster of concerns that to which we give the label poetics, as exemplified by collections of short essays written by poets like The Poetics of the New American Poetry, is fundamentally romantic in its ideology. The assumption that every poet should have his or her own individual poetics, distinct from that of any other creator, is quite foreign to the neo-classical understanding of “poetics” as a set of rules, recommendations, or general principles guiding all imaginative literature. Several poets might, in fact, share comparable versions of romantic poetics, but these will acquire an idiosyncratic shape and linguistic expression in each individual case, or be expressed in a unique set of terms, seemingly sui generis and locked into its particular vocabulary.
As a consequence, the poetics of an individual poet might also take the form of a theory of cultural identity applicable, in theory, to an entire people, nation, or region of the world. Lezama Lima’s sistema poético del mudno, for example, is undoubtedly his own personal “Lezamian” poetics, but also as a theory of cubanidad (Cubanness), of the Carribean region, or of Latin American identity. Insofar as it situates Cuba (and Latin America) in relation to other world cultures (European, Egyptian, etc...) it is also potentially universalist in scope. A similar set of concentric circles are also evident in Lorca’s theory of the duende.
The cluster of concerns that to which we give the label poetics, as exemplified by collections of short essays written by poets like The Poetics of the New American Poetry, is fundamentally romantic in its ideology. The assumption that every poet should have his or her own individual poetics, distinct from that of any other creator, is quite foreign to the neo-classical understanding of “poetics” as a set of rules, recommendations, or general principles guiding all imaginative literature. Several poets might, in fact, share comparable versions of romantic poetics, but these will acquire an idiosyncratic shape and linguistic expression in each individual case, or be expressed in a unique set of terms, seemingly sui generis and locked into its particular vocabulary.
As a consequence, the poetics of an individual poet might also take the form of a theory of cultural identity applicable, in theory, to an entire people, nation, or region of the world. Lezama Lima’s sistema poético del mudno, for example, is undoubtedly his own personal “Lezamian” poetics, but also as a theory of cubanidad (Cubanness), of the Carribean region, or of Latin American identity. Insofar as it situates Cuba (and Latin America) in relation to other world cultures (European, Egyptian, etc...) it is also potentially universalist in scope. A similar set of concentric circles are also evident in Lorca’s theory of the duende.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Bad Advice
I figured out something. My advice is not very good if you are not a person like me. I know my field and have abundant ideas; I love to write and take pride in my prose. I am not particularly great with people unlike myself, though. People who don't seem to get what scholarship is all about in the first place. I always plan my courses as though everyone were like me. That's the presumption I make, but of course that is false.
If you are like me, you might not even need my tricks.
If you are like me, you might not even need my tricks.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Pièce de résistance
I think the best part of the new Lorca book will the part of the chapter on "13 Ways of Looking at the Poetics of Cultural Exceptionalism." This chapter, in turn, will be a kind of tour de force. I don't care if all the rest of the book is not as good as this.
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