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PUBLICATIONS: Aesthetics
of Language
Excerpt from: Cuba Journal
An Aesthetics of Language in an Age of Cultural Studies
Cultural studies (the dominant challenge to, and increasingly
influencial practice within, English studies), has been highly
critical of the aesthetic: uninterested in what the aesthetic
enables and explicates; and in understanding its processes. In
its assignment of the content of a work of literature to ethical
and political scrutiny, it has missed the opportunity to understand
and thus learn from aesthetic practice. Catherine Belsey (Ed.,
Privileging Difference by Anthony Easthope, 2002, p. ix), (and
in contrast to her stance in her 1980 book, Critical Practice),
says, Recent theories and practices of interpretation readily
revert…to an account of thematic content, neglecting the
text’s mode of address and the position it thereby offers
the reader-subject. Going straight to the signified, confined
to what the text says, such a reading is unable to recognize what
the text does.
I interpret Belsey in two ways. First, any text must be considered
as a whole work; we cannot criticize part of a work without considering
that part’s relationship to the whole. Secondly, she implies
that certain “mode(s) of address” have specific methods
of proceeding and work within certain conventions.
Derek Attridge says the lack of account of form in contemporary
literary discussion is the result of dualism, of the “opposition
of form and content, which sets formal properties apart from any
connection the work has to ethical, historical and social issues”
(1994, 245). With the current interest in literature almost exclusively
related to semantics, “form will continue to be treated
as something of an embarrassment” (1994, 245). His solution
is to read texts as acts of signification, a term which he attributes
in part to Jacques Derrida. As such acts, the text is both an
act of reading and an act of writing (1994, 245).
The notion of “response” here is a complex one, since
it is not merely a matter of an act calling forth a wholly secondary
and subsidiary reaction, but of a reenactment that makes the “original”
act happen and happen differently with each response.
As enactments, meanings within literature are both formed and
performed, as both the language and the forms and conventions
of its specific genre enact, or put into play, the reading(s)
of a particular reader (Attridge, 1994, 246). This conjoining
of elements that compose literature requires the aesthetic to
be fully engaged and part of any discussion of literature. Attridge
opposes the implicit view of literature as a static, formal and
linear object whose meanings as a product of social positioning
within historical time are derived from the “necessary sequentiality
of reading”, or as “a fixed linguistic structure without
a temporal or performative dimension” (Attridge, 1994, 246).
In this paper I argue for an aesthetics of language—for
literary language and language practices based in experience,
that is, in place. I claim that any theory critical of literary
language, works?by necessity?within aesthetic and experiential
frameworks, as described by Attridge above. For those critical
theorists to disparage (or simply disregard) the very ways not
only writers use language, but also the way humans make meaning
through their kinesthetic, emotional, imaginative as well as cognitive
beings, is unhelpful and unscholarly. In this paper, I want to
show how, as an artist, I work within my art form; I want to speak
to my (and its) connection to place; and I want to show the ways
in which my work builds in its own critical distance. I develop
my argument in several ways. I analyize my poetry as well as examples
from my teaching and from theatre. I wish to show the relationship
between a text’s content and its form, and highlight critical
moments that aesthetic approaches to experience make available
to artists, teachers and students, and researchers. I am not so
interested in creating a new theory as I am in speaking about
the processes of a practicing artist, examining those processes
for their critical stance, and identifying the key components
that I believe must be present in any literary theory in order
for it to be truly critical. To not limit the discussion here
to the particular work and practice of an individual artist, I
hope to present an experience-based theory of art. I illustrate
my claims in several ways: with a description of my own processes
in writing my fourth book of poetry, Cuba Journal: Language and
Writing; and with examples from my teaching practice and from
my work in the theatre. Lastly, having established Cuba Journal
as a critical work, I consider its potential as a research project
suitable for academic programs specifically within Faculties of
Education, where the research sites are often highly complex.
Bibliography
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