It Must Be Packet Time

Feb 012010
 

We advisees have grown very quiet on this page of late.  I’m in the midst of some final editing right now (well, I’ve walked away from it for a moment) and thought I’d add my comments from the weekend.  Spent large chunks of time Saturday and Sunday at the University of San Diego Law Library.  I tried their undergraduate library too, but it was louder than hell.  I was surprised by how many people were on their phones or just engaged in loud conversations.  Maybe I’m just getting old.  The law library was much more quiet.  They post signs forbidding phone use and talking but permit food and drinks, so it’s beocme the new go-to.  I get very little done in my house.  Too many distractions.

I’ve been reading Francine Prose’s book, Reading Like a Writer.   I find it a bit tedious at times, but she has some great things to say about reading.  I also picked up the Best American Poetry anthology and I’m looking forward to reading some of that once the packet is in the mail.  With Doug’s postings on Lish and Shklovsky, I’m tempted to try to read Francois Cusset’s French Theory, a book I purchased last year and which has been gathering dust ever since.  (My daughter and I are flying to Amstredam next week for her swim meet…I’ll have a lot of time to read.)  I should get back to my editing and printing.   Hope to be more active on this sight in a day or two.

—Richard Farrell

Shklovsky and Lish

Jan 312010
 

Now think about how Shklovsky and Lish fit together. Lish is a child of the stillborn American avant garde (postmodern) of the 60s and 70s. I mean people like Gass, Coover, Barthelme and Hawkes. Hawkes was famous for having said that plot, character, setting and theme are the enemies of the novel. Shklovsky’s Russian Formalism evolves out of Futurism and Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. (Cervantes and Sterne invented most of the techniques of literary experiment; we just keep rediscovering them–note the blank pages in Lish’s novel Arcade and then go and look at the famous blank chapter in Tristram Shandy.) He says art is about technique (not about its subject matter). But the techniques he discusses are delay, stepped construction, deceleration, repetition, parallelism, differential perceptions and baring the device. His novels, even his essays for that matter, are strange, discursive, tangential, experimental narratives that include bits of memoir and literary criticism. Russian Formalism led through structuralist linguistics (Jacobson) and post-structuralism (Saussure and Barthes) to European literary theory–Barthes, Derrida and after.  Lately Lish has been quoting European theorists like Kristeva, Deleuze and Lyotard in his epigraphs. Though they talk and write quite differently, both Lish and Shklovsky believe that subject matter is secondary to technique. They both use the formal disruption of mainstream expectation to jar the reader into paying attention to the reading of the text.

dg