Sunday, February 05, 2006
Research and Writing Projects
These are three writing projects I envision as of this morning. (It always seems to be in flux and nothing ever gets done.)
1. An essay offering a comparative analysis of two Romantic poetics or "poetologies": Holderlin and Shelley. All these ideas are vague. But there's something about these two that seemed linked to me. For one, I like both poets. (And I don't like most poetry!) There's something about the two of them that seem very contemporary in a proto-deconstructive way. Shelley worked out his conception of poetry in A Defense of Poetry as well as other prose works and in the poems, too. Prometheus Unbound seems especially exemplary in this way. Holderlin has a number of fascinating, though nearly impossible to read fragmentary essays and letters collected by Thomas Pfau in a collection I enjoy looking at. Holderlin also works out his ideas of poetry in his mature odes. Critical accounts of the two poets seem important somehow, too. For Holderlin, there's appraisals from Heidegger, Adorno, and Benjamin. Trying to get the Heidegger and the Adorno ideas together is an interesting challenge. For Shelley, one of my favorite critical books is Jerold Hogle's Shelley's Process, not to mention various essays written by my dissertation advisor Forest Pyle. Derrida's "Living On: Borderlines" is a prennial favorite.
2. Some kind of "pure" theory book on four writers from the twentieth century, which are exemplary in their regard to come up with an unsystematic system of inquiry. A method that questions methodology on its way to resisting a Hegelian-inspired notion of Totality. The four writers are Wittgenstein, Adorno, Derrida, and Deleuze. I've been reading lots about these guys lately, and I wish I could find a way to bring them altogether, regardless of their complex individuality and irreducible differences from each other. Been enjoying a collection of essays,
Between Deleuze and Derrida, which does good work on the two, but get frustrated by how much of what they say seems to connect with the Benjamin/Adorno wing of continental philosophy, too, but not knowing how to put it all together.
3. An underground, alternative, "minor" history of the novel that deals with the understanding of temporality, a time out of joint, which questions the conventional understandings of these topics. Rather than Leavis's "great tradition" of Austen, James, Eliot, and Lawrence, my collection of books include Behn's Oroonoko, Diderot's Jacques le fataliste et son maitre, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Melville's Pierre, Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and DeLillo's Underworld. All of these novels seem to be rethinking the eventhood of the pure event. Narratives try to relate a series of events, but the radicality of the event itself resists this process of domestication. (I like the symmetry of English-French-English and American-French-American.) A theoretical introduction would fuse interesting perspectives on time as developed by Benjamin, Derrida, and Deleuze. This is basically a re-working and expansion of my dissertation.
Hmmm . . . How will all this work get done? Arrgghhh!
1. An essay offering a comparative analysis of two Romantic poetics or "poetologies": Holderlin and Shelley. All these ideas are vague. But there's something about these two that seemed linked to me. For one, I like both poets. (And I don't like most poetry!) There's something about the two of them that seem very contemporary in a proto-deconstructive way. Shelley worked out his conception of poetry in A Defense of Poetry as well as other prose works and in the poems, too. Prometheus Unbound seems especially exemplary in this way. Holderlin has a number of fascinating, though nearly impossible to read fragmentary essays and letters collected by Thomas Pfau in a collection I enjoy looking at. Holderlin also works out his ideas of poetry in his mature odes. Critical accounts of the two poets seem important somehow, too. For Holderlin, there's appraisals from Heidegger, Adorno, and Benjamin. Trying to get the Heidegger and the Adorno ideas together is an interesting challenge. For Shelley, one of my favorite critical books is Jerold Hogle's Shelley's Process, not to mention various essays written by my dissertation advisor Forest Pyle. Derrida's "Living On: Borderlines" is a prennial favorite.
2. Some kind of "pure" theory book on four writers from the twentieth century, which are exemplary in their regard to come up with an unsystematic system of inquiry. A method that questions methodology on its way to resisting a Hegelian-inspired notion of Totality. The four writers are Wittgenstein, Adorno, Derrida, and Deleuze. I've been reading lots about these guys lately, and I wish I could find a way to bring them altogether, regardless of their complex individuality and irreducible differences from each other. Been enjoying a collection of essays,
Between Deleuze and Derrida, which does good work on the two, but get frustrated by how much of what they say seems to connect with the Benjamin/Adorno wing of continental philosophy, too, but not knowing how to put it all together.
3. An underground, alternative, "minor" history of the novel that deals with the understanding of temporality, a time out of joint, which questions the conventional understandings of these topics. Rather than Leavis's "great tradition" of Austen, James, Eliot, and Lawrence, my collection of books include Behn's Oroonoko, Diderot's Jacques le fataliste et son maitre, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Melville's Pierre, Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and DeLillo's Underworld. All of these novels seem to be rethinking the eventhood of the pure event. Narratives try to relate a series of events, but the radicality of the event itself resists this process of domestication. (I like the symmetry of English-French-English and American-French-American.) A theoretical introduction would fuse interesting perspectives on time as developed by Benjamin, Derrida, and Deleuze. This is basically a re-working and expansion of my dissertation.
Hmmm . . . How will all this work get done? Arrgghhh!
