Don’t you hate it when you think of the perfect response to something someone has said, only it’s a day later; the conversation’s done; and (if you’re lucky) you might never see the jerk again anyway? That’s pretty much the story of my life. I am like George Costanza, dreaming up ways to re-create the situation just so I can use the perfectly withering comeback I didn’t think of at the time–the exact retort that will brutally slay my interlocutor, forcing her to admit defeat and cower in shame.
I woke up this morning replaying a conversation I had last night with some chick who joined our group at the bar and, in the course of some good-natured interdepartmental snarking, tried to float the assertion that the only two ways to analyze literature were from the perspective of The Colonizer or that of The Colonized. If you know me much you know how absolutely wearying I find all those outgrowths of Marxist criticism, so this argument especially chapped my ass. When she tried to force me to take sides between her two alternatives, I replied simply that I do not write about issues of empire at all, and that, shockingly, one does not have to.
What I found myself wishing I had said this morning was that I respect critics who engage with a text deeply and with intellectual rigor, and that her assertion bespoke a reliance on the kind of superficial meta-scholarship that is both hollow and fruitless and belongs in a Sociology department, not a Literature program.
Since I missed my chance, I felt I had to tell someone. Whew. I feel better now.
“I respect critics who engage with a text deeply and with intellectual rigor, and that her assertion bespoke a reliance on the kind of superficial meta-scholarship that is both hollow and fruitless and belongs in a Sociology department, not a Literature program.”
snapppy! got a reall zing to it.
I’m thinking bumper stickers.
my owan stanby for such ocasioins is ‘what the fuck are you jabbering about?’
for waht its wroth.
Don’t the French call this “l’esprit d’escalier”? i.e. what you think about once you’ve left, in the stairwell.
I’m intimidated READING it.
I’m sure she would have peed. Right there on the spot.
I read Franz Fanon in Jr College back in the early ’70’s and it sure made me think about how different France was since the Norman’s invaded.
O– Damn the French with their expressions for everything. I’m generally too slow to think of anything on the stairs though. Need a good sleep first.
BB– Agh, if only! Not that I strive to make people pee, or anything, but this girl would have deserved it. That was the most innocuous thing she said, if I go by reports from others at the table. A tale for another occasion, though.
S– Damn Normans, with their metropolitan ways!
I too am weary of people who think this way. As well as the ones who teach it too. In fact, I bet I can guess the name of the professor that little gem came from. Your response is perfect. And you’ll have it for the next time you run aground of this kind of “criticism”.
The girl in this case was (I suspect) a first-year grad student, but yeah. Argh. She even had the gall to complain that we don’t have enough Post-Colonialists of whatever subtle stripe on faculty. I was all “Oh, honey!” I mean I was really just fucking speechless. That’s all we have on faculty, it seems.
Uh, yeah. Some of my old profs are still there and I still can’t get all of the readings I did of Paul de Man, Terry Eagleton, Derrida, Spivak, etc. out of my head. I don’t think I did enough reading of actual literature while an undergrad at Zembla U..
But I did get to go white water rafting on the weekends and I took classes on backpacking and juggling…all which gave me credits toward graduation. So that was kindof fun.
I always thought the thing to do was to, you know, read carefully, look at the structural and stylistic aspects of the writing, and see how that expressed the author’s ideas - I had no idea this whole post-colonial analysis thing was going down in America. If I’d met that girl, I probably would have been all like, “Tell me again how the Spencerian stanza reinforces the colonial hegemony,” or something like that.
hegemony. heh.
hey timt - i thiought t.s. eliat dispensed with the athoars ideas back in teh 1930s or whanevar?
i aways like to thinnk of eliet geting smashed at partys and goign up to athuars an yellin ‘ha! haha! ur iralevent now! whatdya think abuot that eh? EH?’ then hed flip the guys tie up an slap im on teh back so hard hed splil his drink.
p.s.
T– I feel fairly confident that girl would have an answer to your question. An infuriating one, but an answer nonetheless. The whole thing is just so effing programmatic.
K– I feel pretty much the same way about hegemony as I do the patriarchy, which is to say, yawn. But it is a fun word to shout.
HA– Hey, that’s what I do at parties! And did you write that response, or is it a response to an ad you placed?
souounds like ur in the right busnes than!
tahts was me. ‘epiphone’ -> ‘epicene’?!
unfroutnately it got flaged an ‘remioved’. which turns out that dosnt ramove it! it jsut canges teh link on the main list page to pnoit to a ‘this craps gone now’ page. so its only in thery tghe ads rely gone.
btw teh new colars are scery.
I think the same girl began a conversation with me by pointing out that I was being quite reticent (in my defense I was trying to process the four pints of dark beer in my system and had to mentally focus on that). I don’t think that the best way to start talking to an introverted person is to bring attention to the fact that they are being introverted. It’s best, you know, to say your name, ask for theirs and go from there.
HA - True, but it’s Roland Barthes that we have to blame for murdering the author.
“…tried to float the assertion that the only two ways to analyze literature were from the perspective of The Colonizer or that of The Colonized.”
That’s the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard.
HA– Oh, the new colors are not scary; there’s much much less pink this time. There is even a lot of white. I like it. (Well, of course I do, I guess.)
S– Aha! I’m glad I have a witness as to her general obnoxiousness. What a conversationalist she was!
TT– Barthes. Meh. I mean, I got no general beef with him, but meh.
Z– Yeah, you could tell she was trying to impress. The whole night she was all, “Oooh, I’m going to be drunk and have intellectual conversations with people I meet at the bar, because this is what I was told grad school is all about. OK, here I go! 3, 2, 1, LAUNCH CONVERSATION!”
Also, this is why I cannot hang out with people from my own discipline.
cont ur belsigns vuaeg. in my fleild they al colect startrek memrabilia.
Take that, Said! And, ahem, “cannot hang out with people from *my* own discipline,” ahem? Have you ever heard the word “colonizer” or “colonized” come from my mouth NOT dripping with derision? I think not! You should have asked her what her slave name was.
You have to wonder, if she kept on banging on about ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’, maybe she’d just come back from having an enema …?
No, she meant The Colonized, from out of West LA in the late 70s; those dudes were *awesome*. And, as it turns out, they also had a hell of a perspective on contemporary literature.
Ha: “cont ur belsigns vuaeg. in my fleild they al colect startrek memrabilia.”
Seriously, don’t get me strated.