tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5669027158753952.post1476292630376733966..comments2024-01-28T00:29:16.605-08:00Comments on Susan M. Schultz's Blog: On Time & Teaching: a Meditationsusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16934944559857117395noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5669027158753952.post-43688231299059115542010-10-23T07:44:40.221-07:002010-10-23T07:44:40.221-07:00Just have 'em read Finnegan's Wake, Nightw...Just have 'em read Finnegan's Wake, Nightwood, then a little Diane Williams, David Markson, Aaron Kunin, Danielle Dutton, et al.a.k.a. "Joe"https://www.blogger.com/profile/09297686120651846304noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5669027158753952.post-66269530350419542052010-10-16T17:46:00.231-07:002010-10-16T17:46:00.231-07:00Thanks, Tom!Thanks, Tom!susanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16934944559857117395noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5669027158753952.post-839952615723363362010-10-16T17:10:25.141-07:002010-10-16T17:10:25.141-07:00-The notion that there's a market out there fo...-The notion that there's a market out there for literary fiction is, I fear, increasingly a fantasy. I agree, however, that fiction writers may tend to think in terms of that fantasy market more than poets.<br /><br />-Music, yep. That's what I'm after. I lament occasionally that words have this dastardly representative quality. It mucks everything up. But then it's a virtue too. I want the representations to make their own kind of music. Tenor and vehicle, signifier, signified: in the perfect novel they all harmonize. If I were primarily interested in the real world, I too would opt for journalism. My novels should come with a disclaimer perhaps: "Not a thru-way."<br /><br />-Dr. Morse, the idea that the word "fiction" implies a market and consumerism strikes me as very strange indeed. "Novel" maybe, but "fiction," I think, stands more and more for the experimental branch whose writers owe some debt to Borges (Ficciones) and who almost certainly have day jobs. <br /><br />-Interesting point about what makes a story not work. I don't read this way. I can think of many novels that I don't think succeed entirely as novels but which I loved reading, in bits, anyway (virtually everything by Norman Mailer, for instance, and G. Stein, D. Barthleme's novels, Nightwood, Invisible Man, Huck Finn...). Most people, I'd agree, are rather more binary in this regard.<br /><br />I should really stop now and resume being a dad.Tom Gammarinohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06808197936737997930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5669027158753952.post-74985172867561896682010-10-16T17:09:19.739-07:002010-10-16T17:09:19.739-07:00-On showing vs. telling. Another false dichotomy. ...-On showing vs. telling. Another false dichotomy. It's useful insofar as we get it, but it's all showing really (diegesis, not mimesis), and what writer besides V. Woolf "shows" us time passing? No, you tell it. And which is "He sat down"? The real point has always been about specificity and concrete detail, not showing and telling. Susan, our friend Molly Gaudry just edited a book called "Tell," an anthology of stories that "tell." You probably knew that. As for those other aesthetic credos and aphorisms, Mark McGurl's The Program Era does an interesting dissection, in cultural/institutional terms, of "find your voice", "show don't tell", and "write what you know". What would a novel look like if you sucked all of them away? Beckett's The Unnameable.<br /><br />-Bakhtin on polyphony and heteroglossia: it seems to me he puts his finger on the novel's unique province, that is, its inherent perspectivism and irreducible complexity (to appropriate, with absolute reluctance, a hideous term from Intelligent Design--I should have said "unparaphrasability" maybe, to paraphrase Flannery O'Connor). I think of theory of mind in some connection here too. Brian Boyd's last book, On the Origin of Stories, makes the case for stories as a Darwinian adaptation of sorts. I recommend it.<br /><br />-As for craft and content in the workshop, in my experience this depends very much on who's running it. I always try to keep the discussion evenly balanced, granting all writers their donne but considering everything on rhetorical as well as formalistic grounds.<br /><br />-I like the cv question. I remember compiling something like that when I was just starting out. (Didn't Ben Franklin do something like this too?) It'd be neat to locate it and see how much of it I've followed through on. I'd guess half. <br /><br />-Realist writers can certainly use symbols to unify a work, though it's true they may need to be more subtle than the fantasy writer, and that too many of them (symbols) sooner or later steer the work away from mimesis toward autotely. Granted, this depends to some degree on what sort of a universe the writer believes we live in.Tom Gammarinohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06808197936737997930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5669027158753952.post-91314499958700804742010-10-16T17:07:44.456-07:002010-10-16T17:07:44.456-07:00Thanks for including me on this. It's just the...Thanks for including me on this. It's just the sort of discussion I miss being in on. <br /><br />And so, I go point by point:<br /><br />-To say that the novel has its origins in the 18th century and journalism is, I think, a bit of an oversimplification. Verse epics are back there too, aren't they? Homer and the Gilgamesh poet. And there's the Roman novel (I've been meaning to read The Satyricon for years). And then there are those defacto precedents in Japan (Tale of Genji, 11th Century) and, I suspect, India, though I know nothing of the latter. Why do I labor the point? Only by way of suggesting that I think the poetry/fiction dichotomy is somewhat (and only somewhat) false.<br /><br />As for the novel's relationship with journalism, though, I suppose "realist" fiction is thoroughly indebted to it, with DeFoe as the progenitor of that line. Franzen's last novel, Freedom, strikes me as being thoroughly of this journalistic sort, i.e. it very obviously adheres to a program of cultural reportage, wants to show Americans who they are at this moment in history, to have its finger on the pulse, articulate the zeitgeist, etc. This isn't really fair, of course. There's a lot more to the book than that, e.g. characters, but this aspect of the novel, or The Novel, seems to me...what's the word?...superfluous? Doomed? Roth observed maybe forty years ago that reality had outstripped the novel in terms of the salaciousness of content. The novelist Gary Shteyngart said somewhere recently that technology moves so fast these days that there's hardly any such thing as a "present" and therefore realistic novels are automatically outdated insofar as news. And Thomas Wolfe argued back in the seventies, in "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," that non-fiction was surpassing the novel as literature's main event. <br /><br />What Wolfe was taking on in that article was the sort of experimental fiction that was in its ascendancy and which, for me, remains some of the most interesting and vitalizing writing of that century precisely because it's as interested in aesthetics as in content. Joyce is behind much of this (see Barthelme's "After Joyce"), and I've made no secret of the fact that Ulysses, as far as I'm concerned, remains the high water mark, and not because of its portrait of 1904 Dublin, or not merely because of it.<br /><br />Every word I say on this topic opens up another avenue that I'd be hard-pressed and a little insane (or a little more insane) to explore here, but here's one more: The Great Depression killed literary modernism. Discuss.Tom Gammarinohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06808197936737997930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5669027158753952.post-23218760513616569922010-10-15T11:32:35.975-07:002010-10-15T11:32:35.975-07:00To anonymous: historically speaking, there may be ...To anonymous: historically speaking, there may be a "colonial" aspect to fiction, but there is certainly a long tradition of post-colonial fiction, as well, that engages issues of language and culture. And there's also a tradition of experimental fiction that doesn't fit into market schemes. Lots of small presses that make no money publish such fiction. <br />I put the vice-versa link on my facebook page, I did! aloha, smsSMShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07241698159482131044noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5669027158753952.post-88007722523008275552010-10-14T23:01:55.065-07:002010-10-14T23:01:55.065-07:00What kind of novels do your creative writing stude...What kind of novels do your creative writing students have in mind? The kind that are written unambiguously in prose?<br /><br />If so, I'm with you.<br /><br />The kind whose language is unambiguously prose? If so, I'm with you.<br /><br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7-Velg39kMJonathan Morsehttp://jonathan-morse.blogspot.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5669027158753952.post-86606331390289132692010-10-14T21:55:58.842-07:002010-10-14T21:55:58.842-07:00probably gon' get in trouble for saying this, ...probably gon' get in trouble for saying this, but...<br /><br />* historically, fiction has been less universal as a cultural tradition, than either poetry and performance. unlike these two other storytelling genres, fiction requires "literacy" (i.e. print literacy) which means cultures based on oral and visual storytelling traditions may not be able to participate equally in it (whether as consumers or producers or critics or teachers). this can be a colonial distinction.<br /><br />* related to that, just by saying "fiction," we narrow storytelling modes/practices/possibilities to what will sell in a market to consumers willing to purchase - & this marketplace is classed, raced, gendered, etc. why can't we ask for "stories" instead of for fiction, as the term "stories" crosses these classed genre boundaries and opens things up?<br /><br />* so much of how western fiction has developed as a discourse, emphasizes whether a story works or not, whether it is a good story or not, especially from the reader's (consumer's) point of view. these holistic framings are not very critical or self reflective, compared to the ways western poets have approached discourse, which has been to foreground ideas (platonic, political, spiritual) and language, not how a plot lumbers along from point a to point b. poetry in the west has displayed more discursive possibility than fiction - perhaps because poetry often is produced in bite-sized nuggets that are easier to float out into the zeitgeist, that can afford to be experimental or take risks? a poem is about parts and being a step in the discursive process; it can fail in so many aspects and still contain interesting ideas and language that spark discourse; a fictional piece is seen as bad if its whole does not work, if its overall story does not work for an audience, and discourse shuts down if these market-based considerations are not met.<br /><br />ooh, i've said it!<br /><br />hey: when are u gonna post the vice-versa link? :)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com