Abstract:Jeanette Winterson's beautiful memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Is a biography of a reader, a book about reading—reading for your life. In addition to the Bible, there are six books in the Plymouth Brethren Winterson household, and they are all nonfiction. Jeanette's mother, Mrs. Winterson, bans the reading of fiction, so young Jeanette reads in secret, in the outside lavatory or under covers at night, carefully depositing each read book under her mattress until it floats so dangerously high that … Show more
“…Anxiety and frustration, rather than excitement, in discovery affect both staff and students as the sense of failure in various forms is the only personal residue of a system that, with the increasing use of computer‐generated data as its inevitable concomitant, reduces knowledge to information and expels anything about the pupil experience that cannot be recorded on a spreadsheet. Sarah Beckwith, commenting on similar approaches to assessment in U.S. universities, speaks of these ‘paralyzing evaluative schemes’ that operate under ‘the rubric of measurement rather than judgement’ (Beckwith, 2017, p. 334). The result—for students and teachers in different ways—is a form of Weil's malheur in which what for her were the physical, mental and spiritual stringencies of industrial production give place to a system in which failure at one level or another is guaranteed, and the creative dignity of young and old alike is sacrificed to a narrowing conception of evaluative efficiency.…”
Section: ‘The Instruments Of Darkness’mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Beckwith reminds us of the role of literature—or, more generally, reading—in saving people from isolation and the suffering that comes from feeling that nothing about their life is recognizable to others or intelligible to themselves, from being castaways from the tribe of the human. (Beckwith, 2017, p. 331)…”
A version of education conditioned by a focus on measurable outcomes contributes to the unhappiness of children. Using an approach that relates the current crisis in mental health to Simone Weil's concept of affliction, I argue that culture, suffering from its own instrumentalisation as cure, needs itself to be healed. Using a case study of Macbeth, a performative approach to education is elaborated with the help of Stanley Cavell's understanding of projection in language. By participating in the process by which meaning comes about, rather than being its passive recipients, students achieve a creative and critical authority that transforms disquiet into discovery.
“…Anxiety and frustration, rather than excitement, in discovery affect both staff and students as the sense of failure in various forms is the only personal residue of a system that, with the increasing use of computer‐generated data as its inevitable concomitant, reduces knowledge to information and expels anything about the pupil experience that cannot be recorded on a spreadsheet. Sarah Beckwith, commenting on similar approaches to assessment in U.S. universities, speaks of these ‘paralyzing evaluative schemes’ that operate under ‘the rubric of measurement rather than judgement’ (Beckwith, 2017, p. 334). The result—for students and teachers in different ways—is a form of Weil's malheur in which what for her were the physical, mental and spiritual stringencies of industrial production give place to a system in which failure at one level or another is guaranteed, and the creative dignity of young and old alike is sacrificed to a narrowing conception of evaluative efficiency.…”
Section: ‘The Instruments Of Darkness’mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Beckwith reminds us of the role of literature—or, more generally, reading—in saving people from isolation and the suffering that comes from feeling that nothing about their life is recognizable to others or intelligible to themselves, from being castaways from the tribe of the human. (Beckwith, 2017, p. 331)…”
A version of education conditioned by a focus on measurable outcomes contributes to the unhappiness of children. Using an approach that relates the current crisis in mental health to Simone Weil's concept of affliction, I argue that culture, suffering from its own instrumentalisation as cure, needs itself to be healed. Using a case study of Macbeth, a performative approach to education is elaborated with the help of Stanley Cavell's understanding of projection in language. By participating in the process by which meaning comes about, rather than being its passive recipients, students achieve a creative and critical authority that transforms disquiet into discovery.
“…As Sarah Beckwith writes, postcritique means only that 'we come after and through [critique] rather than that we have dispensed with it'; postcritique is an effort to prevent critique from becoming the literary scholar's 'sole and meager diet', a contribution to a richer feast rather than a declaration that some dishes should not be consumed at all. 71 To see the postcritical project as the latter, indeed, would be to prove its point, to regard it with precisely the reductively accusatory mindset it ascribes to critique itself. Felski begins Limits with an affirmation that what she proposes is no mere 'magical thinking', but ends with an acknowledgment that in the intervening pages she has done more to explain her 'dissatisfaction with critique' than to forge a coherent alternative.…”
This essay intervenes in debates on the value of 'postcritique', countering concerns that the 'postcritical turn' represents a conservative abrogation of cultural inquiry's political responsibilities. I suggest that conventional critical forms reproduce in the relationship between reader and text a quasiimperialist power dynamic, complicity in which is inescapable regardless of the reader's own political position, and that therefore postcritical approaches might in fact be of greatest political value and urgency in the treatment of literatures written from socio-politically marginal positions. I furnish this argument with a reading of Wilson Harris' Palace of the Peacock (1960). Taking cues from Rita Felski's invocation of phenomenology in her proposals for a postcritical practice, I deploy the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to demonstrate how Harris models stylistic and syntactic resistance to invasive forms of suspicious reading. Such resistance, I argue, constitutes a robustly political demand for the postcritical.
“…. is that, in seeking to broadcast their own sermons against racism, sexism, imperialism, classism, and homophobia, they 2 See The Location of Culture (Bhabha 2004), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Spivak 1999), and The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft et al 2003) for what are, by now, canonical critiques of the colonial or neocolonial center. either reduce the writers to the status of sociologists or they bleach their work of aesthetic value" (Clarke 2000, p. 164).…”
I argue that both Rita Felski’s postcritical model (as articulated in The Limits of Critique) and its academic reception are made possible only by ignoring or erasing African-American and Afro-Caribbean modes of engagement with art that predate and complicate the critical-postcritical binary. To counteract the vanguardism of this trend in literary studies, I pair Caribbean philosopher-poet Edouard Glissant’s meditation on the origins of Creole speech as an indirect language of “detour” with Nathaniel Mackey’s theorizing of black art as “paracritical”—a mode that assimilates performance and critique, language and metalanguage, and that sits adjacent to (and not against or behind) traditionally academic discourses of engaging with literature. If Glissant provides the cultural and philosophical frame for an Afro-Caribbean way of reading literature, Mackey supplies the artistic metaphor par excellence of the paracritical hinge, voiced in the idioms of jazz and blues. Finally, I examine how Glissant and Mackey’s ideas find formal and aesthetic expression in Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand’s 2005 novel What We All Long For, paying attention to the reader response engendered by the adjacencies of violence, empowerment, possibility, and desire in the novel. In order to analyze What We All Long For, we must promote the liveliness and vivacity of the reading experience and put the text under ethical scrutiny, evincing the paracritical faculty that Afro-Caribbean art demands: commingling the twin pleasures of reading and interpretation, establishing a counter-hegemonic model of literary engagement that implicates the reader without stripping away reading’s pleasure.
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