At the end of a work of fiction, the ideal reader knows as much as the author. How could it be otherwise? There is nothing else to know.
This means that the end of the work is the end of omniscience.
At the end of a work of fiction, the ideal reader knows as much as the author. How could it be otherwise? There is nothing else to know.
This means that the end of the work is the end of omniscience.
Bloopers are bloopers, but the study of bloopers is Theory. The study of bloopers can also be fun, and should be (even if an air of quasi-tragic resignation in the face of bloopers is the central, melodramatic posture of deconstruction). It can also tell us a little about the ways that we're all essentially essentialists.
I am, at any rate.
If you're in New York and seeing You can't get there from here but you can get here from there, the show that Claire Bowen described in a recent post, you should also try to see another astonishing union of literary work and vivid display in the the seven hour production of Gatz at the Public Theater
When I was a kid I hated what I called I-books, first person narratives. It was not only that there was something unseemly about people telling the kinds of stories I liked (genre: heroic, adventurous, courageous) about themselves. There was also something just a little bit viscerally off-putting about them.
While Beckett once advised another writer to stop "blazing away at the microcosmic moon," it's sometimes an irresisitible temptation to try to "flush the coverts of the microglot," as J.L. Austin put it (in "A Plea for Excuses"). And why resist it?
Joshua Landy just posted a very interesting blog entry here, partly on how the fallacy of conversion tends to work in Derridean argument. I am no longer enchanted by Derrida -- I've been... deconverted? deprogrammed? -- but I was prompted to defend him in the comments to that post.
Since being invited, after some coughing and ostentatious self-effacement, to contribute here, I've had a kind of blogger's block about it -- here, though not elsewhere.