My Hystories Recommendation

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

At 12:52 28/07/97 +0100, you wrote:
>
>Eric sez:
>>Need to get a buzz of modern culture, paranoia and
>>hysterical delusion (Deluze-ian?). My very fine
>>senior colleague Willard McCarty has recommended
>>Elaine Showalter's new book, Hystories, and having
>>happily delved, I pass that recommendation on to the list.
>
>As a (science) hack, I have to disagree.  Showalter's Hystories is   
>medicine as literary/cultural criticism.  To say, as Showalter does in   
>the book, that Gulf War Syndrome is a hysterical disease (ie essentially   
>a late C20 manifestation of Freud's hysteria) is simply arrogance.


   I should add the same disclaimer to my recommendation
of Showalter's book that I did to Robert Temple's work on Sirius:
I recommend it because I find it interesting and relavant, but please,
do not think that this means I am in complete sympathy 
with it. That whould not be true.  I am as apt to recommend books
I disagree with as to recommend books whose arguments I am in 
near-perfect sympathy with; I admit I often have more fun with books
which I find quite imperfect if provocative. I certainly don't agree with 
Showalter about Gulf War Syndrome, and a few other matters which 
she dismisses or abuses. 

     But methinks she has done something here. She has
created and explored a model---which I think may be interesting 
to consider in the light of Pynchon's fiction and/or the internet---
which she perhaps uses too avidly, a la round peg and octagonal hole.


   Still, perhaps her general argument has something to be said for it?
I think that its broad outline it may offer a useful structure for approachs
which  will add to the ongoing  discussion. Anyhow, a number of 
the books specific moments of analysis  are at least very clever.

Personally I've been near to arguments around this for 5 years via
Jacqueline Rose &  Lisa Jardine, for whom I have at least as 
much sympathy as Showalter.

     However  I feel more able to find some tenable middle ground
between myself and their positions having taken something away from 
Hysteries. As to exactly how that will play out, perhaps that 
wpould need development in a considered esssay.

   On a personal note to fellow London academics-- I think that this book 
will cause contraversy (perhaps of the more-heat-than-light variety)
all August, especially at certain cocktail parties and bar-b-ques in 
Maida Vale and Hampstead. Thus I vow to spend the next month 
firmly flitting between Soho and Camden Town, 'till 'tis time for me
to escape to New York again for a bit.
Eric Alan Weinstein
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk