FW: Re: [Joyce-Ulysses] Re: (old) Dubliners come forth!

[Ghetta Life]

Interesting and entertaining commentary on the state of PostModern LitCrit 
from the Joyce list:

>>"I suggest that we read Mulligan ... as both formed by and formulating 
>>colonial discourse, a discourse that Joyce could not, even in the act of 
>>critiquing, transcend."<<

>There is indeed something deeply rebarbative about such a formulation, and 
>I think its source is to be located in the collision between, on the one 
>hand, the philosophically-tinged Franco-Germanic tradition, and the "plain 
>language" English-American traditions of critical commentary, a collision 
>which resulted in the former colonizing the latter.
>
>In the postwar period, the French, I guess starting with Sartre and 
>Merleau-Ponty, caught up on their reading of the Germans and produced a  
>body of phenomenological-psychoanalytical theory, which in turn engendered 
>what came to be called "Post-Modern Theory".
>
>In the seventies, many Anglophone academics began looking about for some 
>other way to pursue their new-found ideological enthusiasms, so rudely 
>thwarted in the public sphere by the political reaction which set in with 
>Nixon, and latched onto, (and I am told, with far more enthusiasm than the 
>latter's French compatriots,)the new group of Parisian Maitres Penseurs, 
>notably Derrida, Foucault and co., as a high-toned vehicle for them.
>
>But the highly pyramidal French academic system is designed to produce and 
>promote national intellectual superstars, and one result of this is that 
>those who reach this lofty status are permitted a kind of coded, mandarin, 
>often deeply ironical, way of talking about things, quite different from 
>(and deeply subversive of) the more orderly "discourse" of the anglophone 
>academy. Indeed one of their functions seems to be to produce a sort of 
>renewal in the intellectual vocabulary.
>
>Their anglophone followers mostly had to rely on translations, in the way 
>in which colonial subjects do, and in so doing lost almost all the ironic 
>metropolitan tonalities of the original, as well as having to swallow the 
>mandarin franglais vocabulary used by the translators.
>
>And so they found themselves talking, like the chap in the quote found by 
>Harald, about "the discourse" of this or that, a barbarism in English, but 
>unavoidable, since there is no native concept to fit it. And then comes the 
>glib deconstructive  punning style: "formed by and formulating", and  the 
>routine Kantianisms "critique", and "transcend", all of it non-native 
>colonial jargon, not unlike the fashionable fin-de-siecle aesthetic chatter 
>Mulligan had absorbed in Oxford.
>
>Now this stuff has been around for lo, these thirty-odd years, and one 
>might have thought it would have become naturalized, (and no doubt the 
>practitioners of "theory" do so regard it, and will find my carping 
>laughable,) it has not, despite the fact that English is unusually 
>hospitable to neologism. Perhaps the reason is that practitioners of 
>"theory" talk to each other from one academy to another, and have never 
>found, or sought, a broader readership.
>
>It is also true that they are often also very clever and learned, and are 
>also often right, once one has waded through the jargon.
>
>yours,
>Richard Stack

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