"Intersting"

I just realized that I somehow mistyped "interesting" when I was setting up the domain for this blog. Amazing.

Thank you all for not making fun of me, even though I am sure that many of you noticed. ;-)

Oh well...

I still dont understand why "Bradley" is bigger than "Cooper"

Click to see a word cloud of the journal article that I submitted today.

"This Is NOT a Love Story"

I know that I am a couple weeks behind schedule, but I finally saw (500) Days of Summer yesterday evening. Though I did not have that overwhelming "I LOVE THIS MOVIE!!" sort of reaction to the film, I did find it clever and very interesting on several levels. Beyond the almost sickeningly cute Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the very enjoyable indie-tastic soundtrack, I was fascinated by the emphasis placed on surface levels in the film and by the film's self-referential nature. There was frequent reference to the film's fiction and to the filmic apparatus.

The film's nonlinear narrative structure is surely designed to simulate the way that memory works; it jumps from time to time and place to place, inspired by a thought or emotion or connection. This was a clever choice by the filmmakers. I think that this sort of a narrative structure also has the potential to remind the viewer of the filmmaking process. As scenes in films are almost never shot in chronological order, the structure of (500) Days followed a pattern similar to the way it might actually be filmed. Other elements such as the voice-over narration, the addition of animation, and the use of split screen to display alternate narrative trajectories all call attention to the film as a constructed text.

One of the most interesting scenes in terms of the film's metafictional qualities is a(n almost annoyingly) sweet scene in which the two leads are walking (and then running) through an Ikea. They play house in Ikea's stylized artificial living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms, constructing a fake life together, and then when trying to work the sink or the television or some other useless prop, the fiction is broken (or at least complicated). This scene can be seen as a metaphor for the entire film and for the genre of romantic comedies. It is a constructed world, and the thing to remember is that it isn't real; it is all artifice. The sinks don't work.



One of my favorite parts of the film is at the very beginning of the film when the voice-over narration informs the viewer that "this is NOT a love story." I think that this reminder functions in much the same way that René Magritte's The Treachery of Images functions. In much the same way that Magritte reminds the observer that they are not looking at a pipe, that they are looking at a representation of a pipe, the words of the narration serve to remind the viewer that the object they are consuming is not a love story, is not a relationship--it is the filmic depiction of a relationship; it is a a fiction.

It is ironic that so many reviews of the film comment on the realism of the relationship when the film tries so hard to make known its fiction, but maybe that is the "real" relationship the viewer is supposed to take notice of--the precarious relationship between mediated images and our conceptions of reality.

"Disinterestedness"

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

Abraham Maslow

One of the most controversial and most covered aspects of Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings had to do with the question of objectivity. The barrage of questions and comments that followed the review of Sotomayor's now infamous 2001 "wise Latina" comment surely reveals anxieties and assumptions about objectivity in United States culture. For one, it exposes the still existing influence of the Enlightenment on American politics (an influence that I believe a lot of people still hold dear). I would argue that the attention to the comment also reveals that there is a sort of default subject position in the United States. With assertions that Sotomayor's gender and ethnic identity will influence her decisions suggests, there seems to be an implication that she would be more objective, more neutral, were she not situated by those identity markers. The white male heterosexual subject is apparently one that does not need to be interrogated in confirmation hearings, and this likely explains why John Roberts was not asked how being a wealthy heterosexual white male will affect his decisions.

Questions of objectivity, situatedness, and attachment/detatchment are especially interesting to me recently. My discipline has in many ways abandoned notions of objectivity, critical detachment/disinterestedness in favor of theories that emphasize and seek to expose situatedness, power structures, social construction, metanarratives, etc. Though I very much subscribe to these postmodernist/poststructuralist theories, I do think that they have the effect of detaching the discipline from other fields in academia (the sciences and some aspects of the social sciences, especially) and from the general public. It is ironic that my field's insistence on situatedness makes us seem disconnected from the "real" world and too caught up in the theoretical realm.

It is exciting and interesting that there has recently been a resurgence of the idea of critical detachment and formalism in the humanities because I do think that it will force us to re-interrogate what detachment and objectivity mean and how they function, which will hopefully result in a more nuanced positioning towards them. Critics like Seyla Benhabib and Amanda Anderson have have recently articulated theories that put a more positive spin on detachment. Benhabib argues that effective social criticism almost always involves some sort of separation from a society and tradition (which, for her, are likely corrupt). Anderson relates detachment to cosmopolitanism and argues that new cosmopolitanism can be defined "as the capacious inclusion of multiple forms of affiliation, disaffiliation, and reaffiliation, simultaneously insisting on the need for informing principles of self-reflexivity, critique, and common humanity."

What I think is most important is to examine the critical, social, and rhetorical agency of these various theories on objectivity and detachment and see how they themselves are situating mechanisms. One of my biggest problems with opposing subjectivity to objectivity is that such an opposition fails to examine how the desire for objectivity is surely part of one's subjectivity. I prefer "situatedness" because one can be situated by their belief in disinterestedness, but that is just me at the moment.

Edit: Chelsea was smart and reminded me that my glorious friend and fellow blogger Matt recently had a post related to issues of subjective and objective criticism. I encourage you to read it over at Cinema without Organs

"Interesting"

One of my good friends once complained to me that "English majors don't say that something is 'good' or 'bad.' They don't say that they 'like' anything. They say that things are 'interesting.'" I recall laughing off his comment at the time and letting my mind quietly scroll through the millions of times I had said "interesting." I cannot say for sure if that there is any truth to my friend's assertion, as I doubt that there are statistics collected on adjective choice by major. I can say that I am guilty of the charge he leveled against my cohort, and I can say that many of my colleagues are guilty of the same charge.

It is an interesting (there is that word again) phenomenon, and I wonder if there is something to the discipline that would leave the English major predisposed to make a such an assertion that is more tentative, less judgmental than a more typical opinion statement. Thinking about it, I would argue that the word choice makes sense. Students today at most universities in the country are educated by a professoriate that has been so influenced by post-structuralist and postmodernist theorists. Because the theoretical grounding of most departments is based on a rejection of absolute value and meaning and often rejects good/bad or positive/negative value systems, it makes sense that students would adopt the communication and conceptual strategies of the discipline. What is perhaps more interesting (I seriously can't stop myself) is that this sort of positioning and/or aesthetic response would bother people like my friend.

Perhaps it is unfair for me, someone who is drinking the kool-aid, to try to defend the phrase. I don't have a problem with its sweet, ill-defined sensibility. Still, I feel to need to try to rationalize it for myself (and for others). The only way that I can at the moment is that I like how the term functions and opens up discussion in my own work, in my classroom, and in the work of my students. Behind the assertion that something is interesting, there is a reason that it is interesting, and that subtext is what opens up discussion and intellectual debate. Explaining that something is "interesting" is more open and can allow for more complex and nuanced discussions of a given textual phenomenon. It is different than defending a thesis structured on a binarily defined value system, and I like this. I like to see my students looking at how something is functioning and at all of that various components that make it up. They will surely make value judgments along the way, but starting from a position where something is "interesting" is much more open than starting from the position that something is "good."

This new blog will seek to explore things that I find interesting, and I look forward to writing it and hope that you enjoy reading it.