27% Reading Completion

This is another meme from Facebook, and I'm boycotting all further Facebook-notes-as-updated-chain-emails. However, I figure this blog is enough about solipsism that I can get away with posting it here (and it's easier to avoid, too).

I replaced numbers 36 and 98 because The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a part of Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and Hamlet is obviously a part of Shakespeare's complete works.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. I've also changed the instructions.

• All books I have read are in bold
• All books in red font I love.
• All books with an asterisk I plan on reading.
• Tally of read/loved books are at the bottom.
  

1) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
3) Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
4) Harry Potter series, JK Rowling (just read the first one)*
5) To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
6) The Bible (all of it...except the Apocrypha)
7) Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
8) Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9) His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
10) Great Expectations, Charles Dickens*
11) Little Women, Louisa M. Alcott
12) Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
13) Catch 22, Joseph Heller
14) Complete Works of Shakespeare (haven't read the histories...and I ain't gonna)
15) Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
16) The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
17) Birdsong, Sebastian Faulk
18) Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
19) The Time Traveller's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
20) Middlemarch, George Eliot
21) Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22) The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
23) Bleak House, Charles Dickens
24) War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy*
25) The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams*
26) Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh*
27) Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky*
28) Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
29) Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
30) The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
31) Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy*
32) David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
33) Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
34) Emma, Jane Austen
35) Persuasion, Jane Austen
36) Beloved, Toni Morrison
37) The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini*
38) Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis De Bernieres
39) Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
40) Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne*
41) Animal Farm, George Orwell
42) The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
43) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney, John Irving
45) The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins*
46) Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
47) Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
48) The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood*
49) Lord of the Flies, William Golding
50) Atonement, Ian McEwan*
51) Life of Pi, Yann Martel*
52) Dune, Frank Herbert*
53) Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
54) Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
55) A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56) The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57) A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
58) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
60) Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
61) Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
62) Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov*
63) The Secret History, Donna Tartt
64) The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
65) Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
66) On The Road, Jack Kerouac
67) Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
68) Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
69) Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
70) Moby Dick, Herman Melville*
71) Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
72) Dracula, Bram Stoker
73) The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
74) Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson
75) Ulysses, James Joyce*
76) The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath*
77) Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
78) Germinal, Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
80) Possession, A.S. Byatt
81) A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
82) Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
83) The Color Purple, Alice Walker*
84) The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
85) Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
86) A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
87) Charlotte's Web, E.B. White
88) The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Albom
89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90) The Faraway Tree Collection, Enid Blyton
91) Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
92) The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93) The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
94) Watership Down, Richard Adams
95) A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
96) A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
97) The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
98) Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon*
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl*
100) Les Miserables, Victor Hugo (never finished it)*

Read: 27
Love: 14
*Want to read: 24

OMG, Tainted Peanut Butter? Blame the FDA (Again)

But for the love of Mr Peanut, let's not blame ourselves. People have been worried about tainted peanut butter, tomatoes, spinach, etc. for years now, and the latest news from West Texas isn't helping any. From The Raw Story:

The discovery of dead rodents and bird feathers in a Plainview, Texas plant of the Peanut Corporation of America, already implicated in a deadly salmonella outbreak, prompted a recall of all its products, officials said....

The company's facility in Blakely, Georgia has been blamed for a widespread food poisoning outbreak knowingly shipped contaminated peanut butter and had mold growing on its ceilings and walls.

The salmonella outbreak took place between September 1 and January 9, with 501 people infected in 43 states and one more person reported ill in Canada, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which is collaborating with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the investigation....

An FDA inspection report released Wednesday found 12 instances between June 2007 and September 2008 where the firm's own testing revealed that its products were contaminated by salmonella and the PCA nonetheless shipped the product.

The shrieks over the latest food-bourne illness outbreak has made me start thinking. What was it that we said before? From the NYT on 12 December 2006:

"Two outbreaks of bacterial poisoning from fresh produce over the past three months, and a possible third that is still under investigation, raise doubts about the Food and Drug Administration’s ability to inspect and monitor conditions on the nation’s farms and in the plants that package and process their produce....

Meanwhile, the agency’s workload has been rising steadily as health-conscious Americans eat more fruit and vegetables....At a minimum, Congress needs to provide the F.D.A. with more money and more inspectors to monitor the safety of fresh produce all the way from field to consumer. It should also abandon the fiction that voluntary guidelines to ensure safe food production can do the job, and insist instead on some kind of mandatory regulation. It is also time to revive the long-languishing notion that all of the government’s disparate food regulation activities should be combined into a single, fully empowered agency."

So, the NYT wants us to load more regulatory duties onto the backs of agencies that have proven they can't keep us safe. I wonder why they can't? Those with a Liberal bent will tell you it's because they are underfunded. Those with a Conservative bent will tell you it's because they're government agencies and breed laziness. Either way, it's not the agencies' fault. It's ours.

We've bought into the agri-business model hook, line, and sinker. We got hooked, reeled in, and now we're sunk. When/if we think of farmers, we usually think of Old McDonald's farm. But it's more like Old McDonald Farms LLC, a subsidiary of ConAgra Foods.When you rely on something as big as the Peanut Corporation of America, you are asking for trouble because you're relying on a large corporation to act ethically. A corporation may be legally considered a person, but it cannot be morally or ethically considered a person. Sooner or later, the corporation acts dishonestly in service of the bottom line or its shareholders. Wendell Berry, in his Unsettling of America, gives the striking example of the Sierra Club investing in Exxon in the 70s (17). To expect otherwise is to expect the snake not to bite the turtle.

So, like Berry, I say that we should be more "responsible consumers," which would necessitate us becoming critical consumers (we would "refuse to purchase the less good"), moderate consumers (we would know our "needs and would not purchase what [we] did not need"), and--at least partial--producers (24). Berry contends:

The household that prepares its own meals in its own kitchen with some intelligent regard for nutritional value, and thus depends on the grocer only for selected raw materials, exercises an influence on the food industry that reaches from the store all the way back to the seedsman. The household that produces some or all of its own food will have a proportionately greater influence....[The producer/consumer] can choose, and exert the influence of his choosing, because he has given himself choices. He is not confined to the negativity of his complaint. (24-25)

Now what the NYT--and everyone who's carping about tainted food and evil corporations--are advocating is the confinement of the consumer by "the negativity of his complaint"; in some ways the expectations we've placed on the FDA, the USDA, and corporations who provide our food have injected a sense of learned helplessness in the average American. We don't take responsibility for our food choices because we have ceded our responsibility--and, therefore, our power--to organizations. These organizations are theoretically beholden to us, but they are so big, they have no inherent self: they remove the individuals who comprise them from the stated purpose of the organization and from personal responsibility. Thus, the CEO who ships jobs overseas because it is better for the shareholders, though it is worse for the country in which he lives. Thus, the geologist who explores for the oil that eventually pollutes the air his child will breathe. Thus the FDA agent who is pressured to do more inspections and does them more quickly or sloppily which eventually leads to peanut factories that have rat feces and feathers above the processing area.

This would not, of course, happen if we returned to a regional or local model of food production. Michael Pollan has written about the results of agri-business, and Carlo Petrini has made it his mission in life to evangalize the slow food movement. We don't have to choose one of the other, however. Certainly, we could create NeoVictory Gardens, a modern version of something our grandparents did during World War II. This is a radical change, but it's also a change that some people are lamenting Bush didn't urge us to make--that is, war sacrifices. (Again, I ask where's the personal responsibility? Why does someone have to force us to effect change in our lives?)

Of course, a NeoVictory Garden is a difficult change to make beause some people don't have yards, and a window box can only produce herbs in most cases. So why not shop at farmer's markets? Why not purchase locally-made or locally-sourced foods? It's more expensive, but you're paying for inefficiency. And that is a good thing, I think.

Ineffeciency in the food industry means more jobs because of redundancy--more small farms and processing plants scattered throughout the nation means more managers, more farmers, more machinery, more people to produce that machinery, etc.

It also requires more responsibility for the consumer. More smaller companies also means less effective centralized oversight, so the FDA can't save the day (and also can't be the punching bag when people get sick). Let's imagine a company called The Willamette Valley Peanut Corp. that services only the Willamette Valley area. It would be more responsibile to and less removed from it consumers. Compare the Peanut Corporation of America, which supplied millions of peanuts to dozens of different companies making everything from Publix's crap-tastic Spicy Trail Mix to Clif Bars, which are supposed to be "all natural" and "70% organic." But people had never heard of the PCA before, and it took a lot of work to figure out how far its tainted products had spread throughout America. Willamette Valley Peanut Corp., on the other hand, would supply to just regional companies, would be more visible to its end consumers, and would suffer from competition if it produced an inferior peanut. These things aren't (or weren't) real concerns for PCA--especially the last one since the company was too big for smaller, localized companies to compete with. Even if the fictional WVP grew to dominate the area, it's not as hard to start up and compete with a regional power as it is to compete with the Wal*Mart of peanut production.

The end result of all of this worry and hand-wringing is likely to be more regulation, larger government, and higher taxes. I am not so die-hard libertarian that I cannot see the value in these things. Sometimes. But this is not one of those times. If we were able to reward inefficiency and regionalization in our food production, we would be able to more easily re-assume and exercise our duties as consumer-producers, responsible consumers, and individuals. I should acknowledge that this little tirade, as Berry admitted in his book, is implicitly (and now explicitly) directed against liberalism as it is practised today.

It has become, to some extent at least, an argument against institutional solutions. Such solutions necessarily fail to solve the problems to which they are addressed because, by definition, they cannot consider the real causes. The only real, practical, hope-givingway to remedy the fragmentation that is the diseaseof the modern spirit is a small and humble way--a way that a government or agency or organization or institution will never think of, though a person may think of it: one must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions. (23)

I'm not Bob Barr and I think that sometimes larger government and powerful centralized governmental organizations are the answer. I would love to hear how Libertarians think the airline industry would work without the FAA or how well Southern Blacks would be educated without the Dept. of Education. But organizations remove the individual and her sense of importance from the equation, and when that happens moral choices don't carry the weight they once did (since no one will notice or be directly harmed by our actions). Top-down, organizational approaches are sometimes useful. Sometimes, however, they are a fiction useful for corporations and those already in power since they produce the myth that one person cannot make a difference, or that 2-3 people can't make a difference, but the LINUX people I talked about back in November show that this is patently false.

51 Songs

This is a revision of a meme that's been going around Facebook; I did the 25 version there, but not with all my songs loaded onto Media Player. This is the result.

1) "Alphabet Street," Prince from The Very Best of Prince
2) "Before my Time," Johhny Cash from American III: Solitary Man
3) "One & A Rainbow," Ugly American from Boom Boom Baby
4) "Free of Hope," Indigo Girls from Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation
5) "Serve the Servants," Nirvana from In Utero
6) "Karma Police," Radiohead from OK Computer
7) "Star People 97," George Michael from Ladies and Gentlemen: The Best of George Michael Disc 2
8) "The Needle Has Landed," Neko Case from Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
9) "Sowing on the Mountain," Woody Guthrie from Muleskinner Blues: The Asch Recordings Vol. 2
10) "Revelation (Mother Earth)," Ozzy Osbourne from Blizzard of Ozz
11) "Tarantula," The Scabs from Freebird
12) "She Ain't Goin' Nowhere," Guy Clark from Old No.1 / Texas Cookin'
13) "She Runs Away," Duncan Sheik from Duncan Sheik
14) "Rehab," Amy Winehouse from Back to Black
15) "My Funny Valentine," Chet Baker from My Funny Valentine
16) "Be Yourself," Audioslave from Out of Exile
17) "ABC," Jackson 5 from ABC
18) "I Don't Know Enough About You," Diana Krall from Love Scenes
19) "8:02 PM," For Squirrels from Example
20) "Southern Belles in London Sing," The Faint from Wet From Birth
21) "Across the Wire," Calexico from Feast of Wire
22) "Charleston," Django Reinhardt from Djanglologie/USA
23) "Let's Get out of This Country," Camera Obscura from Let's Get out of This Country
24) "Tiny Dancer," Elton John from the soundtrack to Almost Famous
25) "Symphony No. 15 in G Major, K.124:2 Adante," Mozart from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Symphonies Disc 4
26) "Purpose," 311 from 311
27) "Wolves," Garth Brooks from No Fences
28) "Everything Zen," Bush from Sixteen Stone
29) "Songbird," Fleetwood Mac from Rumours
30) "Teardrop," Massive Attack from Mezzanine
31) "Break on Through (To the Other Side)," The Doors from The Doors
32) "Home," 12 Stones from 12 Stones
33) "Woman King," Iron & Wine from Woman King
34) "When I Hit San Antone," Owen Temple from General Store
35) "Diamonds from Sierra Leone," Kanye West from Late Regisration
36) "Let Me Drown," Soundgarden from Superunknown
37) "In Your Mind," Built to Spill from Ancient Melodies of the Future
38) "Oh Yeah," Mos Def and Talib Kweli from Black Star
39) "Vasoline," Stone Temple Pilots from Purple
40) "Gettin' By," Jerry Jeff Walker from Viva Terlingua!
41) "Everything is Broken [Alternate Version]," Bob Dylan from The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs
42) "Oh!," Sleater-Kinney from One Beat
43) "Lullaby in Rhythm, Pt. 1," Charlie Parker from The Legendary Dial Masters, Vol. 2
44) "Melody of Love," Frank Sinatra from The Capitol Collector's Series
45) "Recycled Air," The Postal Service from Give Up
46) "Just Wait," Blues Traveller from Four
47) "Kind of Girl," Low from Things we Lost in the Fire
48) "If You Want Blood (You've Got It)," AC/DC from Highway to Hell
49) "Love & Communication," Cat Power from The Greatest
50) "Leaning Against the Wall," Kings of Convenience from Quiet is the New Loud
51) "It's Not Supposed to Be That Way," Willie Nelson from Phases and Stages

Orals Proposal: A Before and After Snapshot

This is only the first part of the proposal, and it is unfinished, but it's coming along fairly nicely. It's not as bad in any case.

Before:
For years—at least since John Block Friedman’s 1981 book The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought and Jeffrey J. Cohen’s debut on the scene in the early 1990s—monster theory has been overwhelmingly concerned with reading monsters as marginal figures that demarcate the cultures that create them. Freddy Krueger, Frankenstein’s monster, the Giant of Mount St Michel, the Grendelkin, or Polyphemus mark the boundaries of what is and is not possible. Perhaps more importantly, they serve as outer boundaries of what an individual can or cannot think, speak, or do. [1] In short, they have usually been read as “the primary vehicle for the representation of Otherness in the Middle Ages”; [2] in fact, on this there is a rare and surprisingly widespread consensus.

This widespread consensus, however, has made for an awkward moment in monster theory. Such agreement has left many unsure as to how we should proceed, and some have focused their attentions on other projects. Indeed, conversations with fellow members of the BABEL Working Group such as Cohen, Eileen Joy, and Karl Steel have shown that while monsters are still a source of discussion, scholarly interest in them is beginning to wane in favor of attendant issues (hybridity, sexuality, medieval concepts of the human, etc.). As many who were once heavily involved in monster theory have foreseen, academic agreement quickly becomes academic stagnation. Thus, what was once the study of characters who could petrify with fear is itself in danger of sinking into the swamp and becoming petrified by consensus.

What have not been agreed upon—or even hotly debated—are the functions of monsters as boundary figures. We may agree that as symbols of the Other they demarcate, and we may even agree (though to a lesser extent) on how they go about doing so. But to my knowledge no serious, sustained interrogation has been performed on their function as means of community-formation. Boundary figures by their very nature create an inside and outside. As the Lacanian imago immediately introduces the structural possibility of self/not self, so too does the monster introduce the structural possibility of us/them. [3] This interpretation denies any positivist model for definition, and it is the basis on which Hayden White forms his idea of “ostensive self-definition by negation.” [4] He argues that cultures are largely unable to create an overall definition of what they are and so point to a thing that they are not. Following White’s theory of how the concept of “wildness” served to define “human” or “civilized,” we may read monsters as boundary figures that aid in the creation of a culture’s (negative) definition—of defining what it is by demarcating what it is not. [5]

[1] For limits on thought, see Jeffrey J. Cohen’s “The Limits of Knowing: Monsters and the Regulation of Medieval Poplar Culture.” Medieval Folklore 3 (1994): 1-37. For limits on speech, see David Williams’ Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996. For limits on action, see John Block Friedman’s The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000.
[2] The Use of Monsters and the Middle Ages.” SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 2 (1992): 47-69. p. 49 (Emphasis mine).
On this consensus, see also: Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1990); Albrecht Classen, “Medieval Answers to the Strange World Outside: Foreigners and the Foreign as Cultural Challenges and Catalysts,” in Demons: Mediators Between This World and the Other, eds. Ruth Petzoldt and Paul Neubauer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998); Edward J. Ingebretsen, “Monster-Making: A Politics of Persuasion.” Journal of American Culture 21.2 (1998): 25-34; and Franco Moretti, “Dialectic of Fear,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller. (London: Verso, 1988).
[3] Lacan associates this self/Other split that occurs during the mirror stage with Freud’s Innenwelt and Umwelt. See Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” in Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
[4] Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. pp. 151-52.
[5] US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart produced a lasting example of ostensive negative definition in 1964. Admitting that he could not define pornography, he then stated “I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that” (Jacobellis v. Ohio. 378 U.S. 184. Supreme Ct. of the US. 22 June 1964).



After:

Back in 1936, the venerable J.R.R. Tolkien urged Anglo-Saxonists to rethink their approach to Beowulf. Up to this point the poem had been considered a useful historical document and a poor poem, but Tolkien thought that—in order to understand the poem as a poem we ought to examine its monsters. They were not, as so many had previously thought, “an inexplicable blunder of taste”; instead, he argued they were “essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem.” [1] And so began the genealogy of monster theory in medieval literature.

Over the years the approaches and theories have changed, mostly in step with overall academic trends. In 1936 Tolkien thought study of Beowulf’s monsters would lead to an understanding of its literary merits and its generic placement. Currently, medieval monster theorists are more concerned with analyzing monsters as marginal, boundary figures. The general (but not total) shift in approach may have moved from a formalist and structuralist bent to post-structuralism and cultural criticism, but the focus of the approach has never wavered. Monsters.

Monsters—be they medieval creations like the Grendelkin or Chretien de Troyes’ Harpin, or their more contemporary brethren like Dracula or Freddy Kreuger—may be characterized by a single tenet: monsters are what they are (ontologically, functionally, culturally) because they do not play by physical or cultural rules. [2] That notion is acultural, ahistorical, but what is wholly dependent on specifics of culture and history is how monsters break these rules. Beowulf’s Grendel and Bram Stoker’s Dracula are not the same in their goals or their methods, but their transgressions still adhere to the dual categories. Grendel has glowing eyes, is as large as thirty men and has steel-like claws; Dracula is (un)dead and can turn into a bat. Grendel will not or cannot speak, is inimical to the weapons and armor so important to the humans of the poem, and creates a perverse mockery of the feast hall by making men the meal; Dracula drains the Life Force from his victims and unleashes female sexuality in a way that threatens the Victorian sensibilities of Seward, Holmwood, and Van Helsing.

Each transgression (whether it be Grendel feasting on human flesh or Dracula turning into a bat) necessarily marks a boundary, for without a line there is no crossing, no transgression. For Jeffrey Jerome Cohen—and the other medieval monster theorists who largely follow his lead—the boundary is imagined by the creator(s) of the monster. It is through their nightmares that these people and their cultures tell us about themselves. It is through their monsters that they tell us what they believe should not be possible, what they believe one should not think, speak, or do. [3] In short, monsters really do the job to which they are etymologically linked: they point out and show the line between “us” and “them,” this side and the Other side. [4] Such a function was as true for the Victorian era as it was for our era of examination, the Middle Ages. It has lead Cohen to pronounce monsters “the primary vehicle for the representation of Otherness in the Middle Ages,” a statement on which there is widespread consensus. [5]

This consensus deals with a functional analysis of monsters. Gone are the days of trying to identify Grendel or Harpin ontologically; what they actually were is of less interest than analysis of what they do in texts and the effects of those actions on a broader, extratextual scale. We may agree that as boundary figures, monsters symbolize the Other they demarcate, conjuring the specter of its existence event as they attempt to dissuade serious consideration of it. Such a reading of monsters is nothing new and relies heavily on the Lacanian theory of the imago introducing the structural possibility of the Other as a integral part of identity formation. [6] The notion that monsters work to construct what cultural critic Hayden White calls “ostensive self definition by negation” has gained traction over the years, and most monster theorists have accepted—to varying degrees—the premise that communities, largely unable to craft a positivist model, point to examples of what they are not in order to create a definition of what they are. [7] For White, examples of medieval wildmen served to define what authors meant by “civilized,” “us,” or even “human.” This theory is easily extended to monsters to explain their function in the creation of a specific community’s (negative) definition by providing didactic exempla of what is not a part of that community.

[1] “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245-95. p. 261.
[2] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 6.
[3] For limits on thought, see Jeffrey J. Cohen’s “The Limits of Knowing: Monsters and the Regulation of Medieval Poplar Culture.” Medieval Folklore 3 (1994): 1-37. For limits on speech, see David Williams’ Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996. For limits on action, see John Block Friedman’s The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000.
[4] The Latin monstro means to “show” or “point out” and is the root of the Modern English “demonstrate.”
[5] The Use of Monsters and the Middle Ages.” SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 2 (1992): 47-69. p. 49 (Emphasis mine).
On this consensus, see also: Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1990); Albrecht Classen, “Medieval Answers to the Strange World Outside: Foreigners and the Foreign as Cultural Challenges and Catalysts,” in Demons: Mediators Between This World and the Other, eds. Ruth Petzoldt and Paul Neubauer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998); Edward J. Ingebretsen, “Monster-Making: A Politics of Persuasion.” Journal of American Culture 21.2 (1998): 25-34; and Franco Moretti, “Dialectic of Fear,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller. (London: Verso, 1988).
[6] Lacan associates this self/Other split that occurs during the mirror stage with Freud’s Innenwelt and Umwelt. See Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” in Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
[7] Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. pp. 151-52.
US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart produced a lasting example of ostensive negative definition in 1964. Admitting that he could not define pornography, he then stated “I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that” (Jacobellis v. Ohio. 378 U.S. 184. Supreme Ct. of the US. 22 June 1964).

Stereotype FAIL

Reaching up to Touch the Floor

The title of this post is a reference to Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers. In it, he tells an allegorical story about a land in which the people could not touch the floor without great difficulty. It was difficult because the accepted approach to touching the floor was to reach upwards as high as you might; so pervasive was the reach-up ideology, that the only time people could be taught to touch the floor was indirectly--by tying their shoes "without sitting down and shaking [their] hands around at the same time" (13).

So, yeah. That's sort of how I feel at this point, like I've been going about this thing the wrong way. I've tightened up to the point that it's difficult for me to think creatively about my proposal. I've no trouble thinking critically; thanks to a lot of great support from my friends, I think I have a good idea of the areas that were problematic (and on some of these, there was new and different widespread concensus!). What I'm having trouble with is remedying the problem areas. I know what's wrong, but I'm so overwhelmed by the project and its argument that I can't hold any 2 portions of it in my head for more than a few seconds...and forget trying to re-examine the relationship between 2 or more portions of the proposal. That is far beyond the scope of someone who just today forgot one of the key primary sources for this research project (remembered Harpin but forgot Chretien when talking to Eric Lutrell today). So I'm going to work only on this paragraph tonight--and probably for just a few minutes. I imagine a lot of it is about to go by the wayside...

Original:

This widespread consensus, however, has made for an awkward moment in monster theory. Such agreement has left many unsure as to how we should proceed, and some have focused their attentions on other projects. Indeed, conversations with fellow members of the BABEL Working Group such as Cohen, Eileen Joy, and Karl Steel have shown that while monsters are still a source of discussion, scholarly interest in them is beginning to wane in favor of attendant issues (hybridity, sexuality, medieval concepts of the human, etc.). As many who were once heavily involved in monster theory have foreseen, academic agreement quickly becomes academic stagnation. Thus, what was once the study of characters who could petrify with fear is itself in danger of sinking into the swamp and becoming petrified by consensus.

Well, even I have to admit that this paragraph is pretty bad. Let's see what I can do here.

Revised:

Academic consensus is a rare bird, and one of the reasons for this is the stagnation that often follows in its wake. Broad-scale agreement kills discussion and ceases movement: we relinquish our places at the vanguard where we advanced new and risky ideas to bivouac in familiar territory where we produce prescriptive statements. Our sense of inquiry leaves us.

One might argue that the momentum of monster theory has begun to wain, our forward progress has slowed. Perhaps each scholar associated with monster theory has begun to keep one eye open for more attractive, vibrant areas of inquiry. Perhaps when there is nothing left to argue, there is nothing left to say. Perhaps--though we be blind men touching different parts of the proverbial elephant--we have decided that is it, indeed, an elephant. We are far from done, for we have not even begun to understand how the elephant works. We may agree on the definition and even function of monsters in medieval texts, but that is just the "what"; we have only begun to ask the "how" and the "why" of that function.

I started fading there at the end. But it provokes lots of questions in my head: How do monsters function as boundary figures? Is it by dint of their physical description/appearance? Their actions? Their rupture of "normal" narrative events? Their troubling and overshadowing of other, more formal aspects of the works that contain them? Their peculiar cultural markers (such as cannibalism, silence/gibberish, clothing)?

Do these aspects themselves reinforce the boundary via fear? If so, how is fear employed? Is it fear of the monster and of the Other (psychoanalytic) or fear of ending up like the monster who always suffers the same fate in what amounts to a morality tale (structuralist)? Is it fear of what is necessarily on the other side of that boundary? Is what is on the other side of the monster what is actually deeply-seated in all of us (Lacanian extimacy)?

I think the waters are sufficiently muddied...but I'm no closer to a cogent prospectus. Great.

1200 is for pussies, we do the 8th century

This, according to my own calculations, is the single greatest utterance by an Anglo-Saxonist in the history of ever. I am forever in Eileen's debt, for this has brightened my day, given me direction in my life, and reinvigorated my academic drive.