In Relation To Kevin's Article...

Hi All,

In relation to Kevin's article, a really quite important reminder, I might add, I figured I'd also send all of you a link to an article on reading and community. It's by Robin-Tremblay McGaw, a friend and fellow faculty member in Bard College's Workshop in Language & Thinking. And it's published on the L&T blog. Here the stakes of intertextuality--the micro-political stakes--are discussed in relation to contemporary texts. Robin, I should add, is also a very fine/interesting poet. From that essay article:

For a number of contemporary writers (Tisa Bryant, Maggie Zurowski, Harryette Mullen, Dodie Bellamy, Yedda Morrison, Kathy Lou Schultz, Rob Halpern, etc.,) at the forefront of their work are the strategic and highly articulate and conscious acts of intertextuality and reading–in all of its forms and targets or objects: the daily news, novels, songs, visual art, etc. Jocelyn Saidenberg’s epigraphs for her book, Negativity, serve as markers in a labyrinth of other texts for readers to turn to while we dwell in negativity, however capably or incapably. Negativity, a text that is founded on the intertextual, advocates that entering the texts it has included in its textual body and out of which it is partially constituted, is productive and generative, a form of nourishing if also sometimes violent social participation, as even a meal may be. This intertextual world is predicated on relation and proposes in its composition, the selection of its companions at table and sources, each of which carry with them highly specific and yet socially located histories, cultural milieus, and temporalities. At the same time, this intertextual world is conscious of its relation to a writing machine, an alimentary canal, the person at the keyboard or with a notebook, someone who has a body and relationships to disparate categories of delimited identities with respect to specific cultures, languages, diets. These coordinates are always already in relation to and with a cacophony of other cultures, ideological systems, empires of signs and worlds of discourse.

For her book, Negativity, Jocelyn Saidenberg takes one of its three epigraphs from Jean Genet’sOur Lady of the Flowers:

I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, then the universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.

---Robin Tremblay-McGaw