Subject: Bananastanley Fish
From: Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Date: Sat Feb 19 2000 - 20:28:31 EST
Robbie paraphrased an unnamed poet:
> God, in his infinite wisdom, made poems far wiser than poets.
Damned formalists. The legacy of Eliot. I can hear the literary
monuments shifting even now.
Stanley Fish has a great essay on poems (it invariably turns out that
he has written something very forcefully clever on whatever aspect of
literature one happens to be discussing) called "How To Recognize a
Poem When You See One." Here is a snippet:
"It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain
kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention
results in the emergence of poetic qualities. As soon as my students
were aware that it was poetry they were seeing, they began to look
with poetry-seeing eyes that saw everything in relation to the
properties they knew poems to possess..."
The essay is the result of a class period in which Fish's students
mistakenly assume the reading assignment (a list of names on the board
as the enter class) is the day's poem and begin explicating it. He
lets them finish up before he tells them the "poem" they've been
processing is actually just a list of last names.
Scottie will note, rightly, that any method of reading that would
elevate a list of names to the status of poetry has a dear reckoning
to make with the nine worthies on the mount. And despite my
apparently miasmatic regard for inventive close readings (a formalist
device itself), I agree. The more I kick around backstage at this
show, the more I like just to sit back and listen to the actors. I
never had as much fun, for example, talking about the 1st player's
fist speech in _Hamlet_ -- Aneas' tale to Dido -- as I did just saying
it aloud.
But I am smartly aware that not studying the language, laboriously
exhuming this and that device, would dim the glow of the lines
considerably. I see it in my own students' faces. They aren't
involved with _Hamlet_, and it's not that they're rebelliously
disliking a play that they are required to read; they just don't have
anything to grab onto. But when I give them quizzes about the
footnotes and Aneas and Dido and asyndeton and chiasmus, lighbulbs
come on...foreheads begin to glow, recognition cracks into cheeks,
knowing smiles creep onto faces.
It's the same thing with Salinger stories. Last week, nobody cared
much about Seymour's bananafish story until one of the more
literary-critic minded students brought up Freud and the human
anatomy. A few were disgusted, but a few were inspired. Inspiration,
I think, was catching, and for the first time, in the next period, a
whole gradebook full of students had a take on the baby carriages in
"The Laughing Man" before discussion even started. It was nearly
mutinous. Had we met in the physical classroom that day, I do not
doubt that the class would have taken turns carrying one another
around on their shoulders, everyone triumphantly waving copies of
_Nine Stories_.
The possibilities are vast. In the sticky Texas afternoons, I have
delirious, prophetic visions of former students lining the back rows
of economics classes, furtively turning the pages of Victorian novels
while their professors wheeze on about Adam Smith...chemistry majors
slumped in labs, dreamily going over lines from Milton against test
tubes smoking and exploding in the background...frat boys locked in
bathrooms at ten-keggers, Vivaldi's "Winter I" competing with Matthew
Sweet as Lear enters carrying Cordelia's limp body...
-- Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu - * Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message * UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
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