« Menippean satire | Main | Fall 2006 calendar »
June 17, 2006
a rogue? :-)
I had more fun yesterday evening than I have had in a long time. :-) I'm not convinced of my own skill as a conversationalist, but I'm pleased that I know so many people who are talented in this regard. It also felt good (!) to be wished well on my anticipated travels by so many. Of course, such is returned to all! (Hmm, kinda mushy, huh?!)
I'm reading Bakhtin, experiencing a string of those phenomenological moments that lend themselves to a more mystical form of epistemology. Check this out:
"The chronotope of the encounter; in such a chronotope the temporal element predominates, and it is marked by a higher degree of intensity in emotions and values. The chronotope of the road associated with encounter is characterized by a broader scope, but by a somewhat lesser degree of emotional and evaluative intensity. [thank heaven!] ... The road is a particularly good place for random encounters. On the road ('the high road'), the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people - representatives of all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, ages - intersect at one spatial and temporal point. People who are normally kept separate by social and spatial distance can accidentally meet; any contrast may crop up, the most various fates may collide and interweave with one another. On the road the spatial and temporal series defining human fates and lives combine with one another in distinctive ways, even as they become more complex and more concrete by the collapse of social distance. The chronotope of the road is both a point of new departures and a place for events to find their denouement. Time, as it were, fuses together with space and flow in it (forming the road)..." (Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination, 1981, p. 243-244).
In addition to this coincidence, I was given the best belated (by two years!) birthday present imaginable. I investigated some of the tips on choosing a name ...my first choice is already taken. Here's Bakhtin again:
"“Essential to these three figures [rogue, clown, fool] is a distinctive feature that is as well a privilege – the right to be ‘other’ in this world, the right not to make common cause with any single one of the existing categories that life makes available; none of these categories quite suits them, they see the underside and the falseness of every situation…” (p. 159).
There's a bit of "full circle" magic to reading all this now as it was the first place I went outside of the assigned curriculum of courses. And you know what? It got blogged! Leda Leda Leda, it seems you knew where I was headed . . .
Oo Oo Oo - "News from the Profession discusses tutoring with ESL students!
And an application to Henry James The Golden Bowl.
Posted by Steph at June 17, 2006 8:27 PM