File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1996/96-11-30.184, message 107


From: V200KG6U-AT-ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 23:30:27 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: more on French avant-garde



Yes, Mr. Free, you misunderstood me.  I was resppnding to someone
who signed her remarks "Karen," who had commented on the rather
constricted frameworks within which questions and issues may be explored
within the American academy.  Her point, if I recall correctly, was
that the configuration of periods and specializations within the
academy precludes much, if not all, interdisciplinary, as well as
comparative discussion, and that this tightening of institutional and
professional boundaries explains, at least in part, the unreceptiveness
in this country to most of the currents within the French avant-garde(s).

Shocking staid 19th-century American literature specialists is hardly
a worthwhile endeavor.  However, conceeding Melville to the confines
of either Civil War specialists, cultural studies and its variants, etc.,
etc. is similarly remiss.  I was merely trying to underline--perhaps too
glibly--the narrowness of the American academic establishment, and its
unwillingness to consider heretofore unsanctioned critical perspectives
(of course the irony in what I said is that Blanchot's writing, at
least in France, is hardly unsanctioned.  And yet here, the conjoinment
of *desouevrement* and Melville's writing is viewed as either heretical
or just plain nonsensical).

Christopher Devenney
Dept. of Comp. Lit.
SUNY -AT- Buffalo


     --- from list avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---



   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005