File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0111, message 152


From: "laohu - -AT-Home" <laohu-AT-home.com>
Subject: More on Spivak
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 01:47:23 -0600


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


I=92ve been following the general comments the past few weeks on this list pro and con Spivak=92s scholarship and writing style.

Early last year (2000), already having encountered her name repeatedly on this list, I decided to read something of hers to try to find out why everybody seemed so enamored of her writings. I bought "The Spivak Reader" edited by Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean [Routledge: New York and London, 1996] in order to get an overview.

It was quite a revelation.

Yes, I did find her incredibly opaque but attributed much of it to my lack of familiarity with the materials she was discussing =96 until I came to chapter 7 ("Echo"), her discussion of the Echo and Narcissus episode in Ovid=92s "Metamporphoses". Since this particular text and its literary antecedents back to Homer were thoroughly familiar to me, I felt more than qualified to understand it. It is, in my carefully considered opinion, a highly problematic essay, and one to whose procedures and analyses I respectfully take the strongest exception.

I sat down in the middle of last year and, using highly specific examples and commentary, wrote a loooong review of the entire book simply for my own edification and clarification. My comments have never been published, and indeed never will be. But I offer for personal use two versions of it to readers of this list who may be interested in coming to grips with some focused specifics about her work rather than the often vague and rather impressionistic comments that pop up on this list.

The longer version (Spivak-1 below) contains my entire =91review=92, including my observations on her use of language etc. And I admit openly and without irony that it may well be my own intellectual deficit that unfairly prompts many if not most of those remarks. This, however, is not the case in my review of the Echo chapter (Spivak-2 below).

For what it is worth, here is where you can go to the reviews; click on these addresses or paste them into your browser and download to your hard disk before opening and reading (my Norton anti-virus-detector states that neither one contains any viruses):



http://www.avalon.net/~laohu/Spivak-1.doc

http://www.avalon.net/~laohu/Spivak-2.doc



If I am being unfair or unreasonable to Spivak=92s text in my reviews, please feel free to let me know in reasoned detail why and how =96 but please, not something reductive like, "Outrageous!" v.sim. I=92d be happy to hear from readers, perhaps more easily by e-mail if you don=92t want to use the list.

Cordially,

j

e b holtsmark - aka jack     =E4ran f=F6rst och fr=E4mst
laohu-AT-avalon.net               esse quam videri
                                          aien aristeuein

HTML VERSION:

I=92ve been following the general comments the past few weeks on this list pro and con Spivak=92s scholarship and writing style.

Early last year (2000), already having encountered her name repeatedly on this list, I decided to read something of hers to try to find out why everybody seemed so enamored of her writings. I bought "The Spivak Reader" edited by Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean [Routledge: New York and London, 1996] in order to get an overview.

It was quite a revelation.

Yes, I did find her incredibly opaque but attributed much of it to my lack of familiarity with the materials she was discussing =96 until I came to chapter 7 ("Echo"), her discussion of the Echo and Narcissus episode in Ovid=92s "Metamporphoses". Since this particular text and its literary antecedents back to Homer were thoroughly familiar to me, I felt more than qualified to understand it. It is, in my carefully considered opinion, a highly problematic essay, and one to whose procedures and analyses I respectfully take the strongest exception.

I sat down in the middle of last year and, using highly specific examples and commentary, wrote a loooong review of the entire book simply for my own edification and clarification. My comments have never been published, and indeed never will be. But I offer for personal use two versions of it to readers of this list who may be interested in coming to grips with some focused specifics about her work rather than the often vague and rather impressionistic comments that pop up on this list.

The longer version (Spivak-1 below) contains my entire =91review=92, including my observations on her use of language etc. And I admit openly and without irony that it may well be my own intellectual deficit that unfairly prompts many if not most of those remarks. This, however, is not the case in my review of the Echo chapter (Spivak-2 below).

For what it is worth, here is where you can go to the reviews; click on these addresses or paste them into your browser and download to your hard disk before opening and reading (my Norton anti-virus-detector states that neither one contains any viruses):

 

http://www.avalon.net/~laohu/Spivak-1.doc

http://www.avalon.net/~laohu/Spivak-2.doc

 

If I am being unfair or unreasonable to Spivak=92s text in my reviews, please feel free to let me know in reasoned detail why and how =96 but please, not something reductive like, "Outrageous!" v.sim. I=92d be happy to hear from readers, perhaps more easily by e-mail if you don=92t want to use the list.

Cordially,

j

e b holtsmark - aka jack     =E4ran f=F6rst och fr=E4mst
laohu-AT-avalon.net               esse quam videri
                                          aien aristeuein
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