File under: Say it ain't so

Sun Oct 24 04:30:56 UTC 2010

Bravo!  You've made all this, and the lit-crit school to which it
belongs, all understandable to me.  Now could you explain Derrida?

Joel

At 10/23/2010 10:21 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>But don't you see? Don't you *see*?  A reader knows Jane Austen only through
>the mental construct of "Jane Austen," an imaginary "person" formed from
>subjective impressions of a novel or novel said to have been written by
>"Jane Austen."
>
>Prof. Sutherland's research reveals that no matter how many so-called "Jane
>Austen';s" there may be, the "Jane Austen" credited with the "authorship" of
>_Persuasion_ specifically is not Jane Austen in any definitive sense, but a
>largely fictive "Jane Austen," who is really part Jane Austen, and part an
>unidentified editor, presumably male and very possibly the Gifford
>character.  What is even more important is that it is now impossible for the
>reader to deny responsibility for the mental construction of this "novel"
>"Jane Austen" who corresponds to no actual person who ever lived.
>
>Thus, the conspiracy of Jane Austen (whom we will provisionally accept,
>without final proof, as the actual name of an actual person who actually
>wrote the manuscript of _Persuasion_ examined by Prof. Sutherland) and some
>unknown person or persons, possibly male, to create the quite imaginary
>persona of "Jane Austen, author of _Persuasion_, is finally exposed to the
>light of day.
>
>In the latest version of the story (
>http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101022/stage_nm/us_austen), a further editor,
>Robert Chapman, who is known to have been male, is quoted as having wished
>"if only we could destroy these manuscripts because they are disturbing the
>view of Austen that we preserve," a blatant and familiar move in the male
>project to deny woman's authenticity in the name of an indefinable, elitist,
>phallocentric "literature."
>
>  The most crucial result of this analysis is that even though not one word
>of the received, published text of _Persuasion_ has been altered, the
>meaning of every word has in fact been changed by the radical alteration of
>our understanding of the relationship of the text to the general
>Enlightenment fetishization of "authorship" itself, and, moreover,
>by our apprehension that the real woman named Jane Austen (1775-1817) may
>indeed have been the unknown editor's love slave, regardless of gender.
>
>In the words of Kristeva, "If Shakespeare was Bacon, King Lear becomes a
>figure of infinite jest."
>
>JL
>
>On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 8:53 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> > Subject:      Re: File under: Say it ain't so
> >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > At 2:12 PM -0400 10/23/10, Federico Escobar wrote:
> > >"Unpick" also struck me as an interesting choice of words. It was probably
> > >suggested --I'm speculating gratuitously-- by the ideas of precision and
> > >care conveyed by "picking a lock"; since the alleged precision of Austen's
> > >style was "undone" by the new study (which I'm surprised it took 200 years
> > >to perform), then it was "unpicked."
> >
> > I wouldn't think so, at least as far as the lock-picking goes.  The
> > use of "unpick" for 'pick (a lock)', as a directly pleonastic un-verb
> > of the "unloose", "unthaw", "unempty" variety, has long been archaic.
> > The much more standard use over the last few centuries is related to
> > sewing or knitting:  to unpick a sweater or whatever is to remove the
> > stitches.  So here it's the garment Austen's prose styling carefully
> > (or perhaps not so carefully) constructed, along with her reputation,
> > that would be "unpicked" by this finding.  Perhaps relevant is the
> > first OED cite for this sense of "unpick":
> >
> > 1808 JANE AUSTEN Let. 7 Oct. (1932) I. 217 Your gown shall be unpicked.
> >
> > LH
> >
> > >
> > >I also noticed that the author seemed inexplicably surprised by the blots
> > >and crossings. The explanation I supplied was that it was a way of
> > opposing
> > >the description of Austen's writing process offered by her brother:
> > >that "everything
> > >came finished from her pen". She probably emphasized the blots to unpick
> > >people's idea of publisher-ready mansucripts flowing steadily and
> > >unblotchedly from Austen's pen.
> > >
> > >F.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> > ><wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
> > >
> > >>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > >>  -----------------------
> > >>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > >>  Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> > >>  Subject:      Re: File under: Say it ain't so
> > >>
> > >>
> >
> > >>----------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------------
> > >>
> > >>  Note too Prof. Sutherland's use of "unpick" to mean "undo" (generally).
> > >>  (OED
> > >>  allows for a "fig." sense, but the below has no metaphorical context):
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>  "Austen's unpublished manuscripts unpick her reputation for perfection
> > in
> > >>  various ways: we see blots, crossings out, messiness -- we see creation
> > as
> > >>  it happens, and in Austen's case, we discover a powerful
> > >>  counter-grammatical
> > >>  way of writing."
> > >>
> > >>  Fascinating is the gratuitously defensive phrase, "a powerful
> > >>  counter-grammatical way of writing." All writers (with the famously
> > alleged
> > >>  exception of Shakespeare) blot, cross out, etc., all the time.
> > Irrespective
> > >>  of any later editorial improvement, that is not a weakness in Jane
> > Austen's
> > >>  writing. It just shows she had no word-processor.
> > >>
> > >>  BTW, a second look an hour later reveals that Yahoo has nonsexistically
> > >>  replaced the invidious "male editor" headline.
> > >>
> > >  > JL
> > >>
> >
> >  ------------------------------------------------------------
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> >
>
>
>
>--
>"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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