Abstract
I remember very vividly a scene from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, another one of those books which I really did enjoy reading but have no desire to read again, at least in its entirety. This particular episode is called ‘the monkey rope’. Having killed a whale, the whalers would bring this enormously magnificent animal along side of the ship, tie the whale securely to the ship, and prepare it for storage aboard the vessel.
A postmodern writer or artist is in the situation of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he accomplishes, is not governed in principle by any rules already established, and they cannot be judged by means of a determining judgment, by the application to the text or the work of known categories. These rules and categories are what the work or the text are in search of.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘What is Postmodernism’
Theory is never more than an extension of practice.
Charles Bernstein
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Notes
Mikhail Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow: Art, 1979) p. 346.
David Patterson, The Shriek of Silence: A Phenomenology of the Holocaust Novel (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1992) p. 158.
Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) p. 2.
Emmanuel Lévinas, Alphonoso Lingis (trans.), Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981) p. 50.
Jacques Derrida, quoted in Claire Nouvet’s, ‘An Impossible Response: The Disaster of Narcissus’, Literature and the Ethical Question, Yale French Studies, LXXIX (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) 103.
J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) p. 5.
Yves Bonnefoy, ‘Poetry and Liberty’, Claire Nouvet (ed.), Literature and the Ethical Question, Yale French Studies, LXXIX (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) 262.
Julia Kristeva, New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980) pp. 134–8.
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© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Ledbetter, M. (1997). Centre Shouts and Peripheral Echoes: Reading Literature for Voices of Choice and Change. In: Tsuchiya, K. (eds) Dissent and Marginality. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25936-6_9
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