coldhearted scientist وداد

This is an exact description of what happened to me with my ill-fated Vallejo book. Its ill fate killed me and it took me a long time — seven years, I believe — to understand.

If I had understood it then I could have worked on or with the situation. But I did not understand it, or rather I did — I just thought my understanding was not legitimate.

The book was FIRST written as a dissertation, which had to be designed to sell Vallejo as someone one could discuss with the post-structuralist theory in vogue in my Comparative Literature department.

Then it was sold to a “unipress” in such a way as to make Vallejo counter-hegemonic, post-colonial, and so on, that is to say, someone who could be discussed with the body of theoretical work attractive to the press. That was because Vallejo HAD to become attractive to English-language readers (Eshleman’s big translation had not come out yet).

I didn’t want to do it or think it was indicated. I wanted to look at what really was being done with the fractured subjectivity and I thought this would take a different set of theoretical readings and a stronger look at the other modernista and avant-garde texts Vallejo was clearly reading–and the authors and texts he referenced directly.

But to get “unipressed,” it seemed that one would have to abandon scholarship. I couldn’t seem to get myself to do it, but I also couldn’t seem to consider my point of view legitimate, to stop trying to suppress it.

The more I learn, the more I realize that ALL my problems have to do with the neoliberalization and marketization of everything, and my acceptance of the idea that the problem is me. When actually I have valid perceptions and should not hide them or hide from them.

Axé.