Important things today: I had some progress on the MLA panel, and then started working on an abstract for the MLA that is based on what I need to figure out for C19. In both cases, I seemed to crack something. I also got the flights for California ready, and the hotels. I was too late to get the conference hotel for C19 and it is because I didn’t realize I could have used any card, and I could have reserved and cancelled.
Notes on a Diacritics from decades ago (17:1 [Spring 1987], where my post-it said MESTIZO SELF-FASHIONING. It’s about Greenblatt, it’s on pp. 1-20, and it’s called “Academic Tootsie: The Denial of Difference and the Difference It Makes.” My other post-its say “questions of difference,” “Greenblatt: conservative, non-dialectical, upper-class self-fashioning,” and “says Greenblatt is a white male and unconscious of this, universalizes it.” How do you self-fashion as a mestizo, was part of my interest in it, and the other part was the denial of difference. I was amazed that sameness was required for political equality, and fascinated by characters that seemed to just shade into each other in 19th century fiction.
(Mestizo self-fashioning, as we know, is part of the Conquest strategy and then the formation of the Creole upper class, it doesn’t just start with Independence and it’s not original to the avant-garde.)
Tootsie: its feminist intentions don’t alter its male-centered mode of signification. Greenblatt does the same, and neglects the positions of key female figures and their perspective. The author says the self as an autonomous, self-identical, ontologically grounded being who knows what he sees and how he feels about it disintegrates again and again in Petrarch’s poetry. The text is as much an effect as a cause of its own reading and writing (9, and I am lifting directly). In Wyatt, we see a similar unraveling but it stops short, because thee is a female figure who operates rhetorically to ensure the integrity of the male self. Greenblatt takes that as natural.
Denial of difference: he assumes Desdemona doesn’t have agency/a different gaze than [a white man], nor does Othello–except to the extent that they are perverse or otherwise less-than. In fact, Iago “un-fashions” Othello because he’s African … and is unfashioned himself. We/he see that he gets his identity from a political, not metaphysical system, so it is [contingent]; this identity only does not unravel because his racism and xenophobia keep the political system in place.
A self-fashioner is a closed work–they are formed in a system and they are only free to compete for positions within it. Greenblatt even says your self, its integrity, depend on its submission to an absolute power. So: Greenblatt naturalizes the [transcendental I] and calls it self-fashioning. This is not a good rendering of the article, which is more sophisticated, but it’s a start. I was interested in it for the denial of difference but now I am interested in it for the idea of the closed work.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 