“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, March 29, 2011

A Text is a Sentient Object


Read this paper of Eileen Joy's and know the future of literary studies. It's quite simple... Finally, finally I made it through all my school business and can get down to looking at this and other projects. Thanks for your patience all those who've borne with me.

The take home idea: a text is sentient object. It's quite counter-intuitive at first. But it's elementary really. Since we can apply almost everything meaningful about a pencil's interactions with a table to a mind's interactions with its world, why not a text, that is, what a pencil writes, if you hold it the right way...

1 comment:

Bill Benzon said...

If you read the panels of this cartoon in reverse order you come up with the sentient text.