It's all about how academia is eternally in danger of disappearing up its own bum, yet 99 per cent of us are rather in awe to 'academics' and if they were to contradict us and declare that on occasion black really is white, few of us would feel confident disagreeing.
Here are two prime pieces of apparent gobbledgook (or maybe I'm the dumbo). But once from 1950 they decided Hemingway 'was an artist', there was no going back. Here they are:
There was much more to [The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms], of course, than an act of personal exorcism, however complicated. For to destroy by embodying is also to create by arranging. The artist’s special blessing exists in an impu.
lse to destroy an aspect of the thing he creates, and to render permanent what for him, in another and internal dimension, must be permanently destroyed.
That is from Carlos Baker in his book Hemingway: The Writer As Artist. This is from a woman called Hollis Robbins, written while she was teaching at Princeton. It is her commentary on a commentary be Jackques Derrida commenting on Sigmund Freud's comments about Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes:
[It is a] critique of criticism [and a] tale, teller, interpreter, and critical case study all in one . . . Yet if it is true that the tale’s very transparency is a critique of the desire to critique — or rather, the exhibitionistic desire to unveil publicly — Derrida’s privileging of the themes of analysis, truth, and unveiling in his (albeit brief) reading of The Emperor’s New Clothes provides evidence that the awareness of this desire does not reduce its influence. The desire to read The Emperor’s New Clothes as either a fantasy of critique or a new literary history critique of the fantasy of critique is symptomatic of our assumptions about what it means to be a reader-analyst.
If anyone can tell me what either piece means, or even might mean, get in touch.
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