Acosta, González, Stein--"The Difference Is Spreading"
Teaching literature can make for some pretty strange bedfellows. Today, I'm careening among Belinda Acosta's contemporary chica lit, Corky González's radical Chicano-uplift poetry, and Gertrude Stein's shattering of symbolic meaning, all in rapid succession. My brain aches.
First, Belinda Acosta visited my Chican@ lit class to talk about her novel Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, from which she'll be reading on
Wednesday, 9/16 at 7:00 p.m.
Bailey Library, Andrews Hall.
It's free and open to the public, and she'll be signing books afterward. She was great in the class--funny, engaging, warm, utterly unpretentious and candid. Her reading should be fun.
Once Belinda had taken off, the class turned to Corky González's long poem, "I Am Joaquín," which always strikes me as a transparently clear text--so much so, that I always feel a little redundant as a professor when I teach it. "I am Joaquín" had a tremendous cultural impact, impossible to overestimate, but the text itself isn't particularly difficult to understand. There's little to say, except to point out the mildly experimental typography, gloss the historical references, contextualize it in terms of the 1960s civil rights movements, and note the gender discrepancies, which are very much of their era. Yet it somehow manages to baffle students, and because we'd spent so much time laughing with Belinda, we didn't get to talk about it as long as we should have. Teacher guilt!
Tomorrow, for more bafflement, we'll be discussing Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons in a graduate class. (Have you read Stein? Not the easy stuff, like the autobiographies, but the hard, early, crazy stuff, like Three Lives and The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. Why do I assign these texts?) As I prep, I'm recalling the moment when, years ago, teaching Stein to undergraduates in Texas, I received a parody of her work from one of the students, something like, "Gertrude must be shot. Shot once yet once, once yet not once. Gertrude must be shot, once, once, yet not once." Hilarious--and quintessentially Texan. I pinned it on my door.
More serious scholars (ahem) are torn between seeing Tender Buttons (written 1912, published 1914) as Stein's free play with the signifier (the word) that liberates language from patriarchal monologism--"as presymbolic jouissance and as irreducibly multiple, fragmented, open-ended articulation of lexical meaning," to quote Marianne DeKoven--and trying to find patterns of fixed meaning buried within the text (especially private, autobiographical meaning: "lover's code words shared by Stein and [Alice B.] Toklas concerning their sexual relationship," according to Howard Finn). If I were a grad student, and critical opinion offered me a choice between splashing happily in a text's sound-play, rejecting any strenuous quests for meaning while getting to feel pleasantly subversive, or doing the spadework to pry up a coherent through-line, I know which side I'd choose, for sure. Maybe that's just me being lazy.
On a happy, practical note, many thanks to unacknowledged legislators Gertrude and Alice B. for breaking some of the ground for us so that we no longer have to bury our non-hetero relationships or write about them in code. If you're interested in making your campus, workplace, or community more LGBTQ-friendly, go here, because the AAUP is interested, too. To quote Stein, "Act so that there is no use in a centre."
I love that. Not act as if. Act so that.
First, Belinda Acosta visited my Chican@ lit class to talk about her novel Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, from which she'll be reading onWednesday, 9/16 at 7:00 p.m.
Bailey Library, Andrews Hall.
It's free and open to the public, and she'll be signing books afterward. She was great in the class--funny, engaging, warm, utterly unpretentious and candid. Her reading should be fun.
Once Belinda had taken off, the class turned to Corky González's long poem, "I Am Joaquín," which always strikes me as a transparently clear text--so much so, that I always feel a little redundant as a professor when I teach it. "I am Joaquín" had a tremendous cultural impact, impossible to overestimate, but the text itself isn't particularly difficult to understand. There's little to say, except to point out the mildly experimental typography, gloss the historical references, contextualize it in terms of the 1960s civil rights movements, and note the gender discrepancies, which are very much of their era. Yet it somehow manages to baffle students, and because we'd spent so much time laughing with Belinda, we didn't get to talk about it as long as we should have. Teacher guilt!
Tomorrow, for more bafflement, we'll be discussing Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons in a graduate class. (Have you read Stein? Not the easy stuff, like the autobiographies, but the hard, early, crazy stuff, like Three Lives and The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. Why do I assign these texts?) As I prep, I'm recalling the moment when, years ago, teaching Stein to undergraduates in Texas, I received a parody of her work from one of the students, something like, "Gertrude must be shot. Shot once yet once, once yet not once. Gertrude must be shot, once, once, yet not once." Hilarious--and quintessentially Texan. I pinned it on my door.
More serious scholars (ahem) are torn between seeing Tender Buttons (written 1912, published 1914) as Stein's free play with the signifier (the word) that liberates language from patriarchal monologism--"as presymbolic jouissance and as irreducibly multiple, fragmented, open-ended articulation of lexical meaning," to quote Marianne DeKoven--and trying to find patterns of fixed meaning buried within the text (especially private, autobiographical meaning: "lover's code words shared by Stein and [Alice B.] Toklas concerning their sexual relationship," according to Howard Finn). If I were a grad student, and critical opinion offered me a choice between splashing happily in a text's sound-play, rejecting any strenuous quests for meaning while getting to feel pleasantly subversive, or doing the spadework to pry up a coherent through-line, I know which side I'd choose, for sure. Maybe that's just me being lazy.
On a happy, practical note, many thanks to unacknowledged legislators Gertrude and Alice B. for breaking some of the ground for us so that we no longer have to bury our non-hetero relationships or write about them in code. If you're interested in making your campus, workplace, or community more LGBTQ-friendly, go here, because the AAUP is interested, too. To quote Stein, "Act so that there is no use in a centre."
I love that. Not act as if. Act so that.
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