EN3232'week12'sedaris

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EN3232.week12.sedaris

• 7 November 2006

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Tension in a work of art

• Recall the Amis quotation and the question about
  a tension between education and entertainment.
• We want to avoid either/or choices not just
  because they are unsubtle, but because they are
  beside the point.
• Dewey helps us understand the centrality of
  tension to art. Lets have a look

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Why be tense?

• Mimetic art resembles/ relates to/ comments on
  life (which is characterized by disruption and
  moments of relative harmony)
• Art as experience like life, it works through
  disruption toward rewarding moments of stability
  meaningful patterns
• artistic tension develops the possibilities for
  cumulative effects and consummatory aesthetic
  experience. Movement from suspense to
  resolution creates narrative order.

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some tensions

• Are these made-up stories or are they fictional?
• Is DS a winner or a loser? Is he a nasty and
  selfish person, or does he have heart? Do the
  Sedaris love their pets?
• Does DS love his father, or does he have
  contempt?
• Does David dislike the fact that hes gay?
• etc.

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Go Carolina some questions

• What questions does the titlenot the story as
  the whole but just the title itselfset up?
• What overall shape (once we know more) does it
  anticipate?
• What levels of reality does it bring together?

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Reading on multiple levels

• Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of
  TV is familiar with the scene An agent knocks on
  the door. Oh, I think we both know why. (3)
• television and popular culture of the flightiest
  sort as common culture
• dramatic effect, an overall plot in which ones
  quotidian life figures
• the speech defect plot
• the single out the homos plot
• the we hated N. Carolina plot (see Rooster)

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Pleasures of the text double-entendre is one

• D.E. joke, usually in which the sexual
  meaning is smuggled within an innocent reference
  like a linguistic wolf in sheeps clothing.
• the scene ends with either gunfire or the
  gentlemanly application of handcuffs.
• What are the levels of meaning? D.E.?

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What could be meant by gentlemanly application
of handcuffs?
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from double-entendre (one-off) to literary
structure (cumulative)

• Youre sometimes led to believe that this person
  is actually relieved, but Ive never bought it.
  Though it probably has its moments, the average
  day spent in hiding is bound to beat the average
  day spent in prison. When it comes to deciding
  who gets the bottom bunk, I think theres a lot
  to be said for doing things the hard way.
• Discuss this passage (p. 4) from two levels
  crime drama and tongue-in-cheek narrative about
  being outed. (groups of 3, 5 minutes)

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Levels of Meaning Social Differences

• The Agent
• likes sports
• speaks correctly
• part of system
• bad taste
• the straight world

• David
• likes to iron/bake
• alternative speech
• hides from system
• good taste
• future gay man

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Registers of Meaning and Dialogism

• p.276 no living word relates to an object in a
  singular way between the word and its object,
  between the word and the speaking subject, there
  exists an elastic environment of other, alien
  words about the same object, the same theme, and
  this is an environment that it is often difficult
  to penetrate. It is precisely in the process of
  living interaction with this specific environment
  that the word may be individualized and given
  stylistic shape. (Bakhtin, Dialogic
  Imagination)

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Social Struggle at the Level of STYLE

• For Bakhtin, words/vocabularies echo and manifest
  social struggles
• But for Sedaris, the hetero/homo struggle often
  take the form of a style struggle
• The agent would be wearing a dung-colored blazer
  over a red knit turtlenet, her heels sensibly
  low. (4)
• David and agent in a battle of wits.

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Linguistic markers

• Lisp instead of crisp S sound. (Thorry)
• It was the first battle of my war against the
  letter s, and I was determined to dig my foxhole
  before the sun went down. According to Agent
  Samson, a state certified speech therapist, my
  s was sibilate, meaning that I lisped.

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Gay Bildungsroman mastering language as self
defense

• He fights fire with fire. The lisp becomes, for
  him, a STYLISTIC marker rather than a speech
  defect. And hes hypercritical of other markers.
• The woman spoke with a heavy western North
  Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her
  authority. Here was a person for whom the word
  pen had two syllables.
• Plurals presented a problem riversbecame a
  river or two. (11)

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Fear and Self-Loathing?

• Premise DS denies that there is relief in
  being outed. But does this mean he presents
  homosexuality in a self-loathing way? Why or why
  not
• (You can draw on other stories. But do so
  quickly. I havent got all day the curtains
  havent been ironed this week.)
• 5 min, then we discuss.

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Gay Snobbery as Self-Defense

• Her people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and
  hollered for Paw when the vittles wer readyso
  who was she to advise me on anything?

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Enlarging the Pattern

• Just one persons speech defect?
• Chuck Coggins, Sam Shelton, Louis Delucca
  obviously, there was some connection between a
  sibilate s and a complete lack of interest in the
  State versus Carolina issue. None of the
  therapy students were girls. They were all boys
  like me who kept movie start scrapbooks and made
  their own curtains (9)

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After break

• COMEDY WAR
• Divide class down the middle. Three teams down
  each aisle. Choose best passage and read to
  opposition. If you get a laugh, one point. No
  laugh, no points. You can read up to half-a-page
  and are allowed ten seconds of set-up. Otherside
  MUST listen. Ten minutes of prep.
• LET THE GAMES BEGIN.