Part Of My Most Recent Stitched Iliad Paper Was Arguing Exactly This - Tumblr Posts

My literature classes didn’t help. My professors stressed the importance of approaching a text with detachment, with a critical gaze rather than an emotional one. There wasn’t a place in academia for gushing or ranting. There wasn’t room to simply say, “I loved this and I don’t know why.” One had to use academic jargon. One had to be methodical and thorough. It was like listening to a song and wanting so badly to get up and dance, but instead of dancing, you have to sit there and think about why those sounds made you want to dance and consider the exact mechanics behind the formula of a danceable song. And I didn’t want to fucking do that. I just wanted to dance. I just wanted to read. I just wanted to write. I didn’t want to deconstruct lines of poetry or do a close reading of Faulkner’s usage of semicolons.

Jenny Zhang, ‘The Quiet Importance of Angst-y Art’, Rookie (via tristrapedia)

As far as I’m concerned, counteracting this kind of limited approach is one of the primary goals of the para-academic. We need to understand and teach that understanding, appreciating and celebrating an emotional engagement with a text as a valid form of approaching a text, and one that enhances intellectual approaches to it.

Sometimes in my art I actively want to throw the intellectual engagement out, to say “no, not this time, not with this piece, come at this from a different angle, your degrees and grasp of theory aren’t the most fruitful approach here.” And that’s precisely because I’m so used to, and so tired of, seeing anything non-intellectual thrown out.

But in an ideal world we would just completely deconstruct this false, exclusive binary and accept that some people will favour one approach, some another, that for some people they can be combined with different levels of each approach present, and that none of these are intrinsically better or worse than the other, they’re just the approaches that we like best.