[MD] MD and thee

[MarshaV]

Hi Matt,

I don't know enough of what your talking about to ask 
a specific question.  I would like to know more.  How 
about this list in cyberspace as autobiography?  

Marsha
 
 
 

On Mar 23, 2010, at 8:34 PM, Matt Kundert wrote:

> 
> Hi Marsha,
> 
> Marsha said:
> I seem to remember you writing that your main interest in 
> ZMM and LILA was more from the point-of-view that they 
> are novels.  I was wondering what was your present area 
> of study, and does it relate to your experience on the 
> MD list?
> 
> Matt:
> Maybe now I would clarify that it's not that my main 
> interest in them is that they were novels, but that if one 
> is going to develop an overall picture of Pirsig, one needs 
> to deal with the fact that they are novels.  _My_ horse in 
> the race is that it is instrumental to an overall picture of 
> Pirsig that they be read with a special eye on their "literary 
> attributes," which is still a misleading way of putting it.  
> And, on the other hand, I don't know what my main 
> interest is in Pirsig anymore.  I think it has to do with 
> philosophy as a kind of autobiography, Romanticism's 
> transmogrification of Descartes' picture of philosophy as 
> having to begin from the first-person point of view 
> (Wordsworth's Prelude, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, 
> Emerson's essays, Thoreau's Walden).  Pirsig fits in an 
> interesting way into a number of developing traditions, kind 
> of like a node in the middle of a number of arcs 
> (romanticism, the memoir, the travelogue, the confession, 
> philosophical pragmatism, the American importation of 
> Eastern philosophy, individualism: the list can go on).
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by "does it relate to my 
> experience on the MD list," and I hesitate to say that I 
> have a "present area of study" outside of the seminars I 
> happen to be taking right now.  (Solidifying an area of 
> study--something I can tell employers that I "know," like 
> genre and time period--will occur over the next several 
> years.)  But I can tell you that I've been reading 18th 
> century English novels, romantic poetry, post-Harlem 
> Renaissance writers (Wright, Baldwin, Ellison), Antebellum 
> sentimental and sensational literature (Stowe, Poe, 
> Brockden Brown), cultural studies theorists, and a s
> mattering of other things (ecocriticism theory and 
> philosophy of emotions).
> 
> The most interesting thing by far was Ellison's Invisible Man, 
> which is at least as philosophical as ZMM.  Just a 
> fascinating book.  It helped solidify the overarching thought 
> that I want to study the Emerson/Thoreau tradition and 
> particularly as it transforms itself in the African-American 
> tradition that goes from Douglass' Autobiography to Wright's 
> Black Boy to Ellison.  The fact of the matter is that the 
> autobiographical nature of writing generally is far more 
> explicitly tied to what African-Americans have perceived as 
> the goal of writing.  This has directly, I think, to do with 
> them being forced to this country and enslaved, and that at 
> first the only writing they did was in direct service to (what 
> we might call) the "work of freedom"--aside from practical 
> writing, its almost all slave narratives for awhile.  And then 
> afterwards, the task of articulating (and negotiating, if you 
> think of Booker T) the black experience in America is 
> conceived as the primary, if not only, task of the black 
> writer.  This has been a powerful force of antagonism for 
> black writers themselves ("Why do I need to write about 
> black people or blackness?"), but it has marked the best of 
> their writing with a spiritual intensity relative to their 
> refocusing of the peculiar materials of their own lives.  And, 
> too, I think of comparing the particular ways that 
> African-Americans negotiate their experience in their writing 
> with the way another oppressed group in the US has: 
> Native Americans.  Both oppressed, but very different 
> experiences, though, I think, no less productive of an 
> intense process of reconstitution of individual experience 
> (I'm thinking of Sherman Alexie, whom I've already written 
> a little about).
> 
> So, basically, I have big ideas at this point.  And where 
> does Pirsig fit?  In an interesting nexus between many of 
> these ideas, though not all of them.
> 
> Matt
> 		 	   		  
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