[MD] Fwd: ACLA 2016: "Poetry as Practice, Practice as Poetry"

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Arlo,

I don't log on much anymore, and have only now caught this.  I've been thinking about Hadot's notion of a spiritual exercise for a while, though it is only recently that I've had a chance to begin applying it in my own work.  (I have no relationship, however, to Foucault's use of it.)  It's a concept that has surfaced in one of my hobbyhorses (Rorty), and is attracting notice from Americanists, I believe, as well.  (I can cite Thomas Augst's The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America for an interesting application to understand Emerson's relationship to the period.)  

The CFP also registers what I think is a growing counter-theory movement in literary criticism, one that is also associated with pragmatism, Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Charles Altieri.  This is one is trying to take back the word "aesthetic" from the post-Marxist dispensation of criticism that has associated the aesthetic and literary with bourgeois ideology and class interests.  The turn away from these things led to a turn away from "close reading" as a critical practice, which is also receiving renewed interest (or, has become a new rallying banner).

My work has turned in all of these directions, though I haven't been able to get anything definite to cohere in my dissertation yet.  However, I've written two things over the last couple years that might be of interest to people.  One is a paper I delivered to fellow grads in my department, "Literature as Equipment for Living and as Spiritual Exercise."  It deploys the first idea from Kenneth Burke, and I discuss and quote long extracts from Hadot in sec. 6 and 9.  A footnote also refers to an essay "Touchstones," which attempts to develop a more concrete sense of practices of reading and thinking.  (If one is alert, one might also notice an allusion to my history with Pirsig in the name of the third practice of reading.)

http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html

Maybe I should look into sending an abstract the conference!

Best,

Matt