Afterwords to Braddock Award Essays

As rigorous and enlightening as are the two Braddock Award Essays that we have read, I found myself paying particular critical attention to the Afterwords. As essentially self-reflective, they represent of course a real opportunity for each writer to boost their ethos. I am intrigued by these parts of scholarly works that often get overlooked or that most readers view as simply formulaic: dedications, prefaces, acknowledgements. Usually they are indeed formulaic and, in the case of acknowledgements, can be headbangingly boring. But why is this? It's ironic that those parts of the book that are supposed to be a kind of cybernetic device merging the ink of the text with the flesh and bones of real people are often the part that readers--admittedly, usually justifiably--skip over; I guess it just shows how academics can take the life out of anything and turn it into routine! Of course Cushman's essay itself contains lots of snippets from her life, but her Afterword I found pretty routine and insincere. I enjoyed Connors' Afterword, though. I really liked the real dialogue that Connors recalls surrounding both his writing of the essay and his reception of the award: "Okay, sure, I'll give it a shot." "Is this a joke?" It was almost like a Raymond Carver story. I wish he would have told us about the celebration at the restaurant after he got the award and got drunk on whiskey sours and made a pass at his colleague's wife. It's strange. I have an incredibly prurient interest in the private lives of famous and semi-famous critics and scholars, much more so than in authors or artists, precisely because we hear so little about them. There are hundreds of biographies of Ernest Hemingway, but what about a biography of James McCrimmon or J. M. Steadman! You say, because their lives are boring. I say, maybe they're not boring at all, just that the interesting parts are more subtle, more internal.

Nietzsche and Nature

In class last week I pointed out what I perceived as the incongruity between Nietzsche's metaphors comparing humans to animals and his claims that, from the perspective of nature, humans are at the very least anomalous. Amy pointed out, rightly I think, that Nietzsche doesn't really come right out and say that humans are "unnatural." Nevertheless, I understood him as implying this. I went back and tried to find passages that support my contention. On p. 1171, he writes, "One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature." So, humans may not be completely out of place in nature, but they do at least appear, according to Nietzsche, a bit awkward. He further claims that nature "conceal(s) most things from him...in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness." (1172) Now that I think about this quote, though, perhaps Nietzsche is not saying so much that humans don't fit into nature, but more that it is "natural" for them to be different from the rest of nature: after all, it is nature, and not humans themselves, who have made humans this way, according to Nietzsche. I also gave a lot of thought to Dr. Cadle's response to my claim. She said that writers often state that one thing is something that it isn't in order to make their point: good old-fashioned irony, in other words. This made a lot of sense, too. In other words, from this perspective, yes humans are somewhat unnatural in their drive for truth but it is not odd that Nietzsche would use animals to compare humans to in this respect; the irony of the metaphors underscores the incommensurability between humans and nature all the more. I am thinking so much about this aspect of Nietzsche's essay because I am writing on the essay. Ultimately, I think Nietzsche in the essay is doing a lot of intricate weaving and even intentional blurring of rigid categories, thus putting into practice the very platform that he advocates for the artist/"intuitive man" at the end of his essay. Thanks to Amy and Dr. Cadle for getting me to consider possibilities other than my first instinct.

Vico on teaching ethics and wisdom

I've been thinking about Vico's criticism of educational methods at his time. He writes, "the greatest drawback of our educational methods is that we pay an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences and not enough to ethics. Our chief fault is that we disregard that part of ethics which treats of human character, etc" (871). He concludes that students who are set on a political career should not waste too much time on abstract sciences, but should instead focus on rhetoric and inductive reasoning. Our educational system should strive for excellence in wisdom and eloquence, he says, as well as science. There could be a problem here, though. If Vico is advocating teaching things like human character, good and bad behavior, appealing to the passions, using judgment, then isn't he advocating reducing these things to some kind of science; if not, how could they possibly be taught? I guess this is a paradox which could apply to other theorists, rhetorical and educational, that we have encountered this semester. I don't believe that this paradox is insurmountable, but I do think that authors like Vico don't give enough thought to it. If judgment, after all, is precisely that faculty which knows when and when not to apply the abstract knowledge and scientific axioms, then by definition it cannot itself be reduced to abstract knowledge or scientific axiom. Or think of rhetoric. If its essence is adapting speech to the particulars of a given circumstance, each of which is different, then how can it be taught? Now one might respond that we learn from observing those who practice these skills. Fine, but in that case doesn't education depend entirely on the student's talent for understanding and incorporating what she or he sees? In which case, why is Vico advocating our educational system address these areas of "wisdom" and practical interaction with human beings? I'm stating the problem in very gross terms here just as a way to start thinking about a seeming paradox that I think has plagued a lot of the authors we have read.