A quote from James Miller's "Everyman with a Blue Guitar: Imagination, Creativity, Language": "There is an intractable, impenetrable, flowing, and infinite world of reality that presses in on the senses, which the imagination then shapes into a tractable, penetrable, comprehensible reality structured by the strumming on the blue guitar-that is, in art, in language. This... Continue Reading →
A quick link
I was unfamiliar with Wallace Stevens' poem "Man with the Blue Guitar" until I read James Miller's article "Everyman with a Blue Guitar: Imagination, Creativity, Language" in Landmark Essays in Rhetorical Invention in Writing. Interesting. I'll just post a link and leave it at that.
Idea for new chapter outlines
I really appreciate having the opportunity to share my work, and I was able to do that last Thursday thanks to the Dissertation Fellows Conference: those of us given a dissertation fellowship for the 08-09 school year were required to provide a 20-25 page excerpt and then give a 15-20 minute talk based on the work we've... Continue Reading →
For another chapter?
I ran across a term in an excerpt from Kenneth Burke ("The Five Master Terms," in Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Invention in Writing). . . From my notes: Panspermia= from “the ancients” “an original chaos in which all the seeds of all the universal possibilities lay in one vast confusion. Such a panspermia is the region... Continue Reading →
Hmm. . .
"unconscious cerebration": Phrase used to describe the views of a school of invention dubbed the "new romantics" by Richard Young in "Concepts of Art and the Teaching of Writing" (I'm reading the text in Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Invention, edited (not coincidentally) by Richard Young and Yameng Liu. I like it. Even though I know... Continue Reading →
The Substance of Style
is a series of essays (textual and video) by Matt Zoller Seitz that I ran across on the Moving Image Source, which critique and chronicle influences on Wes Anderson's film-making. The text is divided into 5 sections; I highly recommend watching the video essay rather than focusing only on the written text (which Seitz reads... Continue Reading →
A book
I really need to read this: First We Read, then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson. Unfortunately, Miami doesn't have a copy yet (it came out in Feb.) and there appears to be one copy on Ohiolink that is not yet available because it's not in the library's system just... Continue Reading →
yoga and remembered rapture
Writer's block would be putting it mildly. . .I am avoiding the dissertation, completely and totally. Even though I am sitting here in the library with my fellow dissertators, who I know are being productive. Meanwhile, I'm perusing google reader, checking email and facebook, and thinking about insignificant wedding details. How did I make it... Continue Reading →
I should be working on my second chapter
by now. But I'm not. . .I'm still overwhelmed by the joy of knowing as much as humanly possible about invention studies. Ack. On the bright side, I've been thinking of other ways to complicate my place as topos in invention studies discussion, thanks to the (old) review-essay I just finished--"A Critical Survey of Resources... Continue Reading →
essaying the plains 