The stunning depth of knowledge this silence covers
December 20, 2024 12:27 AM Subscribe
These crises never seemed to outstrip the capacity of Melville’s story to offer some illustration and commentary, if not relief. One routine assignment was to formulate a conceptual question about the primary text, then to analyze the way two literary critics have approached dimensions of the question, and finally to propose an analytical response to the question which converses with these critical views. This assignment led many students toward the field of disability studies. The backdrop of the pandemic brought to the fore the investment in ideas of complex embodiment within “Bartleby.” As I modeled the assignment for my socially isolated, increasingly anxious, and depressed students, what emerged from the story and two works of literary criticism about it was a model not just for writing but also for living in a liable, contingent world. from Bartleby’s Insights on Complex Embodiment for a Post-Pandemic World [CommonPlace]
Read Bartleby, the Scrivener (A Story of Wall Street) by Herman Melville [PDF; HTML]
Read Bartleby, the Scrivener (A Story of Wall Street) by Herman Melville [PDF; HTML]
No time to read this before heading in to work, but looks like great lunch break material. I absolutely love this story, and I think it's great that it's getting this treatment. Such an insightful piece of work. Would that we all took its lessons more seriously and opted out of the systems that harm us.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:06 AM on December 20 [2 favorites]
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:06 AM on December 20 [2 favorites]
I hadn't read the story before this post, and I'm deeply appreciative of it. Recently, so much of what I'm generally encountering is what I would call arrowslit discourse, pointy jabs from behind fortified perspectives that are necessarily limited in scope. This story is a perfect reprieve, awaredly imperfect in perspective, even as the narrator tries to explore, inhabit, and exhibit his own morality within this relationship and then runs up against the effective limits of his own toolkit.
I like that it ends in pensive empathy, while understanding remains in the liminality where a word you may be reaching for is near but elusive.
170 years later, we are still unskilled at teasing out how to take people at their word, to allow for accommodations we cannot rationalize. The other characters needed accommodations, too, but theirs had a pat cause, so remained within tolerances.
There's probably reads on this in consideration of intent vs. effect, and also the mundane authoritarianism of organized society. I look forward to revisiting it many times.
posted by droomoord at 4:09 AM on December 20 [4 favorites]
I like that it ends in pensive empathy, while understanding remains in the liminality where a word you may be reaching for is near but elusive.
170 years later, we are still unskilled at teasing out how to take people at their word, to allow for accommodations we cannot rationalize. The other characters needed accommodations, too, but theirs had a pat cause, so remained within tolerances.
There's probably reads on this in consideration of intent vs. effect, and also the mundane authoritarianism of organized society. I look forward to revisiting it many times.
posted by droomoord at 4:09 AM on December 20 [4 favorites]
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posted by HearHere at 3:23 AM on December 20 [2 favorites]