Class Should Be Interesting Today

Sidenote: The book (ah, I almost just referred to it as "the text") we are discussing is not A. B. Yeoshua's The Lover that we were so fortunate to read in 10th grade history class.


On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 6:17 PM, David Shields wrote:

I'm intrigued by idea of focusing microscopically on how individual books
work. Any thoughts re: how to proceed? Kristen will focus microscopically on
a portion of The Lover--eg, pages 20-40 or whatever--but I'm also open to
slowing down to a crawl and looking at fewer books, but looking at them line
by line. Even looking at books we've already read, eg, Bluets, and seeing
how they work on a line by line basis. This may be an overcorrection. We
could keep moving fwd as we are doing. Or we could, after the halfway point,
change our MO a bit and focus on far fewer books and take them line by line
so that we understand their collage composition. The risk of the latter
approach is that it could become somewhat tedious, but the possible reward
might be immense. I'm open to reactions. ds


From: Kristen Young
Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2010 9:55 AM
To: David Shields
Cc: Piper Daniels; Elizabeth Cooperman; Cecilia Kiely; Kate Lebo; Kathryn S Linn; Paul Vega; Erika Wilder

Subject: Re: MO for class.

Hello!

As I was reading and rereading The Lover, its muted cries of passion and hushed overtones of violence brought me again and again to the power of silence. Below are some questions I will be asking during our class; we may not arrive at answers but the seeds could bear some future fruit.

Silence is power. How do we harness its potential and kinetic energies?

What gains strength in the withholding, until the tension breaks the dam of separation between the story and its readers and the story pours forth from their own minds?

When does Duras fall silent? And when does she speak?

Silence performs a greater function than separation in collage: it connects.

How do her silences control us?

How do they free us?

How can we know when to introduce a silence in our own work, i.e. when should we as writers fall silent?

Others who have mastered both the potential and kinetic energies of silence: Ernest Hemingway and Miles Davis.

Incredible review of Duras’ life and work:

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/20/magazine/the-life-and-loves-of-marguerite-duras.html?scp=8&sq=Marguerite+Duras&st=nyt

See you in class!

-Kristen


On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 10:53 AM, David Shields wrote:

Kristen, These are interesting questions, and you should lead the discussion however you wish, but in my view these are rather abstract (unanswerable) questions, and I’m not sure how useful they are for us as we’re trying to contemplate the nature of collage composition. I’d urge us to focus with great specificity on individual passages, eg, pp. 1-20 of The Lover, and we can thereby learn how collage actually “works.”


From: Kristen Young

To: David Shields
Cc: Piper Daniels; Elizabeth Cooperman; Cecilia Kiely; Kate Lebo; Kathryn S Linn; Paul Vega; Erika Wilder

Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 11:17:23 -0700

David,

My plan is to focus on her use of silence to draw us into The Lover on pages 1 - 20; I have specific passages in mind. I don't believe those questions are unanswerable in this text. And as for our own answers, they will come out in our writing. We cannot know how collage works until we know what is not being said, what function the liminal spaces play; to me, those spaces require a more intimate relationship between the reader and the writer than even the words because they invoke greater leaps of imagination as the connective tissue.

See you in class!

-Kristen