Donald Wesling
University of California, San Diego, Literature, Faculty Member
From the beginning (1919) to the end (1972) of his publishing career, Mikhail Bakhtin very often wrote about the force of creativity. This is a secondary theme, but also a freedom-valuing variant of his grand themes of dialogism,... more
From the beginning (1919) to the end (1972) of his publishing career, Mikhail Bakhtin very often wrote about the force of creativity. This is a secondary theme, but also a freedom-valuing variant of his grand themes of dialogism, chronotope, carnival, great time. Bakhtin's definition, which works to disentangle the existing given from the newly-created, helps us in 2015 to rescue creativity from debased usages in the public sphere. One purpose of this essay is to rectify a valuable term: to show what Bakhtin means by "the co-creativity of those who understand." Another purpose is to specify, with Bakhtin's help, the type of creativity Alexandr Pushkin achieves in his historical moment, in lyric, narrative, and meditative poems. To the extent we are successful, we continue an ongoing project in Bakhtin studies: to show how his thinking aids in the interpretation of poetry as verbal art. * What is praxis? Or, What links active thought to action in the world? My answer is: Creativity. As Mikhail Bakhtin defines creativity over fifty years of his writing career, this is one variant meaning of praxis, a term he never used. For Bakhtin, creativity is a politics of art as well as an art of politics. For him, the action of art, while shrewd about historical conjunctures, is an agency both formative and generous. In his response to verbal art, he deliberately condemns and avoids the Formalist need to bracket-off history, to detach the word from dialogue, to draw back from action. For him art-speech simply does not allow the loose and hopeful thinking that the term creativity usually drags along with it.
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UPHEAVALS OF THOUGHT Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives. Like geological upheavals in a landscape, they mark our lives as uneven, uncertain, and prone to reversal. Are they simply, as some have claimed, animal... more
UPHEAVALS OF THOUGHT Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives. Like geological upheavals in a landscape, they mark our lives as uneven, uncertain, and prone to reversal. Are they simply, as some have claimed, animal energies or impulses with no ...
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The intent of Chapter 1 is to rectify the existing, human-centered discourses on the human–animal relation. If we ourselves are nature, as Bruno Latour, Gernot Bohme and some others allow, then we may study the unities and not the... more
The intent of Chapter 1 is to rectify the existing, human-centered discourses on the human–animal relation. If we ourselves are nature, as Bruno Latour, Gernot Bohme and some others allow, then we may study the unities and not the oppositions between humans and animals. First Donald Wesling proposes new concepts and terms for an animalist mode of interpretation; then he considers radical multispecies writers in science fiction (K.S. Robinson) and in the prose poem (Laszlo Krasznahorkai). Last in Chapter 1 he sets up Maurice Merleau-Ponty (d. 1961) as our best guide on the animal and human body as moving agent of perceiving and thinking. With terms from this phenomenological framework, literary readers may better attend to attention and may read more successfully for perceptual content.
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The intent of Chapter 1 is to rectify the existing, human-centered discourses on the human–animal relation. If we ourselves are nature, as Bruno Latour, Gernot Bohme and some others allow, then we may study the unities and not the... more
The intent of Chapter 1 is to rectify the existing, human-centered discourses on the human–animal relation. If we ourselves are nature, as Bruno Latour, Gernot Bohme and some others allow, then we may study the unities and not the oppositions between humans and animals. First Donald Wesling proposes new concepts and terms for an animalist mode of interpretation; then he considers radical multispecies writers in science fiction (K.S. Robinson) and in the prose poem (Laszlo Krasznahorkai). Last in Chapter 1 he sets up Maurice Merleau-Ponty (d. 1961) as our best guide on the animal and human body as moving agent of perceiving and thinking. With terms from this phenomenological framework, literary readers may better attend to attention and may read more successfully for perceptual content.
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... As becomes clear for the first time in English because of Paul Schmidt's translations, Khlebnikov is indeed a radical explorer in the ... Aleksandr Galich: a patrician ironist, noble in tribute to earlier poets, an actor... more
... As becomes clear for the first time in English because of Paul Schmidt's translations, Khlebnikov is indeed a radical explorer in the ... Aleksandr Galich: a patrician ironist, noble in tribute to earlier poets, an actor inventing low-life characters whose attitudes, official or antiofficial ...
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... from his convalescence forward, amazes his grown children by closing all phone conversations with ... a sociologist: Emotion
is our experience of the body ready for an imaginary action; Victor ... 1996), conclude that researchers... more
... from his convalescence forward, amazes his grown children by closing all phone conversations with ... a sociologist: Emotion
is our experience of the body ready for an imaginary action; Victor ... 1996), conclude that researchers should first take account of implicit learning and its ...
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... The new poetries: Poetic form since Coleridge and Wordsworth. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Wesling, Donald. PUBLISHER: Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, Pa. and Cranbury, NJ). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1985. PUB TYPE: Book... more
... The new poetries: Poetic form since Coleridge and Wordsworth. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Wesling, Donald. PUBLISHER: Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, Pa. and Cranbury, NJ). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1985. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 0838750311 ). ...
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... 167 Page 9. PREFACE Rhyme, chime. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is. Rhymed words leap easily from the page to the ear to the memory. Their ...
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In Chapter 5 the keynote is movement, which has been a theme in every Chapter but is now essential to analysis of texts that show how the embodied mind is alive in time. The point is that changes of posture and changes of mind are changes... more
In Chapter 5 the keynote is movement, which has been a theme in every Chapter but is now essential to analysis of texts that show how the embodied mind is alive in time. The point is that changes of posture and changes of mind are changes in the division of our acts of attention. The array of a dozen works analyzed has a range of eras, types, lengths, structures, languages, including a best-seller hard-boiled novel, a classic French lyric about art-speech, and a mid-length meditation in Romantic blank verse. (Here the book’s only Diagram is a grid showing focus-changes in perception and emotion in the array.) Donald Wesling concludes the whole book with a rationale, unfashionable but unapologetic, for taking every opportunity to name the prosodic and linguistic forms in these twelve items.
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genre, the complaint. That Lady Meed (in the C-text only) should be banished to Corfe Castle, that the Abbott of Abingdon is imagined receiving a knock from the king, that the priests who attack Conscience in XX should be Irish, and that... more
genre, the complaint. That Lady Meed (in the C-text only) should be banished to Corfe Castle, that the Abbott of Abingdon is imagined receiving a knock from the king, that the priests who attack Conscience in XX should be Irish, and that the doctor of divinity may well be Willian Jordan, O. P., all give depth to our response to the poem. It is as if satire and invective and allegory continually need the presence of particulars to remind them that the real world exists and to afford raw materials for the process of abstraction. Thus allegorical figures in the poem are continually rubbing shoulders with real people in actual places. There is a good chance that the greater the presence of physical detail in any poem, the greater will be the tolerance of the audience (especially over a long stretch of writing like Piers) to accept the recurring presence of fantasy or of allegorical and satirical modes. Most often such particulars are the manifestation of the poet's energy rather tha...
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Impossible and finally wrong to place an embargo on the human meanings of poetry and restrict oneself to a discussion of poetic prowess, techniques, the choice of forms. Yet, after all, these forms have in themselves their human meanings.... more
Impossible and finally wrong to place an embargo on the human meanings of poetry and restrict oneself to a discussion of poetic prowess, techniques, the choice of forms. Yet, after all, these forms have in themselves their human meanings. Their history is also part of the history of culture. Once we have made the decision to look at the system of form-choices Henri Focillon called it "la vie des formes" we are soon surprised into a perception: since the first generation of Romantics, poets in English (indeed in all modern languages in the West) have been faced with a plurality of styles, a baffling immensity of choice. Since Wordsworth, but especially since 1910, and more intensely since 1945, the beginning poet and the achieved master have alike been conscious that any choice of poetic form is an arbitrariness which must be justified. The writer who begins with free verse must soon make an estimate of the whole received rhyme-and-meter tradition, while the writer who begi...
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For a scholar in the historical disciplines, interest in periodization as such is likely to come late in a career, after these typical stages: taking survey courses as a student and being forced to do period-dating of unidentified... more
For a scholar in the historical disciplines, interest in periodization as such is likely to come late in a career, after these typical stages: taking survey courses as a student and being forced to do period-dating of unidentified passages; teaching survey courses, and writing books ...
Research Interests: Philosophy and Clio
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All our writing is spun out of our guts, whatever kind of writer we are, but we arrange many codes of indirection to avoid letting our guts be seen in our academic articles and books. This makes those who write about imaginary persons... more
All our writing is spun out of our guts, whatever kind of writer we are, but we arrange many codes of indirection to avoid letting our guts be seen in our academic articles and books. This makes those who write about imaginary persons become, themselves, fictions for the reader. In turn, the reader will resist this recognition mightily in order to maintain trust in the knowledge being produced. First guts, then trust, and only then guts in a finer tone--with only partial trust! Eventually, the professional reader of professional writers comes to understand: knowledge is what we're persuaded is the case in the world, and no scholar's entirely powerful or charming. That leaves openings for my disagreement with the scholar's claims and warrants and my show-me attitude toward the scholar's manner. EMOTIONAL KNOWLEDGE IN A FIELD THAT WITHDRAWS FROM EMOTION There is no way to prove Mikhail Ryklin's claim, in conversation, that every work of scholarship originates in a ...
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1.In his chapter on the New Criticism, Ohmann does refer to Marxism as a "logical alternative" to the various kinds of formalism available in the post-war period (89), but without elaborating. 2.Ohmann acknowledges the influence... more
1.In his chapter on the New Criticism, Ohmann does refer to Marxism as a "logical alternative" to the various kinds of formalism available in the post-war period (89), but without elaborating. 2.Ohmann acknowledges the influence of Lauter and Kampf in this book, and his chapter on the New Criticism first appeared in The Politics ofLiterature. AU three writers now serve on the editorial staff of The Radical Teacher, the new journal of the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association. Ohmann also edits College English, the journal of The National Council of Teachers of English. 3.For another fuU-scale refutation of this assumption about Uterature, see Gerald R. GraffsPoetic Statement and Critical Dogma (1970). 4.See, for example, in addition to Ohmann, Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (1918); David Horowitz, "Billion Dollar Brains" and "Sinews of Empire," Ramparts (May and Aug., 1969); James Ridgeway, The Closed Corporation: American ...
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First and last, what moors poetry to society is speech: the speech that gets into writing. So why do most political readings of literature neglect this fundamental orientation? Mikhail Bakhtin never forgets the central role of utterance:... more
First and last, what moors poetry to society is speech: the speech that gets into writing. So why do most political readings of literature neglect this fundamental orientation? Mikhail Bakhtin never forgets the central role of utterance: his philosophy of literary dialogism is based on the idea of fighting out social issues on the ground of the spoken word. Accordingly, conflict-in-language is the theme of this book's introduction as if it is of the whole volume. In this book, Donald Wesling offers an organized reading of Bakhtin's thought, to achieve an account of why Bakhtin scamped poetry; and an account of how a poetics of utterance is a major achievemnt, if we employ in the dialogic reading of poetry many of the powerful terms Bakhtin developed for the novel. After an Introductory chapter that is polemical and pedagogical, this book contains chapters on the social poetics of dialect writing, on the clash of inner and outer speech, on the problem of rhythm, and on broade...
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Chapter 4 is long because each of twelve major thinkers receives his or her own expose, and each of the essays is preceded by pages that survey one work or many works, combing through to find how each animalist thinker shows the four... more
Chapter 4 is long because each of twelve major thinkers receives his or her own expose, and each of the essays is preceded by pages that survey one work or many works, combing through to find how each animalist thinker shows the four attributes of Creativity, Embodied Mind, Dialogism, and Amplification of Affect. In the first instance, those attributes taken as a set are what identify the thinkers Donald Wesling puts forward as animalists. This is to invent a tradition where, apparently, no tradition existed. Wesling shows that Lucretius (ancient world), Michel de Montaigne (renaissance), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (romanticism), John Muir (the 19th century), Alphonso Lingis (with the next three, contemporary), Laurie Shannon, Brian Massumi, and Temple Grandin were always there with the attributes of membership.
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When John Muir died in 1914, the pre-eminent American naturalist, explorer, and conservationist had not yet written the second volume of his autobiography, in which he planned to cover his Yosemite years. Editors Robert Engberg and Donald... more
When John Muir died in 1914, the pre-eminent American naturalist, explorer, and conservationist had not yet written the second volume of his autobiography, in which he planned to cover his Yosemite years. Editors Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling have here provided a remedy.Their account begins in 1863, the year Muir left the University of Wisconsin for what he termed the "University of the Wilderness." Following an accident in 1867 that nearly left him blind, he vowed to turn from machines and continue to study nature. That led, in 1868, to his first visit to Yosemite Valley, where he began his glacier studies. Muir spent much time exploring the Yosemite region, Tuolumne, and both the southern and northern Sierras, publishing articles, and keeping extensive journals through 1875, when he began to write for the San Francisco Bulletin and expanded his travels to areas throughout the west.Mining a rich vein of sources Muir s letters, journals, articles, and unpublished manus...
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In Chapter 3, Donald Wesling explains four modes of thought that are shared by all eight of the example-figures that he brings forward in Chapter 4. These attributes of animalist thinking are: Creativity, or the idea that the senses... more
In Chapter 3, Donald Wesling explains four modes of thought that are shared by all eight of the example-figures that he brings forward in Chapter 4. These attributes of animalist thinking are: Creativity, or the idea that the senses continually bring in new materials for cognizing, feeling, and saying; Embodied Mind, or the idea that the body, as part of nature, participates in the showing of things; Dialogism, or the idea that ordinary thinking is a continual performance of the many betweens, including me-other, perceiver-perceived, feedback-calibration; and Amplification of Affect, or the premise that in living beings change is everything, and involves a series of interruptions, which are discontinuities in perceiving. Wesling concludes Chapter 3 by analyzing Annie Dillard’s essay on being startled by a wild weasel.
The Afterword and Bibliography are “For Animalists,” using a term defined in the Preface and in Chapters 3–4, because of the author’s wish to recruit the reader of this book to the ranks of a new kind of person. The Afterword extends and... more
The Afterword and Bibliography are “For Animalists,” using a term defined in the Preface and in Chapters 3–4, because of the author’s wish to recruit the reader of this book to the ranks of a new kind of person. The Afterword extends and concludes the book in a space closer to political action, by these means: mini-stories on topics from alphabets to zoos; direct argument with friends and antagonists; striking statements on the animal question from a careful selection of recent writings by scholars who push further the theme of the book.
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... performed what we have defined. Thanks are due to Debra Bronstein, Thomas K.Dunseath, Jon Snyder, Mihai Spariosu, and Andrew Wright, who corrected errors and challenged arguments. We would also thank the American ...
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I. SOCIAL INTENTIONALITY OF DIALECT POETRY What would happen if we brought dialect writing out of relegation? If we wanted to think past dialect as archaic or local in the sense of pious nostalgia? My account of the way language helps to... more
I. SOCIAL INTENTIONALITY OF DIALECT POETRY What would happen if we brought dialect writing out of relegation? If we wanted to think past dialect as archaic or local in the sense of pious nostalgia? My account of the way language helps to form cultural identify in Glasgow-Scots and London-Caribbean dialect, in their relation to the majority language of standard English, contributes to the creation of a scholarship of interculture for our moment, a scholarship derived from studies of postcolonial writing sites, transgressive border and diaspora cultures, foreign natives. To declare my argument and method right away: against the likely false consciousness in overstrong forms of nationalist ideology, as expressed in the English Only constitutional amendment proposed in the United States and in the political use of received standard pronunciation in the United Kingdom, I will connect Mikhail Bakhtin's philosophy of social heteroglossia to the centrifugal, entropic energies of dialect...
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RESUMO Do início (1919) até o final de suas publicações (1972), Mikhail Bakhtin escreveu frequentemente a respeito da força da criatividade. Isso foi um tema secundário, mas também uma variante livre e valorativa de seus grandes temas,... more
RESUMO Do início (1919) até o final de suas publicações (1972), Mikhail Bakhtin escreveu frequentemente a respeito da força da criatividade. Isso foi um tema secundário, mas também uma variante livre e valorativa de seus grandes temas, como dialogismo, cronotopo, carnaval, grande tempo. A definição de Bakhtin que colabora para distinguir o dado, que já existe, do recentemente criado, ajuda-nos, em 2015, a resgatar a criatividade de seus usos desgastados na esfera pública. Uma finalidade deste ensaio é retificar uma expressão valiosa: mostrar o que Bakhtin quer dizer com a cocriatividade daqueles que compreendem1. Outra finalidade é especificar, com o auxílio de Bakhtin, o tipo de criatividade que Alexandr Pushkin realiza nos poemas líricos, narrativos e meditativos em seu momento histórico. Na medida em que formos bem-sucedidos, continuamos um projeto de estudos bakhtinianos cujo objetivo é mostrar como seu pensamento contribui para a interpretação da poesia como uma arte verbal.