Global Occupy Movement Roundtable (audio)

Here's the audio file I hinted at in yesterday's post. You'll here me at the beginning, giving introductions.

  Occupy Edmonton Panel by fsobhani

Fragments from an Occupation

Posted below is a collection of concerns, questions, and reflections generated by a recent round-table on the global occupy movement that took place at the University of Alberta. I was involved in planning the event and I'm still hoping that I'll be able to post a recording of the discussion on this site; for now, I've assembled some thoughts (my own, as well as those of other participants) both on the movement more generally and on its current manifestation in Edmonton.

Although a significant action took place today (a march calling for governments to introduce what's been nicknamed "the Robin Hood tax") and our camp at the corner of Jasper Ave and 102 Street is still functional after nearly two weeks of occupation, there has a noticeable decline in participation, both at a day-to-day level (a small number of volunteers are doing all the work to maintain camp infrustructure) and at our regularly held general assemblies. There are ongoing discussions about the future of the downtown camp: none of us are so naive that we think this can continue (at least in its current form) through an Edmonton winter. There have been also been an increasing amount of concerns regarding the homeless individuals who frequent the camp, many of whom are intoxicated or seeking a fix. Thankfully, most of us are of the opinion that the participation of the disenfranchised is just as (if not more) important to this occupation as our own, not least because they had been "occupying" this harsh and unwelcoming environment well before we arrived with our tents. However, many of the problems that currently plague the camp are due to decreased involvement and attendance, and so it is all the more imperative that we think through ways of continuing what we've started that don't sacrifice momentum but are still realistic about the movements material limitations.

It's with those immediate concerns in mind that I turn to some reflections that emerged from last week's discussion at U of A.

First, the global occupy movement is based around local attempts to build permanent zones of autonomy that stand in contradiction to the processes of capitalism that determine our lived condition. Proof of this contradiction can be seen in the violent responses from the state in places like Oakland, Rome and elsewhere.

Unlike the many institutions of collectivity that have become complicit with or have developed out of Western capitalism, the occupy movement is not interested simply in the performance of community and actively resists its commodification. As has been noted, the movement is characterized by a strong negative impulse which draws it into opposition with the political-economic apparatus as it functions today; people are increasingly recognizing that our system has enabled the consolidation of wealth and power by an indifferent upper-class. Despite the reactionary criticism perpetuated by mainstream media outlets, the movement has a clear target in its aim.

There is a conscious effort to privilege local struggle while recognizing its relationship to and solidarity with the larger global struggle. Here in Edmonton, we have begun most of our meetings with an acknowledgment that we are living on Treaty 6 land: once a place of flourishing for the Cree, now a place of alienation and embarrassment for many indigenous peoples due to the first occupation of this land by British settlers. Can we understand our current occupation as a conscious effort to reorient ourselves to a land that was never ours to begin with? Are we participating in the prolongation of colonial structures, or opposing them with and on behalf of the disenfranchised? Does the language of occupation (which has drawn fire from numerous participants) not reflect and produce the very logic of private ownership that we oppose? In addition to the creation of new forms of social relation (not premised on capital), it is also up to us to imagine new possibilities for discourse and representation.

Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of this movement is that it has proceeded without any serious acknowledgment of what today falls under the name “politics.” Our choices in the political establishment offer no substantial choice or change, but instead give us slightly different ways of maintaining untenable lifestyles. In short, the official institutions that claim to embody our democracy have been treated as the ineffective sideshow that they are.

It has been pointed out repeatedly that there is a frustrating lack of collective demands. Our unwillingness to identify or hand over specific demands arises from a fear that those demands will be perverted and co-opted by the powers we seek to oppose. This is certainly a weakness of the movement, but it is also one of its great strengths. Many of the social movements of the late twentieth century had their basis in identity-politics and, consequently, were grounded by an axiom of equilibrium that sought to establish a basic equality of rights among exclusive groups. Such movements were therefore mobilized by a certain degree of self-interest that could easily be put into the service of capital; it seems, in contrast, that the global occupy movement is mobilized by a collective hunger for justice that looks beyond individual needs, not to some universal projection of identity, but to a universal that is necessarily open, but is equally opposed to privatization.

courses I should be taking

Although I'm sure that writing my thesis will be totally exhilarating, I can't help feeling the sting of bereavement as I look over the graduate course calendar for the coming school year and realize what I'll be missing. I can't be too bitter. If I end up doing a PhD, I'll have another chance to feel jaded and overwhelmed by reading lists and intimidated by the precious competition of colossal egos attempting to out-radical one another. There's also a slight chance I'll be able to sit in on one or two of them.

Cultural Forms and Social Circulation

How do we understand how the relationships between literary and cultural forms (both old and new) and their efficacy for generating new modes of sociability? To address this question, this seminar will focus on theories of cultural production and circulation as well as case studies from both earlier historical periods and contemporary culture.

Every historical period has its examples of the ways literature has generated new forms or modes of sociability and transformed old ones: literary debates generated new modes of cultural engagement in Enlightenment-era coffee houses; out of Restoration theatre culture inspired controversy about the relationship between women and prostitution; 1830s New York City saw publics coalesce around racial performance and textual “blackface” in newspapers. For more recent examples, we can turn to the ways second-wave feminists made poetry-reading central to their consciousness-raising groups, the uses anti-globalization activists make of global technologies to organize alternative cultural resistance, or the emergence of transgender identities in the wake of Leslie Feinberg’s book Transgender Warriors. But how exactly should we understand the relationship between cultural forms and the audience forms and the publics they produce? What, in short, are the possibilities—as well as the limits—of what literature can do in the world?

In recent years, it has been common for literary and cultural critics to focus on the politics of literature and culture in terms of the (usually narrative) content of a cultural object. This course aims to augment this approach to reading politically by focusing less on what texts mean and more on how they mean and what they can be said to do: the forms they take, the media and objects through which they circulate, the affects they generate, and the social constituencies they help consolidate. This course thus invites students to consider theories of texts’ social effects in terms of their cultural circulation: how they produce audiences, take unpredicted paths through the world, consolidate social groups, and even generate identity categories.

To do so, we will bring together concerns from a number of overlapping fields including reader response criticism, linguistic anthropology, history of the book, French and German cultural theory (from the Adorno to Bourdieu), public sphere theory, and literary criticism. Theoretical texts will include readings such as the following: Theodor Adorno “Lyric and Society”; Greg Urban from Metaphysical Community: The Interplay Between the Senses and the Intellect; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey; Karl Marx The Grundrisse and from Capital; Lauren Berlant from The Female Complaint, Michael Warner Publics and Counterpublics; Benjamin Lee Talking Heads; Gerard Genette Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation; Nietzche “On The Utility and Liability of History for Life”; Frederic Jameson The Political Unconscious; Stanley Fish Is There a Text In This Class?; Janice Radway Reading the Romance; and Walter Benjamin The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Pierre Bourdieu The Field of Cultural Production; D.F. McKenzie “The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy, and Print in early New Zealand,” Martin Heidegger “The Age of the World Picture.”

Medieval Texts: Medieval Dissent: Plowmen, Lollards, and Outlaws

In 1381, Wat Tyler led an army of peasants into London in the first documented popular revolt in English history. Driven by agrarian unrest, encouraged by priests like John Ball, and calling for legal and social reform, they burned the palace of the Savoy, London home of John of Gaunt, and confronted the king himself on the plain of Smithfield. It is said that at the head of the peasants' procession was someone reciting a passage from The Vision of Piers the Plowman by William Langland. While this use of his text may have shocked Langland into a more conservative revision of the work, it was not inappropriate. The issues of social responsibility among the "estates," and of the failure of the religious to practice what they preach, were central to his work.

Piers refers disparagingly to those who recite ballads of Robin Hood, and this is the period of Robin Hood ballads, which, despite Langland's dismissal of them, are closely linked to the themes of Piers Plowman. The earliest stories of Robin Hood make him a representative of the yeoman class, the lower gentry, who, like the peasants, had grievances against the powerful, including the "lords" of religion. It is interesting that in our earliest known Robin Hood story, it is the Abbot of St. Mary's Abbey in York who is the principal villain; it is Robin, not the abbot, who proves to be the "true" Christian, practicing the virtue of charity and honouring St. Mary Magdalene, patron saint of the lowly.

This is also the period of calls for religious and social reform under John Wyclif, and his followers, the Lollards, raised another revolt in the early fifteenth century, seeking the violent overthrow of Henry IV. They were violently suppressed, outlawed and driven underground, but survived and continued to be a voice for reform until the period of the Protestant Reformation.

In this course, we will consider some of the literature produced by dissenting voices in late medieval England, including the letters of John Ball, the writings of the Lollards, works of anti-clerical satire, Langland's Piers Plowman and other "Piers" works which it inspired in subsequent generations, and various of the earliest tales of Robin Hood. Issues of social criticism and difference, of heresy and rebellion, of tolerance and intolerance will be considered within the literature and history of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England.

Literary Themes: On Violence

This course will provide an opportunity to compare philosophical, sociocultural, and literary conceptions of violence in order to evaluate how each portrays the interrelations between subject formation, witnessing, complicity, and resistance. The general aim is to introduce methods of critical discourse analysis (with an emphasis on modes of figuration) while familiarizing ourselves with the interdisciplinary intellectual histories that inform recent topics in literary and cultural studies. This term, we will begin in the 19th century with the master-slave dialectic from G.W.F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit as well as selections from his Philosophy of Right (week 1). Georges Sorel’s syndicalist theory of the state and revolution will prepare us for a close reading of Walter Benjamin’s grafting of Marxism onto Jewish Messianism in “The Critique of Violence,” which revises Sorelian figures (week 2). A close friend of Benjamin, Hannah Arendt shared his inclination to rethink the narrative form of historical writing as evinced in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which configures the histories of anti-Semitism and imperialism with the modes of persecution and terror deployed by the Third Reich and the USSR (weeks 3-5). Having reviewed Arendt’s prescient yet contested theses about imperialism from The Origins, we will subsequently look at Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (week 5) in order to reflect on the case for violence that contravenes against colonial and racist structures of domination. Following our evaluation of selected writings and lectures on governmentality, security, and biopower by Michel Foucault (weeks 6-7), Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (week 8) will bridge our reading of Arendt with both Foucault and Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, a collection of essays that draws on Agamben among others as she targets both the covert and explicit forms of violence that states have mobilized in the course of pursuing the so-called “war on terror” (week 9). Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (week 10) and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (week 11) will serve as departure points for our reflections on the power dynamics at stake in witnessing war and atrocities at different levels of proximity. The course will conclude with Talal Asad’s On Suicide Bombing (week 12) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (week 13), which will provide occasions to mark the 10th year anniversary of September 11th. Ultimately, then, Coetzee’s and DeLillo’s novels will also give us opportunities to reassess the explanatory value of the theories we have read up until this point as we explore examples of literature’s capacity to bear witness to cataclysmic histories and events.

starting off on the wrong foot

Today marks the beginning of my second term in Edmonton. It's been snowing nonstop for the past three days and it's hard to say when I'll begin biking again (residential streets are not a priority for snow plows). It looks like I'll be doing plenty of walking, so it's a good thing I found my old winter boots. Here's how my upcoming semester looks:

Shakespeare and the Commons
This graduate seminar in the Shakespearean drama takes up the challenge of much contemporary legal theorizing of the common, which urges a turning-back to the early modern period for reclamation of ideas and practices displaced by the rise of capitalism. Its principal premise is that one way to understand what early modernity might offer to a contemporary politics of the common is to turn back to one of the most important writers of the early modern period and investigate the various constructions of the common and the commons in his work. To study the various expressions of the common in Shakespeare is herefore to ask (with a specific writer as test-case) how literature contributes to the common, and thus to contribute to a theory of literature (if only by theorizing one of the things that it does). The course’s second premise is that we can only achieve this, in Shakespeare’s case, by bringing historical conceptions of the common and the commons to bear, and so the enterprise demands historical enquiry. We will therefore read, in addition to select plays by Shakespeare including Henry VI Part II, Timon of Athens, and King Lear, some early modern case material, the text of key early modern laws, and excerpts from debates in the Elizabethan and Jacobean House of Commons. Some of our readings will be philosophical, some legal, but the emphasis will fall on our inquiry into the Shakespearean theatre as a forum for a practice of communing, for it is only by understanding the Shakespearean theatre as a historical practice of the ‘common’ that we help the early modern irrupt into and shape what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call ‘altermodernity.’ Depending on student interest, we could build towards a study of contemporary constructions of the ‘creative commons’ in order to consider how we might, with our investigation of Shakespeare’s engagements with the ‘common,’ revise standard constructions of Shakespearean authorship (which continue to be bourgeois, Romantic, and Lockean).

Introduction to Cultural Theory
The primary aim of this course is to give graduate students in English an opportunity to focus on the complex relationships that exist between forms of power, the constitution of knowledge, and the activity of contemporary criticism. By working through the ideas and concepts deployed in a number of influential essays in cultural theory, the goal is to enhance students' critical vocabularies and to challenge the 'commonsense' of contemporary theory in an effort to help students develop new insights into their own projects and fields of interests. With respect to the study of culture, what can we do with the theoretical concepts and approaches we have inherited? What relevance do these have to contemporary circumstances and situations? What are the connections that we have identified between knowledge and power? And how do we imagine that criticism intervenes in this relationship to interrupt regimes of knowledge/power in order to create new ways of thinking, knowing, acting, and feeling? These are the kinds of macro-questions that will guide us as we work through key concepts in cultural theory across seven areas: culture, power, ideology, scale and space, time and history, subjectivity and collectivity.
 
 Aesthetics and Politics of Literary Reading
What it means to read a literary text has become a highly contested question. Are our readings determined by our cultural position, or are they an outcome of the power of literary language and our experience as readers? Stanley Fish argues that understanding is constrained by the institution we fi nd ourselves in. Interpreters “are situated in that institution, their interpretive activities are not free, but what constrains them are the understood practices and assumptions of the institution and not the rules and fixed meanings of a language system” (Is There a Text 306). Fish goes on to argue that, for this reason, an interpretation is always to hand. Reading literature does not involve puzzling out its meaning: “sentences emerge only in situations, and within those situations, the normative meaning of an utterance will always be obvious or at least accessible” (307). This representive view is open to challenge: according to Martha Nussbaum “good literature is disturbing in a way that history and social science writing frequently are not. Because it summons powerful emotions, it disconcerts and puzzles” (Poetic Justice 5). The reader who “is not at risk,” says Howard Brodkey, “is not reading.”
While these contrasting approaches also have much to say about the role of criticism and theory, and the institutional practices of English as a discipline over the last 150 years, in this course we will primarily be concerned with their implications for reading. We will interrogate historical and current practices of reading in their light. We will also compare them with a third possibility, that of investigating actual readers, a focus that has so far received little attention and has been actively discouraged by some authorities. Jonathan Culler, for example warned of “the dangers of an experimental or socio-psychological approach which would take too seriously the actual and doubtless idiosyncratic performance of individual readers” (Structuralist Poetics 258). But are readers really idiosyncratic? What do empirical studies show occurring during literary reading? First we will review the history of formalist accounts of reading, from Kant and Coleridge, through the Russian Formalists, to the Lancaster school of stylistics (Geoffrey Leech, Mike Short, Willie Van Peer) and the cognitive poetics of Reuven Tsur. Second we will look at some of the standard theoretical accounts of the reading process, contrasting the aesthetic approaches of Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser with the constructivist views of Stanley Fish, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Siegfried Schmidt. We will go on to look at empirical studies of literary reading, beginning with studies of historical readers by Richard Altick and Jonathan Rose, then examine several typical modern studies of readers, including a critical review of the methods used to study actual readers and the different levels at which response to literary features has been studied, from phonetic to narrative.

the university as solution

In a recent interview, Slavoj Zizek briefly describes the task of modern university:

What universities should do is not serve as experts to those in power who define the problems. We should redefine and question the problems themselves. Is this the right perception of the problem? Is this really the problem? We should ask much more fundamental questions.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what isn't happening at most Canadian universities, especially at the University of Alberta. An interview with U of A's president, Indira Samarasekera, in the September issue of the Walrus demonstrates again and again the way in which the Conservative government has based funding on the university's ability to fix the problems of the day and illustrates how the university is becoming more and more like an extension of the market.

U of A is Canada’s leading oil sands research and teaching centre. The method for the first commercially viable extraction process was invented here in the 1920s by Karl Clark, whose basic technology and engineering principles are still in use. The industry’s presence on campus today is most visible at the nine-storey Markin/CNRL Natural Resources Engineering Facility, with its state-of-the-art smart classrooms and specialized instructional and research labs; and at two institutes, the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation and the Oil Sands Tailing Research Facility, which house research chairs dedicated to bitumen and heavy oil development. Even the university’s interdisciplinary School of Energy and the Environment lists oil sands development as a primary field of research, followed by improved recovery, which is also about oil sands (alternative energy and energy and environment are listed as sixth and seventh, respectively). “As a publicly funded institution, we have a responsibility to enhance the public stewardship of important resources,” says Samarasekera. “Whether we like it or not, the world is still dependent on oil and gas, and until we get weaned off them we need them extracted with a much, much higher degree of environmental responsibility. I’m proud of our association with the environmental elements of oil sands work. That for us is a huge reputation booster.”

différance revisited

My first of fourteen graduate seminars on the ethical and political thought of Jacques Derrida begins with an effort to situate our upcoming readings in the context of post-structuralism. Today we made recourse to "Différance," that seminal lecture given before La Société française de philosophie in 1968, as a taste of Derrida's engagement with the philosophical tradition. Our next (introductory) class will focus another pair of major essays, each of which highlight a crucial move in Derrida's thought: performativity in "Signature Event Context," and textual analysis in "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy."

At the outset, I'm relieved that we have an agenda, and that we can be up front about it; that is, we are reading Derrida after the so-called "ethical turn" in cultural theory with the assumption that Derrida has always been in engaged in questions of an ethical and political nature; furthermore, that we are doing theory in the academy, a context in which Derrida's ideas (and guiding "concepts") are simultaneously muted and omnipresent, most often presented as ahistorical givens. In other words, Derrida is an emblem for many impulses and there's no getting around it.

Many such impulses can be located in Derrida's essay on différance. I first read this essay in an undergraduate course on postmodern philosophy and I'm glad to have this chance to reread it four years later. Indeed, one of the best things about reading Derrida is the fact that his texts are so multivalent, so thick, that one always sees something new and exciting upon a rereading. In the course of this exercise, a number of significant moves (many of which were highlighted in our class) emerged that had previously eluded me (perhaps this had something to do with the fact that I was in my second year, and was only beginning to "get it"). The rest of this post is an attempt to highlight several of these instances.

In this essay, each of Derrida's interlocutors acts as a precursor to differance; in their respective work philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas have anticipated Derrida's argument. Derrida is effectively picking up on certain ruptures in the Western tradition in order to justify his own tendencies, to make good on their promises, to carry forward what has already begun. For example, Derrida draws on Nietzche's indifference to difference (exemplified in the eternal recurrence of the same) and Freud's language of the unconscious refers to deferral and delay (a temporality invoked by differance); differance also picks up on Heidegger's distinctions between Being (Dasein) and being and between presence and the present, as well as Levinas' interest in radical alterity and Saussure's construal of language as a differential system of negatively related terms.

But within this towering tradition of serious (and intimidating) intellectual work, Derrida is quick to point out the importance of "play." Misreadings of Derrida tend to emphasize the anarchy implicit in this concept, but it is far more multivalent than often gets suggested: it is a performance, it is imaginative, joyful, but it also suggests the movement, the shakiness, the potential for disturbance, that one finds in a loose bolt.

Those familiar with Derrida's critique of phonocentrism and logocentrism will recognise that the graphic importance of the "a" in differance demonstrates that signification (whether in speech or in writing) is never present to itself. Indeed, one sees this worked out through many of Derrida's writings. It is the nature of writing (and the nature of the academic institution) to make differance present; or, to put it slightly differently, it is always an outcome of our scholarly context that differance is turned into a concept, a method, or a potential application (however, one sees this most often with regard to deconstruction). Thus, part of Derrida's strategy throughout his career is to continuously displace differance with new terms (such as pharmakos, spectrality, etc.) to frustrate this constant sedimentation.

Another somewhat obvious (but no less crucial) element in "Differance" is Derrida's occasional gesture towards a negative politics. Differance

governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority. It is not announced by any capital letter. Not only is there no kingdom of differance, but differance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom. (Margins of Philosophy, 22)

In much the same way Derrida describes the "a" of differance as an Egyptian Pyramid: "This stone -- provided that no one knows how to decipher its inscription -- is not far from announcing the death of the tyrant" (4). This abdication of mastery is offset by a closing affirmation ("in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance"), but the politics of differance are clearly premised on a certain kind of violence done from inside the text, and from the inside of Derrida's inherited tradition. As we move further into Derrida's more overtly political work, I'm expecting that questions of violence and responsibility will be at the forefront of our engagement.

canons, texts and contexts

My first full week in Edmonton ends with uneasy anticipation of the next: the beginning of classes. There have been plenty of distractions. As usual, my apartment continues to evolve with occasional additions from the alley, and last night I watched the brilliant but uneven Harry Brown, which stars Michael Caine as a recent widower (and former marine) whose burnout London housing estate is becoming overrun with violence and drug-trafficking. A familiar story (very similar to that of Gran Torino) but told in the most uncomfortable, effective way. The direction achieves the level of estrangement necessary to make Harry Brown feel important and timely without resorting to race, poverty or any of the other usual outlets for easy moralizing (unsurprisingly, the only thing American film critics could appreciate about this film was Michael Caine's performance).

I've appreciated having some time to settle in to my new place, but it's hard to contain my excitement for the coming week. Here's what I'm up against:

Milton and Print Culture

John Milton – canonized poet of the high literary tradition invented in the centuries after the seventeenth – came out fighting in the pamphlet wars of the 1640s. In works like Areopagitica, Milton self-consciously located his own writing and publication within the fervid print culture of civil war London. In other words, while Milton’s literary friends and allies certainly included the likes of Virgil and Dante, his nearer neighbours in print (especially in the 1640s) included petitioning apprentices and a host of writers of cheap pamphlets.

Derrida Engaged

Derrida’s later career is often described as an emphatic turn away from idealism and abstraction and towards issues of more immediate worldly concern. However, Derrida himself questions this characterization, and one point of this seminar will be to investigate ways in which this “engaged” Derrida has always been at work—even in those less overtly politicized moments of his deconstructive program. Texts up for discussion will include Margins of Philosophy (1982), Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International (1994),  Of Hospitality (2000), On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001), Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005), and The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008).

Empire and Travel in Literary History

This course studies the relation between English (British, European) expansion and travel and the meeting of cultures. It will discuss the relations among English (British, Europeans) and local peoples, Africans and Native Americans and will examine questions of race, gender and class as well as culture more generally. This is a focused survey of works of travel that have mainly to do with questions of politics, religion, identity and/or expansion in the context of literary representation and will show that, from the Middle Ages to the present, travel (including the motifs of pilgrimage, journey, expansion colonization) has long been a concern in English or European literature and culture.

from Winnipeg to Edmonton

I've relocated. I now live in a city with as many people as the province of Manitoba, a city with bike paths and an LRT, a city with an NHL franchise, a city whose streets are actually based on a numbered grid. It's hard to resist comparing Edmonton with Winnipeg, and I've been doing it constantly since arriving here a few days ago. And as a Mennonite from southern Manitoba, I admit I feel a bit uncomfortable with the amount of money that gets thrown around here. Then again, I don't miss Winnipeg's potholes.

In last weekend's Calgary Herald, there was a rather unfortunate article that assigned several of Canada's major cities with a corresponding superhero. It provided me with a helpful introduction to Calgarian arrogance. I'm not going to pretend that I've always dreamed about living in Edmonton, but if you've read "Civil War," you know better than to trust Iron Man. Judging from these descriptions I've ended up in the right place:

Calgary (Iron Man). Amoral economic heavyweight by day, party animal by night who happens to possess the power of flight and a reasonably good sense of humour. Also a slight crack problem.

Edmonton (Whiplash). Intellectual, Eastern European, sensitive, emotionally damaged northern city whose primary obsession is getting revenge on Iron Man for all of it by hogging all the available federal money to help pay for its contemporary art museum.

We visited the museum last week. It was a bit of a letdown. Winnipeg also gets a mention on this list, and its description shows that this writer clearly doesn't know anything about superheroes or recycling.

Winnipeg (Optimus Prime). Good-guy Transformer whose best days lay behind him. Started out a hero, but these days, lumbers around like a big old broken robot short of WD-40. (This is the toy you keep begging your kid to toss).

a note on what i'm doing

A week of tough decisions. I've decided to go to Edmonton, Alberta this fall to do an MA in English at the University of Alberta. In the process I've had to reject offers from the University of Victoria and the University of Ottawa; both have strong programs and attractive locations with high price tags attached to them. The rationale for my choice certainly had to do with funding and living expenses, but I'm not just choosing UA because it has the deepest pockets. It has a significant collection of rare books (not to mention the second largest collection in Canada), some of which will be of considerable use for my work on John Milton and early modern literature more generally. In addition to more traditional literature courses (one on Shakespeare and the commons, another on travel literature from Chaucer through Jonathan Swift and more recent postcolonial poets), I plan on taking a course on Derrida's later work, a course on "The Politics and Aesthetics of Literary Reading," and (hopefully) course on cultural theory with Imre Szeman, who studied under the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson at Duke.

Initially, I intended to focus on the concept of authority in Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained with attention to its manifestations in theology, politics and the literary/poetic tradition as Milton saw it. If this seems vague and overly broad that's because it is. Writing a statement of purpose for applications can feel incredibly arbitrary. I tried to touch all the bases with mine, even throwing in a few words on the "death of the author." Although, I may not in fact write a thesis, I think this idea will become more grounded as time passes. From the start, I knew that I wanted to tie this in with the Protestant emphasis on the the centrality of the Word and consider how Milton's pair of epic poems construe reading, faith and reason.