total horseshit
recent posts
Stiffing day-laborers. Does it get any lower? Je...
The hubris. I worked out at the gym on campus thi...
Yeah, I know meat is murder, but what are you goin...
Halloween was a night of pizza delivery horrors. ...
I've concluded that this is a hoax, or, well, a sa...
Heard an interview with the mastermind behind Poly...
I biked over to campus this afternoon. I've never...
Forgot to shut a window in my apartment last night...
archives
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Humanist Fallacy #10 :: Junket Critics
Just as any studio or marketing firm can find some disembodied critic to rave about its half-witted low-brow comedy, and as some jabbering moron on the radio can dig up a neocon think tank somewhere to justify the latest retrogressive economic policy or donor kickback from the Bush administration, there is a literary critic or theorist to back up any cockamamie interpretation you wish to make of a text. Junket citation. Here's a specific example:
According to Maggie Kilgour, feeding from (or eating with) the Other is a perilous involvement which carries the risk of being eaten by the Other.
To eat in a country is potentially to be eaten by it, to enter into a false identification by being absorbed by a foreign culture--what we call "going native"--and so be prevented from returning to a place of origin in which one is truly at home. The opposite of returning to one's own hearth is ultimately to be subsumed totally by a hostile host. (23)
Shylock's reluctance to eat with the Christians displays the fear of "be[ing] subsumed... by a hostile today," but in terms that ratify the reciprocal Christian fear of being consumed by a guest/alien who has been allowed into the home/country.
-- Kim Hall, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice
Just as any studio or marketing firm can find some disembodied critic to rave about its half-witted low-brow comedy, and as some jabbering moron on the radio can dig up a neocon think tank somewhere to justify the latest retrogressive economic policy or donor kickback from the Bush administration, there is a literary critic or theorist to back up any cockamamie interpretation you wish to make of a text. Junket citation. Here's a specific example:
According to Maggie Kilgour, feeding from (or eating with) the Other is a perilous involvement which carries the risk of being eaten by the Other.
To eat in a country is potentially to be eaten by it, to enter into a false identification by being absorbed by a foreign culture--what we call "going native"--and so be prevented from returning to a place of origin in which one is truly at home. The opposite of returning to one's own hearth is ultimately to be subsumed totally by a hostile host. (23)
Shylock's reluctance to eat with the Christians displays the fear of "be[ing] subsumed... by a hostile today," but in terms that ratify the reciprocal Christian fear of being consumed by a guest/alien who has been allowed into the home/country.
-- Kim Hall, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice
