News The Morning News
posted by on June 14 at 9:33 AM
posted by news intern Chris Kissel
Oil be back: Saudis plan to export more oil in order to combat high prices.
Breaking the news: Tim Russert was “the preeminent political journalist of his generation.”
Arrested development: Zimbabwean government detains opposition party members again.
Waterlogged: Midwestern floods could take serious toll on economy.
Jailbreak: Detained Taliban fighters escape from a jail in Kandahar.
Cooperating: Bush kicks it with the Pope.
Not cooperating: Iraqi leaders, U.S. government hit an impasse.
Martians chronicled: Phoenix lander collects some serious particles.
Hulk beware: Scientists scan boats in Puget Sound for gamma rays.
Trashed: Homeless advocates say City’s decision to throw away personal belongings found during park sweeps is legally unsound.
Fresh faces: College students whose parents never got degrees struggle to make it to the finish.
Now, back to my homework:
From “Imprisoned Narrative? Or Lies, Secrets, and Silence in New Mexico Women’s Autobiography,” by Genaro Padilla. Criticism in the Borderlands, Calderón, Héctor and José David Saldívar, eds. Duke University Press, 1991.
What happens when the autobiographic impulse finds its self-constitutive means undermined by the very discursive practices that make autobiographic textualization possible? What happens when an individual finds herself in a situation where memory is encouraged to imprint itself upon the page, but only in a language and idiom of cultural otherness that mark its boundaries of permissible autobiographic utterance? Given the discursive domination to which the subordinate cultural self must make supplication if it wishes to survive in any form, the imprinted self is likely to be a representation that discloses intense cultural self-deceit, political fear, and masked and self-divided identity. The “I” is made alien to itself, existing as it does deeply embedded in a discursive world outside of its own making or control.
That paper "Imprisoned Narrative" must be an incredibly boring read. Why do people write academic papers in such a stilted, purposefully opaque style? And when they do, why do journals publish them?
They write that way so they can keep their jobs, which are controlled by people even more useless and intellectually constipated than themselves.
In other news: they got to earth but it was already nuked. We still don't know who the last one is. That is all.
gutierrez y muweezy.
"Oil Be Back" is fucking funny. Good one!
YOU SON OF A BITCH! Welcome to my hell. I'm a socio-cultural anthropology major at UW and my academic life consists of reading shit like that. It's truly hideous. Postmodernism and Foucault has taken over the social sciences and this is what we are left with.
If you want to create your own Postmodern essay, here's a free generator:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
@3: and it gave me faith in RDM and Co. again. That episode was totes l33t.
If you're going to post shit like that discursive crap, warn me. My finals were over and I want to pretend language like that is not a key part of getting an English major for at least three months. The saddest part for me was when I almost understood it without trying.
And is that the Lacanian "I"?
May I offer this edit, for clarity and style:
What happens when an autobiography becomes undermined by the dominant discursive reasoning? What happens when an author’s memory is encouraged to imprint itself upon the page, but is limited to the language and idiom of a culture that has never truly represented her, as her culture is a subordinate Other? She must supplicate herself if her story is to survive. Deformed, her story will now betray her, disclosing the intense cultural self-deceit, political fear, and a masked and self-divided identity of someone constrained by a dominant and culturally limited logic. The autobiographical “I” is made alien to itself, confined and encoded in a discursive world outside of her own making or control.
(PS: I am a New Mexican woman.)
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