Charles Bernstein
Jerome McGann on Close Listening
Jerome McGann
Appearing on Close Listening with Charles Bernstein
Kelly Writers House, April 4, 2011
Program One: Reading
McGann reads from Are the Humanities Inconsequent? Interpreting Marx's Riddle of the Dog (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009). McGann subjects current literary studies to a patacritical investigation. The investigation centers in the interpretation of a riddle of Marx, Groucho that is: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Working by indirection and from multiple points of view, McGann argues that aesthetics is always a science of exceptions, and that any given critical practice is also always an exception from itself.
• complete reading (27:18):MP3
Program Two: Conversation
McGann talks to Charles Bernstein about the continuing importance of Blake and the Pre-Raphaelits, about poetry as a form of knowledge, about the disease of Romantic Ideology with special reference to Byron and Wordsworth, and about the textual condition in new and old media, with special to the inevitably of multiple variants of any work.
•complete conversation (59:08) MP3
More McGann on PennSound:
Reading selected poems by Edgar Allan Poe, recorded in Charlottesville, VA, February 2011
The recordings here.
Additional reading:
Bernstein, "McGann Agonist" (collected in Attack of the Difficult Poems)
"Radiant Textuality"
"Texts in N-Dimensions and Interpretation in a New Key" (pdf of essay)
"Marking Texts in Many Dimensions"
Rossetti archive
Patacriticism: the web site
The Drucker/McGann "Ivanhoe Game"
Deformance essay: public version
The Point Is to Change It (cover picture above)
Feedburner RSS FEED