From a literary perspective, the move from producing morphing e-texts to staging Beckett in a New Orleans neighborhood left for dead makes complete sense. In both instances, there's a savvy literalism at work. A literalism that doesn't function, as some critics have argued, by nihilistically destroying meaning; rather, this literalism insists that although we ordinarily overlook meaning's material supports,it's senseless, and ultimately impossible, to remain always blind to the ecosystems in which meanings are enacted.
As I argue in "Senseless Resistances," the manuscript on which I'm presently working, the material resistances in the composition and the systems with which it comes into contact impede communication, generate affect, and catalyze the cognitive work required to bring the composition to life as a significant entity.
To those who would claim that such a materialist approach to literature and art is formalist, I would agree. To those who would claim that formalist approaches are inherently apolitical, I'd point to Beckett's involvement in the French Resistance or Chan's antiwar activism. Chan makes a distinction between politics (collaborative and goal specific) and art (individually produced, resistant to instrumentalized uses) that is worth retaining, if only to remind us that our lives are multi-faceted and engaging in one activity doesn't preclude another.
On a side note: Glad to see Paul rockin' the Nebraska cap, particularly after my beloved Huskers experienced such an awful football season. (The University of Nebraska Press continues to release quality books in literary studies, e.g., Nicholas Spencer's After Utopia and Marco Abel's Violent Affect, both of whom are
faculty members in UNL's English Department. If only they'd publish them in paperback.)
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