Ralph Ellison's Endless Revisions

Ralph Ellison's failure to publish a finished follow-up novel to Invisible Man during his lifetime has baffled critics and scholars of American literature. While a posthumous text, larger than Juneteenth, is imminent, the scholars who edited Ellison's volumes of writing into the forthcoming book to be published by the Modern Library suggest that Ellison's embrace of word-processing technology led Ellison to revise, repeatedly, already well-crafted sentences. Anyone fascinated as I am about how how technologies, particular the digital computer, alter the way we think and write will want to read The Invisible Manuscript, which contains something of a cautionary tale about writing with word-processing software: Computers make it easier to rework your writing, yes. But avoid the temptation to revise pepetually. Writers, particularly those with perfectionist tendencies, can get lost in syntactic detail and lose track of the larger project.

Aesthetic Ideology: The Politics of Language

Leading neocons exress despair at the Bush Administration's incompetence in Neo Culpa: Politics & Power.

As a literary critic with a keen interest in the relationship between affect and meaning, I'm intrigued by the implicit understanding of how language works in this quote by David Frum:

"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

Notice how Frum avoids talking about trying to convince Bush to believe in a particular position. Instead of referring to reasons and arguments, he imagines a sort of understanding via osmosis. In this fantasy, ideas are objectified as the foundational substance of words, and these ideas, once spoken, get absorbed by the body, like lotion. Indeed, it's not even clear that "understanding" is the right term here, since Frum talks about a feeling - a committed feeling - towards ideas rather than a belief in them.

Thank you, Mr. Frum, for providing a textbook example of how a neo-Platonic, logocentric model of language can prove to be disastrous.