ENGL 639:
Reaching toward the Ineffable--
The Aesthetics and Politics of Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison
Language can never live
up to life, once and for all. Nor
should it. Language can never pin down
slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it
yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so.
Its force--its felicity--is in its reach toward the ineffable. [...] Unmolested language surges toward
knowledge, not its destruction. [...]
Word work is sublime, because it is generative. It makes meaning that secures our difference, our human
difference, the way in which we are
like no other life.
We die. That may be the
meaning of life. But we do
language. That may be the measure
of our lives.
Once upon a time ...
Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture
image
credit: http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/tonibio.htm photo of Woolf
by Gisele Freund
Instructor: Moira P. Baker Office: 406 young hall Phone: 831-5352 (Office) 731-4104 (Home) email: mpbaker@radford.edu |
Office hours: Mondays: 5:00-6:30 Tuesdays: 5:00-6:30 Thursdays: 2:30-3:30 Other times by
appointment |
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