Tuesday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion | Clarissa's Blog
"I'm sanitizing my syllabi all the time because of how damn sensitive everybody is."
Do you find that you use the term, "sensitive" differently from how everyone else does? I've always felt that not only my use of this term, but my preferences for mapping it are rather different from how people would do so if actually brought within advanced Western culture. I realize there are pejorative and more applausive connotations relating to this term, generally.
I also have a somewhat different mapping of the word, "emotional", since I would not always use it pejoratively, although the tendency seems to be to relegate it to a negative meaning.
I think, generally, what I have noticed about the Western psyche is a certain fragility, concerning which Elliot Roger and others like him express only a more extreme quality. People become alarmed very quickly by something that is outside of their range of understanding or experience. They seem to fear moral contamination.
I find it rather strange, because even many university profs are somewhat infected by this fear of the unknown. You have to be able to persist with a strange, text, maybe over a very long duration, to find what it in it and what it is trying to say. If you throw it away from you, for fear of moral contamination, you will at best get a limited interpretation. You will slot the book into a predesignated paradigm rather than allowing it to speak for itself, which is much harder.
For instance, take the two extracts I have posted here about the eruption of madness.
http://musteryou.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/the-rebellious-memoir-dambudzo-marechera-versus-elliot-rodger/
Now, I think the normal Western reader would be "sensitive" as it were to Elliot's pain, because they can understand what he is saying and also feel his brittleness. The may not like him, even, but he has made clear the nature and origins of his pains as being, from his point of view, very clearly social in origin. Physical size is an issue of social normativity and social comparison.
Marechera's writing, however, would not speak to the average sensitive reader, as it takes a lot of processing. Even for me at times, his writing can seem to ooze moral contamination. One has to persist with it and get beyond one's initial reaction against the intensity of the writings. The brittle mentality of one who feels pain as being fundamentally social in origin will not tolerate for long words that seem to ooze like blood from the page.
When one recoils against taking in a whole and thorough sense of the text, is it a case of the reader having too much sensitivity or not enough? Marechera's may be experienced as "emotional" writing, whereas Elliot's writing is brittle and calm.
Marechera's writing, however, is artistic and he was not a deadly psychopath.
"I'm sanitizing my syllabi all the time because of how damn sensitive everybody is."
Do you find that you use the term, "sensitive" differently from how everyone else does? I've always felt that not only my use of this term, but my preferences for mapping it are rather different from how people would do so if actually brought within advanced Western culture. I realize there are pejorative and more applausive connotations relating to this term, generally.
I also have a somewhat different mapping of the word, "emotional", since I would not always use it pejoratively, although the tendency seems to be to relegate it to a negative meaning.
I think, generally, what I have noticed about the Western psyche is a certain fragility, concerning which Elliot Roger and others like him express only a more extreme quality. People become alarmed very quickly by something that is outside of their range of understanding or experience. They seem to fear moral contamination.
I find it rather strange, because even many university profs are somewhat infected by this fear of the unknown. You have to be able to persist with a strange, text, maybe over a very long duration, to find what it in it and what it is trying to say. If you throw it away from you, for fear of moral contamination, you will at best get a limited interpretation. You will slot the book into a predesignated paradigm rather than allowing it to speak for itself, which is much harder.
For instance, take the two extracts I have posted here about the eruption of madness.
http://musteryou.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/the-rebellious-memoir-dambudzo-marechera-versus-elliot-rodger/
Now, I think the normal Western reader would be "sensitive" as it were to Elliot's pain, because they can understand what he is saying and also feel his brittleness. The may not like him, even, but he has made clear the nature and origins of his pains as being, from his point of view, very clearly social in origin. Physical size is an issue of social normativity and social comparison.
Marechera's writing, however, would not speak to the average sensitive reader, as it takes a lot of processing. Even for me at times, his writing can seem to ooze moral contamination. One has to persist with it and get beyond one's initial reaction against the intensity of the writings. The brittle mentality of one who feels pain as being fundamentally social in origin will not tolerate for long words that seem to ooze like blood from the page.
When one recoils against taking in a whole and thorough sense of the text, is it a case of the reader having too much sensitivity or not enough? Marechera's may be experienced as "emotional" writing, whereas Elliot's writing is brittle and calm.
Marechera's writing, however, is artistic and he was not a deadly psychopath.
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