I received the following note from Marion Morrison, who is an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa. It was written in response to my entry a few days ago concerning H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. I'm extremely grateful to Professor Morrison for taking the time to comment on my observations.
"Dear Dr. Metablog:
I detect the subtextual presence of mutually imbricated and conterminous forces in your multichronotopic problematizing of King Solomon's Minds. The indigenous woman, Foulani, living in a no (wo)man's land where the colonialist gaze dissects racialized gendering, foregrounds the elusive intersectionalities present in the semiological narratology of deconstructive post-structuralism. It is only by scrutinizing the poetics of diasporic displacement that we can contest the epiphenomenological echo of (hetero)masculinist discourse from a gendered perspective, which, if I understand your insufficiently theorized analysis, you have vainly tried to do. Such (re)mapping of knowledge, even when employing a single-axis feminist theory, unpacks syncretism and hybridity and at the same time denaturalizes doxa rooted in phallocentric epistemologies. But, you ask, what about the reproduction of alterity through a highly policed matrix of conceptual checkpoints? The answer is simple: any binarist recontextualizing across multiple terrains adds a metadiscursive dimension to the polysemic site and leads to aporias of nationalist cartographies of knowledge, as is crystal clear in the case of Rider Haggard. Without otherizing the conceptual spaces opened up by postcolonial hybridity, hermeneutical nihilism would dismantle palimpsestic textuality -- and you know what that might lead to. A meta-analysis of King Solomon's Wives -- a textual situation in which there are multiple hegominid discourses as well as the potential for co-implicatedness -- could rupture various subaltern geographic positionalities (but only in a translinguistic sense).
As I'm sure you understand, these comments are written under the sign of the plural."
January 10. Today I received another communication from Professor Morrison. It's a bit angry, so I won't quote it all, but here are the relevant sentences.
"Dear Dr. Metablog, or Vivian, or whatever you call yourself:
When you typed my comments into your blog, you clumsily erred. I certainly did not write "hermeneutical nihilism would dismantle palimpsestic textuality"; it's obvious that I wrote "hermeneutical nihilism would not dismantle palimpsestic textuality." Leaving out the "not" makes a mockery of my argument and renders it virtually unintelligible. You owe me and your readers an apology."
Yours,
Marion Morrison, Ph. D."
Gosh, Professor Morrison. My bad. I don't know what I could have been thinking.
Dear Viv: You made that up.
Posted by: Kerry | January 24, 2007 at 09:39 AM
Oh! Now, it all makes sense.
Posted by: Lisa | January 20, 2007 at 08:31 PM
Shame on you, Dr. Metablog. Or whatever your name is.
Posted by: David Schacker | January 10, 2007 at 10:47 AM