...not sure what just happened

Results matter.

It's overrotten.

Rather like our recent discussions on faith, what it does when left out.

That is, the discussion itself. I found myself supporting science like never before. I wanted lists; sick of reading Freud's Uncanny, indeed for the third time. I've tamed that particular notion; not to say I've effected it. Nor did Freud. I will do it someday perhaps--perform it--bring it out--but for now I must recognized that things that appear strange and creep us out because they are too familiar is one thing, and another might be interpreting the recurring banality and poeticizing it; finally we arrive somewhere--because we've been flung--near the banality of evil. If they each seem uncanny to me now it's because I've used them somehow, incorporated them. As in the notion has rather a stale taste; the rest is literary criticism, as he and every honest critic and professor has acknowledged. It's because it's an aesthetic phenomena, as he says in his first line: his science is with good conscience drawn from experience and literature; though it's empiricism, interactions among subjectivities, roles being played.

Regardless of the comments qualifying all this, and even if we know Freud's usual or later method...

I want him to stop talking and tell me what's happening. I'm sick of reading this essay: it has introduced two Lit courses and appeared early in Literary Criticism. English majors know that rereading is at the heart of the enterprise; no matter that I nearly had Frankenstein in three classes as well, but the prof herself was weary of teaching it--of course this is the prof now teaching the Uncanny again. No matter, it's just an essay. Scarcely a burden for the seasoned critical reader. But there is less work to be done in the domain of pulling out the latent and curiously schemetized--as in, supposedly before the critic gets a hold of it, this unconscious material is practically in three parts already.

So it goes, so we have been bred to expect; I cannot hide this anymore--I hold traditional theory in contempt, I am sick of its motifs--I see them everywhere in every class (except Paul Bruss's no doubt). Perhaps it's how they're presented to me. I suspect of course it is they themselves which deserve not mere repudiation but--parody. Which in theory is quite nice to the original source, there is a respect at the bottom of the meanest parodies, we all know. But I cannot jump from that and say I do not treat it as the original source, I see no center, nothing transcendental; no immanent justification or even first tenet--this is all so plainly abolished as to make me truly dizzy when I descend to my own immortal soul--I have retained the imagination to make the emptiness quite liveable. Of course I'm just as alienated as any intellectual--let's say for the moment that I'm that. But it's not getting any better. The Lit program is simply pestering me with old ideas that always seem at first new, while the series of syllabi undercut this. Academia's outside ties--stubborn purse strings--keep each class guided by the pressures to write theoretically...as peculiarly 'knowing' authorities.

It usually appears as putting the literary text on trial; we've heard this phrase since Sontag at least. Other instances (like on Emu's sixth floor English) though constrained by limited outside expectations, only appear to the student (if that student's me) as...a sentence that simply fell off.