Thanks for the comment first, and to put it a bit more in context I was
drawn to Shelley Jackson by some comments in Steven Shaviro's blog which
discuss Jackson's narrative as univocal in the sense given to the word
by Deleuze which I have excerpted and quoted below.
Not referring to Shelley Jackson here, but there is often something
about what is called the postmodernist novel which I find difficult to
read or get into, even if when I look at the novels I have scattered
around and under my desk, postmodernist novels seem to be a dominant
theme. I don't quite know what that may be but it may have something to
do with a cynical or ironic style or tone? I am trying to get into
reading DBC Pierre's _Ludmila's Broken English_ but cynical voices keep
putting me off. Deleuze described cynicism as a capitalist illness and I
don't think cynicism can be that easily avoided. I find a cynical tone
or style in James Flint _Habitus_ as well. So, how to portray cynicism
without irony? There is perhaps a suggestion for a solution to this
problem with Shelley Jackson?
The other comment on univocal narrative would be that of immanent
critique and here Shelley Jackson as a feminist writer has some
interesting suggestions. (For Deleuze, the univocity of Being is
capitalism. A connection with immanent critique in Kant's critique of
reason... univocity critiques univocity.)
citations from: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?m=200608
That is to say, the novel is “postmodern” in the quite literal sense
(rather than in the more prevalent extended senses of the word
“postmodern”) that it doesn’t reject these modernist distinctions, nor
take one side of them against the other, but rather subsumes them all
into itself, and speaks unresolvable multiplicities with one voice —
what Deleuze calls the “univocity” of being.
[and]
Part of the novel’s univocity is that it theorizes its own allegories
and metaphors, without these theoretical suggestions being anything like
a master key to the rest of the book — the theories are on the same
level as the narrated events and bodies and languages that they
theorize.
On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 13:05 -0500, Pierre Joris wrote:
> I've been following her work over the years & though it's not exactly
> my cup of tea (I drink more coffee) it has always been interesting &
> challenging & she has consistently tried to work at an edge where the
> medium truly gives the massage.
>
> Pierre
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