TARRELL RODNEY CAMPBELL
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Editing and Writing Services
  • My Writing
  • Blog
Picture

Author

Campbell has worked in media, publishing, and academia since 1999. During this time, he taught high school and college-level writing, edited various  publications, worked  as a freelance writer and editor, tutored students and professionals on writing techniques, and led content strategy for successful websites.

Let Us Define the Blog

6/26/2013

0 Comments

 
          In his latest blog posting, “The Blog as Literary Genre,” Kevin Eagan of Critical Margins asks, “Is the blog, in its mature form, a literary genre?” He believes, ultimately, that the blog is “a literary form or genre” and, although the blog “does more than an essay because of its playfulness, [i]n its play, it can move between personal diary entry and sophisticated essay with ease.” I agree and disagree with Kevin; but, above all I appreciate his blog’s prompt and call for a defined understanding of, and purpose for the blog, especially from one who is already a leader within our new generation of literary scholars.

Picture




Kevin Eagan
Writer, editor, blogger


          In full disclosure, I must admit that Eagan is my former university mate; our graduate tours overlapped at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. And so, it is with great pleasure and respect and seriousness that I approach Kevin’s question. First, let us address some terminology. I am a little uneasy with some of the descriptors used by Kevin. For example, what is a “mature blog?” Elsewhere in his posting, Eagan juxtaposes the seemingly untidy blog against the “tidy” novel and writes of blog postings evolving into “longer, more thoughtful articles” (italics mine). I think that using such descriptors destroy the concept of the blog and work towards confining the blog to an area where ideas of hierarchy begin to dominate and democracy begins to dissipate. To think of the blog as genre confines and destroys it; to think of the blog as literary form offers more freedom.

Picture
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
(SIUE)

          As literary form, the blog already, always exists as what it is: written poetry or prose, made from letters, of a fiction or non-fiction distinction. To start speaking of the mature blog or tidy blog or longer, thoughtful blog is to begin to make valuations in relationship to particular blogs. To make such valuations would make one a critic of blogs. And do not get me wrong, we are trained to discuss the excellence of form regarding literature and its expression and whether or not the literature expresses universal ideas and interests, but the blog should not be confined to a genre: it is a literary pharmakon, a remedy and a poison. It should remain as such!

            When it comes to the anxiety that Kevin implicitly betrays regarding the nature and role and purpose of the blog, the blog itself is both remedy and poison to his problem. The blog is problematic and somewhat poisonous to the Academy from which Kevin and our ilk spring; the blog is poisonous to the hierarchy of genres and forms so analogous to the teaching of literature from ivory towers on high. At the same time, the blog is a remedy to any and all concerns and anxieties related to and engendered by a need to categorize literature(s). It removes such concerns. As literary pharmakon, the blog’s 
‘essence’…lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no ‘proper’ characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical, physical, chemical, alchemical) of the word, a substance…It is rather the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced. (Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, 125-6)

The blog should remain our literary tabula rasa; it should be blank every time we approach it; it should be a tool of literature, but not controlled by the structural rules of existing literatures. It should always, already remain ambivalent to literature. And, its ambivalence should 

constitute the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/ body, good/ evil, inside/ outside, memory/ forgetfulness, speech/ writing, [poison/remedy].).…The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference. It is the différance of difference. It holds in reserve, in its undecided shadow and vigil, the opposites and the differends that the process of discrimination will come to carve out. Contradictions and pairs of opposites are lifted from the bottom of this diacritical, differing, deferring, reserve. (Derrida 127)

          Allow the blog its free flowing, democratic nature. To place it within a genre, to make it the generic, robs the blog of its characteristic of instantaneous, always new creation. A blog is a place where thought experiments, like this one that I am having right now, can freely take place: a place where thought experiments can take place and where the arbiters of style and syntax and grammar are not welcome…unless they are. 

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    November 2021
    August 2018
    March 2014
    July 2013
    June 2013

    Categories

    All
    20th Street
    Anglo
    Anglo Saxon Studies
    Apotheosis Of St. Louis
    Artworks
    Bashenga
    Beowulf
    Blackbelt
    Black Panther
    Blog
    Britons
    Cass Avenue
    Color
    Congress
    Corpus Christi
    Critical Margins
    D&D
    Delmar
    Dissemination
    Dominion Of New York
    DOORWAYS
    Dragons
    Dungeons
    Erik Stevens
    Explorations
    Facebook
    Feminisms
    Ferguson
    Gateway Foundation
    General Franz Sigel
    High Art
    Hypertext
    ICMS Kalamazoo
    International
    Jacques Derrida
    J.E.B. Stuart Confederate Memorial
    Jeff Vander Lou
    Jesmyn Ward
    Kehinde Wiley
    Kelly Virella
    Kevin Eagan
    Killmonger
    Literature
    Low Art
    Man On Horse
    Mary Rambaran-Olm
    Masculinisms
    Masculinist Impulses
    Matthew 24:6
    Medievalism
    Medievalists
    Medievalists Of Color
    Medieval Studies
    Middle Ages
    Mimi
    MoCs
    Nahir I. Otaño Gracia
    Nathan Grant
    National Book Award
    N'Jadaka
    N’Jobu
    Northside
    Norway
    Oakland
    Passing/Posing
    Pharmakon
    Plato's Pharmakon
    Pruitt Igoe
    Psychology Department
    Public Art
    Quimbandas
    Research
    Rhineland
    Rumors Of War
    Saint Louis Art Museum
    Salvage The Bones
    Saxon
    Seeta Chaganti
    Siue
    SLAM
    Soldier's Memorial
    Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
    Stanford University
    St. Louis
    Tarrell Rodney Campbell
    T'Chaka
    T'Challa
    The Blog As Literary Genre
    Tiamat
    Translatio Imperii
    Vibranium
    Wakanda
    White Supremacy
    Why I Write

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Editing and Writing Services
  • My Writing
  • Blog