※ [本文转录自 NTU02DFLL 看板] 作者: elishading (小艾) 看板: NTU02DFLL 标题: [公告] 台大外文系学术演讲 时间: Sat Mar 11 00:59:11 2006 DFLL Faculty Colloquium Textual Ethics: Reading Transference Speaker：Prof. Marshall S. Grossman (Professor, Department of English, University of Maryland) Venue：DFLL New Conference Room, 1F Old Main Library Date：Tuesday, March 21, 2006 Time：3:30 ~ 5:00 pm Abstract: This lecture explores two distinct but related aspects of textual agency. On the side of reading, the well-worn thought that reading may be a transforming experience, constituted as and resulting in an ethical choice. On the side of writing: an ethical moment in the willingness of an author to submit himself or herself to the logic of his or her text by following its tropes and schemes to places at first unanticipated by authorial intention. Taken together these processes make up two sides of the same ethical coin. The features that lend to a text whatever transforming power it may have emerge in the writer's more or less intrepid collaboration with his or her medium, genre and material and the reader's willingness to engage in a similar collaboration with the resulting text. One way to think about this sort of textual agency is to consider the writer as the first reader, transformed by the text as he or she encounters himself or herself as its author. In the process of writing the writer is transformed into the author of the text he or she has written. The variable historical efficacy of the text—when it is written and when it is read—must somehow inhere in its formal features. Narrative might be thought of as the rhetoric of subjective configuration. Telling stories mandates and implements one or another selection and configuration of elements in a conceptual universe. Because narrative submits the present of speaking to the expectations of a represented speaker, it installs also a peculiar temporality in the subject, who comes to locate him or herself at the constantly moving intersection of anticipation and retrospection. Because anticipated consequences are multiple, present action may be chosen so as to favor one anticipated outcome over another. Such successive moments of choice define also the field of a rhetorical ethics. Using psychoanalytic transference as a model for the reading and writing process, I will show that the ethical moment of a text, as opposed to the determinative moment of choice depicted in the text, lies not in choosing a reading but in deferring that choice. The ethical moment of reading and writing a text resides in the unfolding of possibilities that are never fully under control. ____________________________________________________________________________ History and Literary History Speaker：Prof. Marshall S. Grossman (Professor, Department of English, University of Maryland) Venue：DFLL New Conference Room, 1F Old Main Library Date：Wednesday, March 22, 2006 Time：3:30 ~ 5:00 pm Abstract: To be interdisciplinary it is incumbent on us to articulate disciplinarity, to say what distinguishes literary studies from something else, to say what is instrumental to it, and to what it may be instrumental. The call to admit the disciplinary other, which calls upon us, therefore, to say what we are, necessarily elicits responses from two directions. One is etiological. To the extent that we are literary critics, we may ally ourselves with, derive ourselves from, art. For all its possible unfashionable and perhaps unpalatable baggage, I choose this etiology. I think I am an art critic. As such my focus is on a very specific interaction between text and reader. I understand the text as an agent. It may say something, but as an art text it also does, or aspires to do something. Along with whatever it says, it brings the proverbial je ne sais quoi, which I understand to be not a supplement of form or content but their irreducible remainder. The other direction, really the same direction, is phenomenological and ethical. It has to do with what I place before me. Historians may use a text instrumentally—as a witness to tell them about the people who produced it. As an art critic, I may find this information interesting but also distracting, and I should never find it sufficient—to my task, though it may be sufficient to its own. The text does not reach me as a document, an instrument convenient to my inquiry. It reaches me as an agent. It seeks access to my being and I seek access to its being. Though it may have come from the past, it does not reside there. It is never in the past because it is always timely with me. Time and life are short. If it does not act presently, why am I reading it? If, indeed, a literary text is not a document but an agent, how do we distinguish between the documentary and the agential? The document is a witness. It records and it pretends to (potential) transparency. An agent performs. It is opaque by its nature and even to itself. The document is an instrument. The literary text is not to be used instrumentally but to be treated as a living soul, as Milton famously put it, “as the image of God, as it were in the eye.” Matthew Arnold pointed out that this formulation becomes even more crucial when God no longer exists. In Freudian terms one might say that the unconscious of a document is descriptive, it is there to be effaced by further research and contextualization. But a literary text—a work of art—has a dynamic unconscious. It is activated by contact with another consciousness. Reading it one needs to fend off the temptations of a premature appropriation so as to reach the moment of Hegelian self-consciousness: when the subject encounters another which it recognizes to be a subject like it self. Affects are exchanged, cognitive structures altered. Neither the work nor the reader emerge the same. This is not meant to describe what always happens when literary art is present, but what can happen. However, it is to say, that only when it does happen has literary art occurred. ## Contact person: Hsiu-ting Jian 3366-3212 --

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