Plot Against America

The Plot Against America

–”Relay” text for our project, as “Antidote” Text.

 
 
Notes

 

Historical	//			“Literary”
“Historicity”	//			Poetics; “Disruptive”?
Consensus / Doxa	//			“Antidote” / “Para-doxa”
Myth	//			Experience / Family; anecdotes
Belief     – Religion; Ideology; Fear	//			Affect (expression)  –”perpetual fear” (subjective condition)

 
 
Issues / Questions

 
“Historicity”: Transparency / Opacity; (re: “disruptive effect”?)

 
 
Ethnicity / “American”: “Census Bureau” — “crazy quilt” (Ragtime)

 
 
Q. Inscribe Memory and Experience into writing (how?)

 
 
Poetics
(derived for practical application — “what is the recipe” for composing a “para-doxa Text”?)

 
“Disrupt” automatic or passive reading of historicity with opaque literary technique (such as? language/diction, description, inconsistency…?)
“Calls attention to” novel as literature (fiction) and not historical discourse (consensus).
–Examples? (in order to generalize from specific instance toward “category” of the “recipe”)

 
 
“Grounded” in experience and quotidian reality of Roth’s hometown: Newark, NJ.

View Larger Map

 
 
Note: John Updike’s also employing this strategy (geo./setting) strongly suggests this is a key lesson for us:
“Updike’s Pennsylvania” (29-Mar)

“…Updike’s literary imagination rarely departed from eastern Pennsylvania – the place he called America’s ‘doughy middle.’”
“…Updike’s meticulous writing style [is] a kind of high-definition TV.”

 
 
Operates on two scales or perspectives. Nation (collective) and Individual (particular experience);
– geographic “scope”: simultaneously (inter?)national and local, within family home and children’s bedroom (twin beds).
Instances of “cognitive mapping” by “Young Philip Roth” (character)?

Trip to Kentucky (“rescue mission”)
Intersection (Summit + Keer Ave, Newark)

 
Metonymic Figures: stamp collection; drawings; chess (board/set); prosthesis.
    –Q. technique/use of people/individuals as “figures,” expressing personal affect of fear?
    –Q. Other examples? (generalize the recipe)

 
 
Q. What other poetics (techniques), lessons, or aspects have you noted (in response and in groups on Monday), toward making an “inventory” of Roth’s “recipe”? What categories can we perceive, to include in our later work?
(Review CATTtegories — under “Analogy.”)

 
I will add everyone’s responses as I compile them from this week’s (03/27) blog entries.

 
In the meantime…
I have speculated a potential figure in the Fallschirmjäger (literally, “para-troopers”), which I might “re-deploy” toward an “unconventional” purpose: manipulating and re-fashioning these historical figures, in the way that Anselm Kiefer re-purposes German culture toward artistic statements (e.g. characters from Wagner and Goethe) — “re-appropriating” by breaking from the Nazi connotations (see Barthes: “sociolect” or “dense/thick” mythical discourse).

 
However, the image that I proposed is too impersonal and abstract, in using the logos of the Fallschirmjäger and of CBS (“consensus broadcast system”). A better figure connects both of both these angles — except now I imagine this as if it were drawn by Sandy Roth (to whom Plot Against America is dedicated, after all) and then animated by Tateh [via "movie-picture book" in Ragtime]:

 
We now recall the finer distinctions between a drawing, photograph, a logo (or composite/digital image) — which “inscribes experience” visibly? (e.g. in the “hand” of the individual) Perhaps a lesson for our poetics…?