ENGL 639:  

Reaching toward the Ineffable--

The Aesthetics and Politics of Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison

 

Language can never live up to life, once and for all.  Nor should it.  Language can never pin down slavery, genocide, war.  Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so.  Its force--its felicity--is in its reach toward the ineffable.  [...] Unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.  [...] Word work is sublime, because it is generative.  It makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference,  the way in which we are like no other life. 

We die.  That may be the meaning of life.  But we do language.  That may be the measure of our lives. 

Once upon a time ...

Toni Morrison,  Nobel Lecture

Visit the Portrait Gallery

image credit:  http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/tonibio.htm                               photo of Woolf by Gisele Freund

 

Instructor:  Moira P. Baker

Office:  406 young hall

Phone:  831-5352 (Office) 731-4104 (Home)

email:  mpbaker@radford.edu

Class listserv

Office hours:

Mondays:  5:00-6:30

Tuesdays:  5:00-6:30

Thursdays:  2:30-3:30

Other times by appointment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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