| ashu |
Posted
on 08-Oct-01 12:10 AM
A fascinating article: long but very interesting.
enjoy,
oohi
ashu
ktm, nepal
************
An excerpt:
Each of Dissanayake's books concludes with an exhortation. In What Is Art For? she argues that the arts should be integrated into modern life, as they are in premodern cultures, not set aside as the fiefdom of specialists self-conscious about their outsider status.
In Art and Intimacy, she calls for more art education in schools.
And in Homo Aestheticus, she takes aim at the hyperliterate credo of poststructuralism: The arts are a part of our evolved nature, she explains; literacy, a recent invention, isn't. She diagnoses the Derridean notion that there is nothing outside the text as a delusion typical of—and flattering to—someone overinvested in the skill of writing.
She dismisses as "poppycock" the notion that there cannot be thinking or experience without language. Split-brain studies, she points out, plainly document the contrary; patients with no link between their left and right hemispheres can use drawings to answer questions they cannot respond to with language. Until language stamps it with meaning, Gayatri Spivak once argued, the "shudder in the nerve strings" is "a direct sign of nothing." Dissanayake retorts: "Nothing? Fire is hot. Hunger is bad. Babies are good."
http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0110/cover.html
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