Wager as essay

Chicago Review

Volumn 49, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 31-50

  Retallack, Joan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949894278     PISSN: 00093696     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. In The New Art - The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986)
2. 2st the odds (Elmwood, Connecticut: Potes & Poets Press, 1989), unpaginated
3. The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1980), 72
4. Barbara Stafford, Artful Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 310
5. Complete Works, 610-11
6. For thoughts on why they mostly happen to be men see my ":RE:THINKING: LITERARY:FEMINISM:" in The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: U of California P, 2003)
7. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Tavistock-Methuen, 1984), 100. Winnicott's sense that creativity (the play of the active imagination) is what brings us into meaningful contact with realities beyond subjective space is what John Dewey simply terms experience
8. For Dewey the function of art is to restore a vivid connectedness to the world that we too often lose in cultures that tend to produce distracted, alienated adults. Playing and Reality and Dewey's Art as Experience can be read as working on the same problem - the life worth living. Interestingly, Dewey was skeptical of the kinds of play theories of art that stressed "make believe" origins of art in dream or fantasy states. He writes, "In art, the playful attitude becomes interest in the transformation of material to serve the purpose of a developing experience. Desire and need can be fulfilled only through objective material.... Art is production and that production occurs only through an objective material that has to be managed and ordered in accord with its own possibilities" (Art as Experience [Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1989], 284-85)
9. Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (NY: Columbia UP, 1991), 1:92
10. Aesthetic Theory, trans C. Lenhardt (NY: Routledge, 1984), 262
11. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), particularly Chapter 3: "Structures, Habitus, Practice," for a useful tool in thinking about "climates of thought" whose omnipresence and enormous power anyone interested in innovation and change worries about
12. Notes to Literature, 1:16-17; italics mine
13. "Composition as Explanation," in A Gertrude Stein Reader, ed. Ulla Dydo (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993), 497. All quotes below are from this edition
14. John Cage, "Lecture on Nothing," in Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1961), 122
15. Leslie Scalapino, Objects in the Terrifying Tense Longing from Taking Place, (NY: Roof Books, 1993), 67, 1, 66, 67
16. Leslie Scalapino, New Time (Hanover: Wcsleyan UP, 1999), 11-12
17. Objects, 73, 74
18. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 9-10