Jerry Ward's Blogspot

JANUARY 15, 2018                  In a mind-grabbing   monologue, Hamlet considers the monstrous difference between what is performed on a stage and what he must perform in his life.   Admitting that he is "a rogue and peasant slave," indeed an ass who " must   like a whore unpack [ his ] heart with words," he concludes: I'll have grounds / More relative than this --the play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King. ( Hamlet II. ii, 603-605) Does the Age of Trump demand that a few of us imitate Hamlet and try to catch the conscience of a person who devotes his life to sound and fury?   Yes . And Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2018 is as good a time as any to do so.                 Elsewhere I have suggested that we have a conversation with David Walker and Ida B. Wells, so that w...

RADICAL ERUPTIONS OF DESIRE                 The invitation to write about "the treatment of street lit within academia or even within African American literary studies more specifically" for readers who have vested interest in "street lit's place, or lack thereof, within academia, combating illiteracy amongst black and brown youth, and in relation to the prison-industrial complex" was too attractive to refuse.   Here was an opportunity to plunge with eyes wide shut into the magma of argument regarding blind spots in American literary and cultural discourses, to spend a season in the "cultured hell" to which Claude McKay drew attention in the poem "America,"   in the territory where radical eruptions are commonplace.                     From the vantage of literary history as a subset of an always expanding ...

Vision Quest (2018) Rereading Romero, Patricia W., ed. In Black America: 1968: The Year of Awakening .   Washington, DC: United Publishing , 1969. Jones, LeRoi and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing .   New York: William Marrow, 1968. reminds me that nostalgia may be ineluctable, but that it leads to nowhere.   The better choice is reconsidering what has been lost and gained since April 4, 1968. Two outstanding   books Yancy, George, ed. On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis.   New York: Oxford UP, 2017. Johnson, Gaye Theresa and Alex Lubin, eds. Futures of Black Radicalism .   London: Verso, 2017. provide relief from obsessive attention to Coates, Ta-Nehisi. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy .   New York: One World, 2017. Yancy, Johnson, and Lubin remind me that exploring options is prudent. These noteworthy books lead to a ...

PRE-TRUTH SPLINTERS                 According to recent reports from humanists, the new scholarship in studies of the U.S. South/souths is a strange fruit of amazing grace.   As the trend is projected by the Modern Language Association's group LLC Southern United States, we find that students, teachers, and random blueneck intellectuals are being urged to suspend disbelief.   Or maybe they are being implored to add pre-truth splinters to their diets.   Making sense of things is an arduous chore for Southerners born before 1968.                 The South is no longer a state of mind to be misrepresented   by bloody romance and mythology.   It is a matrix of crime and punishment, a confederacy of artificial intelligence, a digital plantation.   Folklore and fakelore have begun to spawn and swarm. ...

Sympathy in 2018 2018 is an opportune moment to scrutinize and readjust terms of engagement. Do not assume, on the basis of insufficient proof (either anecdotal or empirical) that sympathy is a given ,an innate property,   a psychobiological reflex possessed by all human beings. Think. Sympathy or compassion is ambiguous. Some portion of it may be encoded in our DNA, and the remainder is probably   a result of how we are socially and culturally educated or conditioned. Centuries of narrative direct us to such a conclusion.   Those same narratives inform us that sympathy is not constant or fixed.   It is variable.   We have the option of not generating sympathy.   In the poetry of imagination, sympathy is most often triggered in times of extreme crisis, tragedy, or catastrophe. Shakespeare's   Portia lied beautifully in saying the quality of mercy is not strained.   In daily life as we know it, the quality is enormously strained.  ...

AN ADVENT ADVENTURE Do universal values, such as the true, the good, the beautiful, and the just, exist?   Could we not suggest, without contradiction, that these values are the object of an agreement of the universal audience?   These values are the object of a universal agreement as long as they remain undetermined.   When one tries to make them precise, applying them to a situation or to a concrete action, disagreements and the opposition of specific groups are not long in coming . Chaim Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric Marilynne Robinson's nicely worded essay "What Are We Doing Here?" ( New York Review of Books , November 9, 2017) is a predictable apology for the utility of the humanities in the twenty-first century. It proposes to respond to one of the grand questions that can be associated with nia and either ontological or existential reflection.   The title is a question one might ask at a social or political meeting, at a professional con...

Blog 12.19.2017 CHRISTMAS I have a reason for not being anxious to celebrate Advent and Christmas Day.   Sixty years ago, my father died on December 25.   Fifty-nine years ago, my favorite uncle died a few days before Christmas.   I do want other people to be happy, but I am most at peace when Christmas has gone with the snow, the sunshine or rain, the wind.   I still say "Merry Christmas."   The only genuine happiness I experience, however, is listening to Handel's "The Messiah" and a few songs I've treasured since childhood,   attending Midnight Mass, having home-made fruitcake   after Mass, and eating a special meal with relatives on the excessively commercialized holiday. KWANZAA Umoja ---Decide with whom you should seek unity. Kujichagulia --Expand the terms of engagement for 2018. Ujima ---Cooperate on a project with people you can trust. Ujamaa --Be frugal.   Shop selectively. Nia ---Remember ou...