March 30, Post 12: Outline

      I had a moment of clarity yesterday while riding back from Kentucky to New York in an 11-passenger van where my project made sense as a whole for the first time. The following is what I typed out in the span of 15 minutes or so. I think it might be interesting to look back on this in relation to whatever shape the project takes from here.

     Problems of Autobiography:

          Future never arrives; problem of the endless present

o   Desire to accept the aesthetic solution

§  Lets us escape the moment by moment living that makes no sense

§  Natural: “we long, amid a troubled world, for perfect being. We forget that what gives meaning to the notion of perfection is the events that create longing, and that, apart from them, a “perfect” world would mean just an unchanging brute existential thing.” (Dewey 63)

§  Tells who you are (looking at tapestries, Revel accepts the role presented to him of Theseus)

·      Peter’s point about that being a fake mystery

o   Mystery easier to live than novel form sine it’s told in reverse

·      But: conception of the world as a combination of necessity and contingency which allows for happiness to exist (dewey)

o   Ruppert's critique of the solution (beauvoire)

·                Problem of inclusion

o   James in Bruner: stories happen to people who know how to tell them (tell about Emily who always wanted to hear stories and always had them to tell)

o   But – even doing autobiography, how do you create “the right” identity? (identity as telos of a coherent story) - loschnigg

§  Endless prelude – loschnigg (doesn’t really escape the problem of the endless present)

§  Revel’s endless cycling of narrative

§  Another problem: the way we learn to tell stories limits how we tell them ourselves; limits who we can be.  (james quote)

I was too close to the project and lost track of why I was doing what research (like Roquentin, who forgets why he was interested in the Marquis de Rollebon, except I think that I was on the right track after all, I just couldn’t see the forest for the trees.)

This project is different every time I look at it. 

I wonder if anything will come of this outline.

Jitney, somewhere outside of Buffalo, NY/3rd floor KJ, Hamilton College, NY - 31 March 2013.