Ellen Brinks

One of the plagues of academic life, and one I'm going to do my best to minimize now that I have moved to the sidelines of said life,* is that you so often have to read the criticism before you've encountered the original work. Not only in egregious cases like say Finnegans Wake, where of course everybody reads about it in order to avoid reading it, but even in the case of a perfectly respectable Romantic poet like John Keats, in some moods my favourite of the bunch actually for his commitment to the permutation of the self. Meaning, like, I think of that Eighties pop song "Sex (I'm A)" by Berlin: "I'm a man" / "I'm a boy" / "I'm a man" / "Well I'm your mother" / "I'm a man" / "I'm a one-night stand …." Wordsworth or Goethe or, God forbid, Byron is "I'm a man" and Keats is a boy/your mother/&c. Therefore, it's a natural thing that his grappling with the idea of the hero-poet, the "election" to that effetest of roles that is always also a crucifixion, the changing of the symblic order as played out in Greek myth (Hyperion, the forgotten, the Apollo among the titans; Mnemosyne, the memory of what signification might have been), should be deeply promising, I got this article cos I had to check something in it for an editing job that I was doing and then I just read the whole thing and added it to my librarything because that is my particular pathology. And it's fine, it's interesting: Brinks focuses on the Gothic and queer valences in the poem and especially the opposition between the penetrated, tortured body of the beaten hero and the disembodiment of the victorious order, and it's quite cool. Coriolanus makes an appearance (Hyperion is also Oedipus, he is the anti-Superman ….). But it makes me think that I need to do things a bit differently so I can be encountering more Hyperions and less commentary, no matter how worth.

*It's a fucked world, btw, when the people who see themselves as "at the centre" of academia, young up-and-comers, are the exploited grad students with, as the internet meemee would have it, no cash, no hope and no jobs, while the few/proud/geeky who are actually making a living doing something related to their degrees are "on the sidelines," implicit failures because they don't see themselves as the next, I dunno, Judith Butler against the odds. IT SERVES THE LOGIC OF CAPITAL, people. Nineteenth-Century Literature.… (más)