Keeping the Sabbatical Honest – Chapter 3!

Chapter 3 of the Book Project now exists in a start-to-finish form, suitable for submitting, with Chapter 5, on oysters, for whatever nefarious purposes presses might use them form [for example, a book contract…]

It’s here, not on academia DOT edu, because I am not a chump, and because CUNY, like other public goods, is great.

An excerpt:

What remains is Body. As a named character with motives and a voice, Body has everything a literary work typically needs for a personality. With all this, and with its claims to ownership of flesh and bones, we might say that Body plays the part of soul, but immanently rather than rather than transcendently, by a voice that just marks out the place where the self can be located for a while within always an always shifting materiality that it shares, unequally, with the worms. If we locate the soul in the function it plays in other poems in this tradition, as the voice of moral and doctrinal authority, then the worms may be the poem’s soul, with this crucial, obvious distinction: they are not the self, nor, as a crowd, even a self, and as nonhuman life, they are certainly, for better or worse, not destined for eternity.