“A genre is a loose affectively-invested zone of expectations about the narrative shape a situation will take. A situation becomes-genre, finds its genres of event.”
Lauren Berlant, 2011, ‘Austerity, Precarity, Awkwardness’.
Category Archives: Bite Size Theory
Bite Size Theory
“[O]ne reason why the South African situation became so acute a marker of iniquity in the twentieth century was because it was an extreme example of the way people could be bounded beyond their own volition; into neighbourhoods, into families, into destinies, into lives, and into jails if they resisted. This strand of self-consciousness about borders and boundaries – a negotiation of frontiers and a fear of what lies beyond – is particularly (even if not uniquely) South African.”
Mark Gevisser, 2014, Lost and Found in Johannesburg.
Bite Size Theory
“Without a history built and defended upon an entirely different foundation, we will find that Hitler and Stalin continue to define their own works for us. What might that basis be?[…] Its form arises not from the political geography of empires but from the human geography of victims. The bloodlands were no political territory, real or imagined: they are simply where Europe’s most murderous regimes did their most murderous work.”
Timothy Snyder, 2010, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.
Bite Size Marxism
“Ever since Luxemburg put into question the completion of real subsumption by suggesting it was nothing more than a heuristic device Marx employed to totalize capitalism, thinkers outside of Euro-America have, in one way or another, underscored a conception of the social that embodied an uneven mix of practices of prior modes of production alongside the newer innovations of capitalism”
Harry Harootunian, 2015, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism.
Bite Size Methods
“Finding something is easy: it’s knowing that you ought to have looked for it that is hard. You search for known items only once you have done all the real work. In the really important cases, you search for known items only once you already know what they are going to say. In short, if we knew ahead of time what the questions were and what books probably answered them, there would be no reason to do the research.”
Andrew Abbott, 2014, Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials.
Bite Size Theory
“It is in the very limitations and leanness of shadows that we learn, in the gaps, in the leaps to complete an image, that we perform a generative act of constructing the shape – recognizing a horse, a box, a bed roll, a crutch, a typewriter. The very leanness of the illusion pushes us to complete the recognition – and that prompts an awareness of the activity, recognizing in this activity our agency in seeing, and our agency in apprehending the world.”
William Kentridge, 2014, Six Drawing Lessons.
Bite Size Criticism
“International scholarship on Coetzee, with some exceptions, involves walking one step behind the novelist, collecting the allusions he scatters to Foucault or Levinas or Derrida and arranging them reverently in his honour, which is also to the honour of pure literature.
Imran Coovadia, 2012, Transformations: Essays.
Bite Size Criticism
“T]his is how American folk music works. Forgetting and disappearance are the engines of its romance. They are the motor of the will in the music to create characters, to insist on their mystery and to resist the impulse of society at large to turn the music into social science – or what the late Harlem critic Albert Murray called “social science fiction”.”
Griel Marcus, 2015, Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations.
Bite Size Cavell
“Empirical statements that claim truth depend upon evidence; statements that claim truthfulness depend upon our acceptance of them. My acceptance is the way I respond to them, and not everyone is capable of the response, or willing for it. I put this by saying that a true statement is something we know or do not know; a truthful statement is one we must acknowledge or fail or refuse to acknowledge.”
Stanley Cavell, 1971, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film.
Bite Size Cavell
“A work one cares about is not so much something one has read as something one is a reader of; connection with it goes on, as with any relation one cares about.”
Stanley Cavell, 1981, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Romance.
Pop Theory 