Saturday, March 28, 2009

That's etymology, not entymology

So all my writing efforts have shifted toward the diss, so I thought I'd offer up one my favorite paragraphs so far, from chapter 1. It's exactly the kind of paragraph that might get cut, but I hope it doesn't:

"'Genre,' like 'invention,' also has roots in both science and literature. What words like these give us is not an excuse to do interdisciplinary work, but a directive: if the words we use to categorize idea and things within our separate fields are shared by other fields (genre), and if the words we use to describe our procedures and methodologies are also shared (experiment, invention, etc.), then we must assume that this sharing contains more interest than the kind provoked by etymological kinship. It is not that etymology is not important; rather, the interest provoked by etymological kinship, which is a kind of pleasure in finding origins (and which is supposedly a question for a linguist and not necessarily a literary critic), is a pleasure that threatens to make us forget the serious nature of what is at stake when we search out the genealogy of words. If we assume that language plays a key role in ordering experience, and I certainly do, then we must take the pleasure of etymology very seriously. For when we search out the history of a word, especially a word like invention, and when we track its historical shifts in meaning, we are also tracking the history of an idea, the history of a practice, a whole range of circumstances that both prompts the change of a word’s meaning, and the circumstances produced by that shift. There was never a time when “invention” was more pregnant with meaning than in nineteenth century America; this tells us something about this particular word and this particular nation which we would not understand without understanding them together."

2 comments:

Becky said...

I am reminded of reading similar sounding articles in my HUM 125 class: A lot of words that I don't understand. At least we know you're smart.

Unknown said...

So I happened upon this via Melissa's blog. At initial glance thoght you were working on snarky commenting. You're "diss."

Anyhow- hope you're done by this point and that the dissertation was a raging success.