Reviews for Standard Language: Spoken and Written, Vol. 5

The average rating for Standard Language: Spoken and Written, Vol. 5 based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-27 00:00:00 Todd Conwell This was very clever, in some places amusing and in some places frighteningly relatable but overall it built up to a nothing except a calling into question of everything we could ever say about ourselves. Even irony is a false friend and irony is equivocal. I would say always/already equivocal but after reading this book I am scared to use cliches like that although as Riley points out trying to avoid using them also ends you up in a communicative cul de sac (this was the relatable thing). She's very well read and seems to have some sort of symbiotic relationship with Judith Butler (maybe it is just that they are friends) where I found this book by reading Butler but this is also peppered with references to Butler. But this is peppered with a million references. It's very clever and kind of privileged, you get the impression the author must have had a lot of reading and thinking time to come up with this and I am jealous as hell (but possibly also not focussed enough or clever enough even if I had the time). Then the solidarity I thought sounded promising but she left it right to the end and said almost nothing about it. I like that you don't have to identify with or be the same for solidarity but there also seems to be a knowing wink here about solidarity as a vain attempt to stave off the irrelevance of self vis a vis ageing and death. Which is admittedly starting to terrify me, so much so that i structured that sentence agrammatically (that wasn't deliberate). Maybe sometime when I am drunk I will reread this book in case it is better that way. I will enjoy the echo and narcissus drunk anyway: "Fuck you" LOL. This uses a lot of Kierkegaard and I remember needing to be quite drunk to read that back in 2007 or whenever it was. I don't know why I read it, I honestly think it would have something more useful for me about how "care" and "teaching" and "parenting" and everything are made up things but also things we socially probably can't just walk away from. Probably. But this is way more theoretical. I wonder what books like this are for? They must be fun to write but is this just an extended conversation with other very clever people (like Judith Butler)? But I feel I should also pay better attention because the comment on my article (twice now from different reviewers) is that I am not using theory much I am just making shit up. So I guess I should try to understand stuff like this. Should you read this? If that's an honest question then probably not. It would probably be useful to some people but those people can probably work it out for themselves and not ask me for advice. The narcissus and echo bit if pretty amusing though. Childish but funny. And I will reread it sometime to get my head around it. She says her version of Echo is agentic. I think maybe I am just not smart enough to understand this in one reading...

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-22 00:00:00 Claudio Varnerin I've got a lot of conflicting feelings about this one: Riley's flair for description and poet's eye for diction makes the reading positively scintillating at times, and wonderfully compelling. On the other hand, the self-same verbal skills engender a growing weight to the book's verbal structure and, at times, begin to take on the sense of pure excessiveness, as if the critical project had fallen away somewhere. Similarly, I love what I believe Riley's doing with identity politics are crises in representation and self-understanding, but at times I feel like she's drawing circles where more straightforward lines and dots would carry her arguments and points across much more coherently. As a poetic exercise, that's all cool; but as pedagogical literature the approach has its limits, as well as its aforesaid strengths. Whatever else, it possessed me to read more of her work, as well as to sit up straight and listen to what she has to say. An effective exercise, to be sure.