on the boundaries between scholarly worlds

I have just written an essay that I may never post to Counterforces regarding the role of the critic in navigating the various effectively autonomous (visual) artworlds—and the degree to which the work of the critic of artworlds is alien even to highly educated inhabitants of other social worlds that don't overlap the assorted artworlds.

I am productively enlightened regarding the latter—the extent to which we who communicate with one another do not inhabit even remotely overlapping conceptual worlds or universes of discourse—by an LJ-Friend's link to a particular graduate student's summaries and critiques of recent scholarly essays on the work of China Mieville. I don't feel comfortable linking to it here because it comes from a friends-only post. However, its subject is the scholarly commentary to be found in: Extrapolation, Volume 50, no 2 Summer 2009: The China Mieville Special Issue, guest edited by Sherryl Vint.

I had been refraining in recent days from a post on The City and the City praising Mieville's adroit combination of a huge variety of actual borders and boundaries: the Green Line in Nicosia; the pre-unification maps of Berlin Hauptstadt der DDR with the city on the other side of the boundary simply a blank space on the map; the Berlin U-Bahn lines running beneath forbidden zones and emerging at an international boundary in Friedrichstraße station; the state lines in America in which drinking is reported to be legal on one side of a building and forbidden on the other (this one may be a rural/urban myth, though I lived in an Atlanta neighborhood in which the line between wet and then-dry counties ran down the middle of the street, resulting in a slew of bars and liquor stores directly across from the public library and doctors' offices); not to mention Mieville's deft use of the actual characteristics of various cities and countries in his fictional territories, each element readily recognizable as having been borrowed almost intact, right down to the title of essays. I would then most likely have gone on to discuss the relationship of Mieville's main conceit in the novel to the psychologies of consciousness I have spent so much time discussing on the joculuum blog.

But now that I have seen what sort of theory-laden Mieville scholarship is out there in worlds of which most of us have no knowledge whatsoever, I think I shall remain silent. Like Charlie Brown when he saw a duckie and a horsie in the clouds where his companions saw elaborate and subtle tableaux.