{"id":3857,"date":"2020-06-14T11:13:49","date_gmt":"2020-06-14T15:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=3857"},"modified":"2020-06-14T11:13:49","modified_gmt":"2020-06-14T15:13:49","slug":"another-rabbit-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=3857","title":{"rendered":"Another Rabbit Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of days ago I was organizing books in the Auxiliary Library in the barn and happened on Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination<\/b><\/a> (which I had bought in 2008, on just what inspiration I can’t recover, 12 years later). Many of the 40 essays contained within are interesting to probe again, touching as they do on interests and enthusiasms and questions that have arisen during those dozen years. The last third of the eponymous and first (“The Geography of the Imagination”, originally a Distinguished Professor Lecture at University of Kentucky in 1978) is an extended riff on American Gothic, Grant Wood’s evocation of American essence:


\n(Art Institute of Chicago<\/a>)
(see Wikipedia entry)<\/a><\/center>
\nDavenport’s four pages of deconstruction<\/a> of this eidetic image is a lovely mapping of implications, of allusions, of in-knottings. Some are explicit references by<\/i> Grant Wood, others seem imbricated [an overlapping of successive layers], where the pointer is to bricolage<\/i>, in the sense of ‘creation from a diverse range of available things’, rather than to an orderly pattern of overlapping, as with shingles (bricoler<\/i> is “to tinker”). A similar unpacking can be visited upon other familiar images, to get at the question of how and why they come to be eidetic, and I’m tempted to try some of that myself (stay tuned…).<\/p>\n

\nIt’s no surprise that American Gothic has been praised as representing “steadfast American pioneer spirit”, derided as Norman Rockwellish cliché of a[n imaginary] small town America, and widely replicated in satire and parody (see a blog devoted to instances<\/a>). Here’s an instance from my own archives:<\/p>\n

\"Kent<\/a>