Tuesday, April 08, 2008

"Finding Lost, getting lost"

A paper that I wrote about LOST for a conference a couple years ago was recently published through the online Society for the Study of Lost. Just click that first link if you're interested.

About the paper itself: I'm not totally happy with it. (Though these things tends to happen after enough time passes.) For one, I use a lot of Harold Bloom in it, a literary critic whose terms I like, but whose ends I find somewhat detestable - and so my use of Bloom ends up leading me to a very unBloomian place, and I don't really discuss that. I'm currently reworking and expanding it for publication in print, (hopefully I'll have some more details/good news about this in the next few months) and in the new version I'm adding some Baudrillard (drawing from Seduction, in particular) as a foil to Bloom. There are two reasons for this: 1) Baudrillard's conception of 'seduction' is actually much closer to what I was getting at then is Bloom's notion of 'misprision'; 2) the opposition of Baudrillard's decidedly anti-truth, anti-authority philosophy with Bloom's almost spiritual notions of genius and canon also reproduces, I think, Lost's own numerous binary conflicts between rationality and spirituality, seduction and truth, etc.

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