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Showing posts from August 16, 2020

anger and writing

  I wrote this in 2013, before the age of the Troll King. It was prescient, or at least I’d claim that it put its finger on some damn thing in the national consciousness. It concerns a question: in what ways does anger distort one’s reading   Anger, of course, is sometimes purposely provoked by a text. Sometimes that provocation is meant to align the reader and the writer in a shared indignation. Aristotle, in the rhetoric, defines anger in social and pragmatic terms:   ‘Anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one's friends.”   According to Aristotle’s definition, then, anger is the felt correspondent of the law of talion – the law of eye for an eye. Its intentional structure is not: I feel hot, I can’t breath, I have to scream, but – I have to strike out to even up the slight I have received. This way of construing t