André Dunoyer de Segonzac (French, 1884-1974)
Eucalyptus, N/D
Watercolor and strokes of Chinese ink on vellum, 46 x 61,5 cm
Tell me
My heart is burning
There are silences
in the trees
Sentences that dart out from nowhere
An isolated beach
Something that looks like you
Comforting resemblance, a mirror image
Something you could only say to each other
Really want to watch the favourite
That certain texts survive, and others do not, is not just a matter of particular texts resonating with individual readers, but also of structures of gate-keeping and evaluation, of selection and omission. These screening processes, enacted daily in discussions over what to publish, where to allot marketing dollars, or how to revise the undergraduate curriculum, enable some works to circulate widely while overlooking others. From this point of view, transtemporal mobility is at least partly related to institutional inertia. Citations generate more citations; graduate students teach the texts they were themselves taught; canons—whether of fiction or of theory—reproduce themselves over time. Indeed, even as new texts filter into the classroom and ways of reading gradually shift over time, it is difficult to imagine how education might proceed without a base level of continuity, repetition, and transmission of prior knowledge.
Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!”, New Literary History 42.4 (2011), p. 580.