tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-786207835641480928.post8390264275989284692..comments2024-03-28T12:59:41.910-04:00Comments on NeverEnding Story: Cool Announcement: Publication of My Critical Study of Haibun (Haibun Today, 7:3, September, 2013)Chen-ou Liu, 劉鎮歐http://www.blogger.com/profile/06235248170011255532noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-786207835641480928.post-82727340561328998222013-09-02T09:34:52.314-04:002013-09-02T09:34:52.314-04:00In her Contemporary Haibun Online review, Naomi Be...In her Contemporary Haibun Online review, Naomi Beth Wakan emphasizes that: <br /><br /><br />Usually commentaries on texts are done by a variety of other writers, but in this case the commentary is by Cobb himself. This does present an unusual, rather schizoid, but strangely interesting situation in which Cobb speaks for himself in the third person, as “the writer.” <br /><br />There is nothing new or unusual about this kind of writing practice. Wakan has no knowledge of commenting on one’s own work as a strategically effective way of engaging in the politics and poetics of a literary genre, such as in the case of one of the key figures of Third World Literature, Chen Yingzhen, whose harsh criticism of Chen Yingzhen, titled “A Discussion of Chen Yingzhen”, written in another penname, Xu Nancun, is a must-read for students and scholars of Third World Literature in general and modern Chinese literature in particular. 2 Most importantly, the author, David Cobb, of What Happens in Haibun, has no such understanding of this writing strategy either. In order to avoid giving readers the impression of “self-regarding and self-elevating” (p. 13), and being “liable to be a sneaking bias towards [his] own preferences” (p. 13), Cobb gives the following three reasons for why 40 (not “43” on p. 13) haibun he has chosen are his own (p. 13): <br /><br /><br />Why did I not gather together a corpus of exemplary haibun from a variety of different pens? Frankly, because I am in my “senior salad days” and did not have the stamina to seek permissions from a host of other authors (it is common knowledge that for the purpose of reviewing, the reviewer does not need to get permissions from the authors to quote their works), to engage with them in extensive correspondence about why they said this that way, and that this way (the poet’s work can speak for itself, otherwise no one can review the work by a dead poet, such as Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior); and in the process risk falling out with them if I felt I had to say something about their works that they could not accept (emphasis mine; the thinking behind this reason saddens me) . <br />Chen-ou Liu, 劉鎮歐https://www.blogger.com/profile/06235248170011255532noreply@blogger.com