'What shall be our new ornaments?' Description's orientations. Issue 4 (2nd April 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Benson, Stephen
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 34:Issue 4(2020)
• Page Start: 605
• Page End: 625
• Publication Date: 2020-04-02
• Subjects: Description -- ekphrasis -- contemporary literature -- creative-critical writing -- criticism; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1504115
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Description has made something of a comeback in recent years as part of a theorising of possibilities for a post-hermeneutical critical orientation. The present essay considers the descriptive turn, so-called, in relation to a range of writing that crosses the boundaries of the critical and the creative: in work by Claire-Louise Bennett, Lisa Robertson, Wayne Koestenbaum and R. F. Langley. The essay identifies in this writing an occupancy of description's register as it has been articulated over the ages by a frequently sceptical regulatory discourse: description as understood to be variously gratuitous, ornamental or passively affirmative. Rather than suggest an expanded field of contemporary descriptive practice, the proposal here is for description conceived as a minor mode, a relatively rare happening, but all the more valuable for being so.