Creativity makes us uncomfortable

I would like to start off by saying I am so sorry for my username. I thought marinara_sauce would be a cool username but I guess I missed the memo that we were all using our actual names. So this is Leslie McNamara in case you were wondering.

I am currently taking Persuasion and Rhetoric with Professor Greg Goodale, and I would say it is my favorite course this semester (sorry Sebastian). I'm kind of surprised by how many concepts overlap with this course, though. The "Intertextuality and Discourse Community" reading mentioned Foucault, which we read in Rhetoric, and talked a bit about the concept of truth, which is something we frequently cover in Rhetoric. Greg constantly pushes us to think about truth, and what is really true, what makes something true, etc. I liked the mention of truth in our reading, "Mendel spoke the truth, but he was not dans le vrai (within the truth)" (40). I like this because it shows how malleable the concept of truth is. There can be multiple truths within a community, such as guidelines and a certain frame of thinking, but those might only be the truth in that community. So what is truth? What kind of truth was Mendel speaking? Was it the overarching truth? Who are we to tell? So philosophical!

I saw a cyclical relationship with constraints within the discourse community, and the texts that arise from those communities. Constraints influence the texts written within the community, but texts written in the community also influence the constraints. Porter talks about how texts can influence the "cultural matrix", saying "Successful writing helps to redefine the matrix- and in that way becomes creative" (41). In a way, the constraints in the community work to block creativity, but texts that break out of the constraints are re-shaping the constraints, and that is creativity. I think this is part of why avant garde artists make us uncomfortable, because they are pushing the boundaries of our order of things, and breaking out of the constraints put on them. This is kind of ironic, because we so often strive for and praise creativity, but only creativity that is within constraints that make us comfortable. True creativity makes us uncomfortable.