I've just been reading a paper by one of my colleagues, wherein she locates the impulse in the work of Elizabeth Grosz "to put the body back into philosophical writing," in her words. This impulse is resonant for me, intellectually as someone who is (at the moment) looking at the the links between performance and writing, but also more personally as someone who has chosen writing as a field over the more obviously bodied field of theatrical performance.

It's been over ten years since I've taken on a role in a play, and although I use my body in fairly conscious ways in my classroom performances, I still don't think of my teaching as craft in quite the same way I might about theatre, or about writing, the latter of which is the craft I actually do endeavor to polish.

But I miss the body in the craft, the attention to tactile data, the way the senses are attuned to the body in space and the space around the body. More to the point, I am brought to mind of the idea that academic discourse typically shuns this awareness in our own writing...

Even here in this space, I can point to posts that bear the markings of a more embodied writing style, one more alive to metaphorical richness and descriptive language about sensory (sensual) experience. Those posts are not about my academic work. Sometimes they're about teaching, but more often, they're about the times I spend at home, playing with my kids, or eating some delectable meal.

I'm re-reading some Pinter for class, and I am wondering if I might not use the opportunity to create an exercise for myself, to do some writing about Pinter (even if only brainstorming for the lesson plan) that invokes the body, my writing body, even as it engages the theoretical and intellectual axes that I automatically revert to when writing criticism...