“We Must Write Dangerously”

Abstract

This article is a response to the view expressed by James Joyce that modern authors (even academics) should write dangerously. I discuss the view in terms of four main subsections: dangerous style, dangerous stance, dangerous content, and dangerous reading.

“Sharing a Moment”: An Open Letter

“…Like Joyce, I support writing dangerously as writing adventurously and riskily, and, like Roth, writing subversively, and, like you, writing evocatively, experimentally, nonconformably, even vulnerably (see Badley, 2021, p. 721). We agree that the often carping and fault-finding style of criticism so prevalent in academic life is both regrettable and unacceptable.…”

Common—Reading—Placing—Writing

“…responding to James Joyce’s view that modern writers (even academics in these trying times?) must write dangerously by freely critiquing our patchwork selves and our fragmented world (Badley, 2020b);…”

Becoming Posthumous

“…My counterlife would not be a rehearsal for an afterlife but rather a transition into it. In my counterlife writing during my end-stage posthumous existence, I even aspired to being dangerous (see Badley, 2020). Indeed, writing posthumously has been lavishly praised: The Nobelist Nadine Gordimer argued that serious (and I would add “playful”) persons should try to write posthumously because by doing so they would bypass the usual constraints of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public, and, perhaps especially, intellectual opinion.…”