What the Critics Say
About Rainey Polk |
| Nebraska Center for Writers |
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What the Critics Say
About Rainey Polk |
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The work of Rainey Polk is a remarkable deconstruction of the neurotic superstructure of the
myth of the “wild west,” an exposé of the dialectic of desire between hero and villain,
made more complex by the presence of woman, resulting in "alienation," the condition in which
the neurotic subject’s “being” — his jouissance — has been, or seems to be, displaced to
the side of the Other, the, as it were, “bad guy.” Heterosexual union is not possible until hero
defeats villain, thus releasing the captive being and restoring the subject to his socially valorized
position, union signaled by the heroine’s frantic run to the hero, his gun still smoking, the ties of
her bonnet flying loose. — Jacques Lacan
A version of pragmatics can provide tools to aid reading of the Polk texts explored here. I suggest little behavioral genres as subdivisions of heteroglossia and discourse's dialogic structure. Examples of rhetorical or little behavioral genres include the full-fledged question, exclamation, command, request (i.e., "You hornswoggler! Git yer kit 'n git!"). Some of these rhetorical genres have been contemplated extensively within speech-act theory. In addition to traditional thematic, character, and image analysis, I will draw on a few insights of speech-act analysis to examine structures of commands, urgings, and pleas (i.e., "But why not, Missy May, you bein' so dadblamed purty and me bein' 'bout to bust?") as those structures contribute to the dialogic character of Polk's discourse of resistance. — Volosinov Yoo may hav heered as how cuzin Rainey has done set hisself up in the writtin' trade. I do not know as how I cotton to that. I'd a ruther have a hors theef in the famly as a writter. He is shur to bring shame upon us all. — Ellet Polk |
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