Poethics: And Other Strategies of Law and Literature (review)
Henri Bergson, CS. Peirce, Sergei Eisenstein, and others), Cohen merely concludes, with Burroughs, that "consciousness is a cut-up and life is a cutup." Such simple conclusions abound in Cohen's book. Throughout the introduction and in many of the essays, questionable beliefs are unproblematically asserted, usually to support the idea of an uncomplicated individual consciousness, the salutary expansion of which then becomes the noble work of great novelists and filmmakers. For Cohen, the latter group achieves this expansion by means of such stock art-film devices as repetition, montage, and the visualization of characters' memories. The long-take, deep-focus, moving-camera style of Hollywood film presumably leaves individual consciousness no larger than it finds it.