cas : cas presentations An Education at the Fights October 3, 2003 Friday, 1:30 p.m. Lecture Hall, IPRH 805 West Pennsylvania, Urbana University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This is a Special Presentation of The Center for Advanced Study and The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Carlo Rotella Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies, Boston College author of October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature; Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt; and Cut Time: An Education at the Fights Introduction by William J. Maxwell Director of English Graduate Studies Associate Professor of English and Interpretive Theory Discussing some classics of the boxing literature and drawing examples from Cut Time, I'm going to talk about the struggle to make violence meaningful. There are potential lessons in getting hurt, in hurting others, in seeing others get hurt. In that sense, hurt carries meaning; it can educate you. But it can also rob you of your capacity to learn or feel, or even to think. A fighter who gets hit too often can descend into dementia pugilistica; a heavy hitter can go blood simple; a jaded spectator can fall entirely out of the habit of compassion, losing any feel for the human consequences of boxing spectacle. In that sense, the meaning can drain out of hurt, leaving only the nakedness of it. The tension between lessons to learn and the brutally wasteful finitude of lessons animates every aspect of boxing, and it's a crucial part of the attraction exerted by boxing on writers for three millenia. Writers, like all sorts of other people (including fighters), want boxing to mean something. So they wrap all sorts of meaning around the raw fact of meat and bone hitting meat and bone, which is what boxing comes down to. Because boxing resists their efforts to wrap it in layers of sense and form, because hitting wants to shake off all such burdens and just be plain hitting, the capacity of the fights to hold meaning is rivaled by their incapacity to mean anything at all. I'm going to talk about writers' confrontation with that two-edged problem. Carlo Rotella was on WILL-Am radio's call-in program, FOCUS-580. Listen to the archived interview here.