11-06-2013, 07:50 PM
Billy,
Your latest is all over the place. I don't know if you're addressing me, Milo, or whoever and at what point in it. I can barely make out an intelligible position in it.
But your "pointed" question is entirely besides the point. I'm not concerned with whether or not I can "objectively know" someone by reading their literature. I'm not concerned because I never claimed to be able to do this, and everything I stand for tells me that it is impossible to "objectively know" anyone, period, through any means, in any robust sense.
We piece clues together, rather, from the scraps they throw us. Our own imaginations help us to fill in the gaps. We have conjectures, speculations, inferences. Sometimes, they are unwarranted and illegitimate, as Milo's in his last response to me. (To elaborate on that point: there is no sense in which I've just learned about authorial intent. I was first exposed to the idea over ten years ago while an undergraduate in college.)
Sometimes, however, our inferences are spot on. There are times when interpretation, in other words, "hits the real." This still does not mean I know "someone objectively." Rather, it means that I've deciphered a motive or a meaning behind what was concealing or distorting its presence.
Within the context of this thread, I have already admitted that perhaps my original inferences about Pound and Eliot were unwarranted. What I will not back down on, though, is the idea that my methods are legitimate, even if I'm not always the best examplar of their correct, astute, and responsible use.
I've given you guys all kinds of reasons why, which have been variously ignored, misinterpreted, and so-forth. I've written about how the most eminent literary critic working in English right now routinely makes use of these sorts of methods. To be honest, I don't care to defend myself anymore. I've made myself about as intelligible as I possibly can. I've even pointed out how what I'm saying is not really controversial or uncommon; it's something we do every single day, again, as in the statements about my own psychology made in Milo's last post to me.
I don't quite understand the resistance to the ideas I'm presenting; I think it's more of a pissing match, at this point, than anything. I don't understand why there's been no rational justification for the roughly New Critical perspective you guys seem to champion, which is far too simple a theory of literature for me to take seriously. I tend to think of what you guys preach as an aesthetic movement, that blinds itself to what makes much great literature truly great: the fact that it is often an expression, however artfully concealed, of the artist's own struggle to come to some kind of internal clarity or coherence within him/herself, as much as situate him/herself within a tradition.
Your latest is all over the place. I don't know if you're addressing me, Milo, or whoever and at what point in it. I can barely make out an intelligible position in it.
But your "pointed" question is entirely besides the point. I'm not concerned with whether or not I can "objectively know" someone by reading their literature. I'm not concerned because I never claimed to be able to do this, and everything I stand for tells me that it is impossible to "objectively know" anyone, period, through any means, in any robust sense.
We piece clues together, rather, from the scraps they throw us. Our own imaginations help us to fill in the gaps. We have conjectures, speculations, inferences. Sometimes, they are unwarranted and illegitimate, as Milo's in his last response to me. (To elaborate on that point: there is no sense in which I've just learned about authorial intent. I was first exposed to the idea over ten years ago while an undergraduate in college.)
Sometimes, however, our inferences are spot on. There are times when interpretation, in other words, "hits the real." This still does not mean I know "someone objectively." Rather, it means that I've deciphered a motive or a meaning behind what was concealing or distorting its presence.
Within the context of this thread, I have already admitted that perhaps my original inferences about Pound and Eliot were unwarranted. What I will not back down on, though, is the idea that my methods are legitimate, even if I'm not always the best examplar of their correct, astute, and responsible use.
I've given you guys all kinds of reasons why, which have been variously ignored, misinterpreted, and so-forth. I've written about how the most eminent literary critic working in English right now routinely makes use of these sorts of methods. To be honest, I don't care to defend myself anymore. I've made myself about as intelligible as I possibly can. I've even pointed out how what I'm saying is not really controversial or uncommon; it's something we do every single day, again, as in the statements about my own psychology made in Milo's last post to me.
I don't quite understand the resistance to the ideas I'm presenting; I think it's more of a pissing match, at this point, than anything. I don't understand why there's been no rational justification for the roughly New Critical perspective you guys seem to champion, which is far too simple a theory of literature for me to take seriously. I tend to think of what you guys preach as an aesthetic movement, that blinds itself to what makes much great literature truly great: the fact that it is often an expression, however artfully concealed, of the artist's own struggle to come to some kind of internal clarity or coherence within him/herself, as much as situate him/herself within a tradition.
“Poetry is mother-tongue of the human race; as gardening is older than agriculture; painting than writing; song than declamation; parables,—than deductions; barter,—than trade”
― Johann Hamann
― Johann Hamann