thank you, Professor Miller; I thought your response at once astute and
beautiful. Granted a poem's secrecy solicits, it seduces. It etymologically
and conceptually leads aside from those forms of thinking and knowing which
are securely verifiable. Seduction, as Diotima taught Socrates and Socrates
Alcibiades long before Spenser, can lead nowhere but to the empty space
which is its cause. But en-route, if we care to listen, seduction will
offer us fragmentary forms of truth and no-ledge worthy of the gods ... If
Spenser's flourishing secrets solicit in this way, do they not propose oral
seduction? Oral seduction begins with the poem's moment of concluding, with
understanding all the words, as Andrew Zurcher aptly put it following
Professor Hamilton, but also listens to all their sounds and forms? Do not
Spenser's seductive flourishing secrecies propose themselves as a different
and privileged form of no-ledge, a limit of consciousness where an
understanding of what is true but cannot be verifiably known is momentarily
unveiled?
best,
Dr. Shirley Sharon-Zisser
At 09:09 11/11/00 -0500, you wrote:
>I'd like to step back from one of Professor Hamilton's assertions below,
>namely: "We don't know, we can't know, we weren't intended to know, and so
>why bother?" Granted that we don't know, can't know, and weren't intended
>to, I still think we were meant to bother. It's part of the response the
>poem solicits from us. Not all of Spenser's historical allusions work this
>way, but lots of them do: they advertise a secret but withhold the answer
>(if indeed there is one). Richard Rambuss wrote a pretty good book on this
>element of Spenser's poetry, and while I don't find it persuasive in every
>respect, I do think the underlying account of Spenser's ways of flourishing
>secrecy is very astute.
>
>David Miller
>
>David Lee Miller
>
>Department of English
>University of Kentucky
>Lexington, KY 40506-0027
>
>859-257-6965 (office)
>859-252-3680 (home)
>859-323-1072 (fax)
>
>
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|