Yes, Jeremy! History exists! I was just thinking along those lines
this morning! & here in the States anyway we have a particular sense
of time & history which is inextricable from, first of all, the
the attempt to fulfill the promise of democracy (anti-slavery movement,
women's rights, labor movement, civil rights movement), and secondly,
the jarring discord between that attempt and the war, imperialism,
& inequalities of the 20th century. I sense a tremendous failure of
nerve or missing-of-the-point in the a-historical, obscurantist
literary usages stemming from some strands of postmodernism.
What you are so-rhetorically characterizing as my "shrug" is
impelled by that sense, and is also a part (however minor) of
that history. I will keep shrugging.
Henry
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Jeremy writ:
Henry -- This is what I meant by shruggery. A history exists, for better
or for worse, of usage; that usage applies to works from early in the
twentieth century and is sometimes applied to works of more recent
vintage. We can argue about the history - of course - and we can argue
about how to understand the relationship between artistic form and
cultural politics - of course. And that's a dense clot of argumentative
matter to drag from the sink; but pretending it doesn't exist remains a
strategy best suited to amnesiacs and ostrichs. The devil remains in the
convenience store.
Best,
Jeremy
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