A very busy week, so I've only had the chance to glance quickly at
what appear to be very interesting posts sparked by my interview
announcement. Just to fire off a question/thought in response to
Dave's comment below:
David, fair enough. But since you seem to be predicating your
reception/enjoyment of a work on the "empirical veracity" of an
author's name, do the works of Homer, or Sappho, or
Shakespeare, or, say, the heteronyms of Pessoa also leave you
cold?
Ultimately, I think, the controversies around Yasusada (whose
"critical" discussion, Rebecca, by the way, has greatly increased
*since* the work's [self]exposure as a fiction) can't be separated
out from the larger habits, prejudices, expectations, etc, of the
current reading culture-- which is perhaps stating the obvious; but
I've often wondered why a similarly obvious question is not more
often entertained: What if we had a different (more sophisticated?)
reading culture, where works were commonly taken up by readers
with no automatic assumption as to their authorial provenance?
Where "real" authors and (Mikhail Epstein's term) "hyperauthors"
were understood to exist and mutually flourish, with, imagine it,
even occasional commerce between them-- though no doubt the
former always existing in much greater number than the later?
It's not an either/or question, I think. And it seems to me that in a
climate more willing to engage the presence of fictional experiment
*within* institutional categories that are today highly ossified and
shielded in the amber of ideology, that terms like "hoax," so
smugly bandied about, become more complicated.
This is rushed and sloppy, sorry, but wanted to send in a few
words.
Kent
David Bircumshaw said:
Jaan Kaplinski was mentioned the other day - now when I read his
poems
(predicated on a name they most certainly are) even through
translation I
find myself engaged by them in a way which fake Japanese poets
or useless
objects do not engage me.
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