Erminia, I was myself about to give up on this, so please feel no
obligation to reply. Dialogue comes to an end if no attention is paid to
what the other person says. I have tried to understand what you've been
saying - and it's not always easy! - but it seems you haven't even bothered
to read what I've written before replying. I can’t see the use of thousands
of books if a few sentences cause such confusion. Saying the same thing
three times is no fun at all. You wanted “to respond to (my) solicitation
about defining poetry a hobby”. But I made no such solicitation, nor did I
define poetry as a hobby.
>On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 08:52:51 +0100, Erminia Passannanti wrote:if it is
>TRUE that from some sort of perspective poetry can be
>also taken, if one wants, as a hobby, as you claim, then it is ALSO true
>that a typical feature of hobbies is obsession.
I’m not sure obsession is a typical feature of hobbies (though people who
look down on hobbies would typically say it was). What I am sure of is that
I never claimed poetry was a hobby.
Because it was obvious you’d misconstrued the first post, I even emphasised
this fact in my second by writing “unlike T.S.Eliot who did, I didn’t say
that I thought of poetry as a hobby”. This means that T.S.Eliot thought (or
claimed to think) of poetry as a hobby. I have yet to say whether I
personally think of poetry as a hobby.
You also wrote:
>I totally agree with Eliot’s notion of an impersonal poetry which goes
>beyond confessionalism...
If you approve of the impersonal in poetry, why won’t you allow criticism
(or whatever weird version of it we’re doing here) to be written
impersonally?
(Response to some notes on Sontag:
You wrote:
>About Sontag and the distorted way she has been made appear here on this
>list. She has been much disregarded by academic circles for some patent
>contradictions in her work, first of all her interest in the Frankfurtians
>(not the sausages!) and then her rejection of the notion of interpretation
>(her slogan was in fact ‘Against interpretation’, 1966). Well this is a
>contradiction given her interest also in Benjamin and Barthes, especially
>their focus on and interest in the photographic message.
I see no contradiction in Sontag’s essay ‘Against Interpretation’ with
regard to Benjamin’s writings in general. His idea of ‘boring’ rather than
destructively excavating texts, (which Hannah Arendt discusses in her
introduction to ‘Illuminations’) is something she leans rather heavily on
in her essay when she writes with disdain: “The modern style of
interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind”
the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one”. It's also in tune with
his delightfully uncompromising idea that ‘No picture is painted for the
beholder. No book is written for the reader. No symphony is composed for
the listener.”)
Best,
Iain
|