I'd like to second Professor Prescott's notions. I think one of the things
at stake here is the very way we define ourselves and our discipline.
As scholars, I assume that most of us are devoted to skeptical yet
thoughtful intellectual inquiry that hopefully leads to greater
understanding of a text, a time period, etc.. As readers who (I assume)
enjoy reading the texts we examine, we also take pleasure in the
texts that we examine for aesthetic reasons as well as scholarly ones.
This can, as this thread has demonstrated, be sometimes a dicey
propositioin, but I agree with Professor Prescott that we risk closing
avenues of understanding, inquiry and enjoyment if we put ourselves in the
position of making ethical judgements about the authors we study at the
expense of other modes of inquiry. Despite the fact that most of us
refer to this period as "early modern," implying a more tangible
relationship to our own period than the term "renaissance" permits, it's
also important, I think, not to judge the actions and ideas of Spenser or
any other author, for
that matter, too rigorously according to our supposedly enlightened early
21st century political sensibilities. Am I naive to think that we should
be devoting more energy to understanding Spenser and his motivations
rather than looking for ways to condemn him/them?
Gary Ettari
University of Washington
_______________________________________________________________________________
Gary Ettari "I am sure care's an enemy to life."
Box 354330
Department of English Sir Toby Belch
University of Washington
Seattle WA, 98195
_______________________________________________________________________________
On Fri, 21 Mar 2003 [log in to unmask] wrote:
> It's been a few days, but I'd like to reply to Ted's very unglib comment.
> I have hesitated to put in my own two cents' worth, although I'm not sure
> why--maybe the fear of losing friends? seeming too conservative? too
> British despite my Irish ancestors in County Cork? Yes, reading people who
> have done bad and even atrocious things is a real problem, but if I
> couldn't live with cognitive and even moral dissonance I'd get out of the
> humanities and into, say, astrophysics (those people study subjects they
> can't do anything about). My response to this thread, aside from
> depression, is double: first, there are no good guys from all points of
> view. Mother Theresa was down on birth control, and has many who think
> she's right; Jefferson owned slaves, which Aristotle would have found OK;
> Thomas More helped put heretics to death, but their co-religionists were
> to do the same to Catholics; Jacques Louis David helped with the Terror in
> France (I could defend him, if asked, although many wouldn't); and if
> Elizabeth had let the Spanish take over Ireland (which was one of her
> fears) and then ally themselves with the Guise in France, the Reformation
> in England might have been crushed--which of course many people then and
> even fairly recently would have thought a good thing. I was recently
> reading a facsimile of Elizabeth Singer, beautifully edited by Jennifer
> Richards, and enjoying her vigorously feminist poetry (politically
> correct) when I turned the page and there was a poem on King William III
> congratulating him for killing lots and lots of England's enemies at the
> Battle of the Boyne. Ouch. I don't mean to be an utter moral relativist,
> but I do think that from one point of view Cecil and the queen could be
> thought irresponsible if they did not try to protect themselves against
> the possibility of the Spanish in Ireland. History is tragedy, and often
> not just the first time but the repetition. I think Spenser knew this.
> This does not exempt us from ethical judgment but for me it makes
> judgments complicated. Second, I was dismayed to read one comment (I
> forget whose) that taking pleasure from Spenser might be unethical. I see
> the point, but it seems to me that the only reason this isn't like St.
> Jerome on pagan literature--it is wrong to enjoy books by people who
> believe in gods who are demons at worst and imaginary at best--is that
> most of us don't mind pagans and do mind colonialism. We are in danger, I
> suspect, of a political version of Puritanism: down on pleasure if there
> is even a whiff of what we reject. We are also in danger of a certain
> smugness. I wonder what awful things we are doing that seem just fine to
> us at the moment. So I'm going to go right on taking pleasure from
> Spenser, sypmathizing with Eizabeth's fears even as I remember what she
> and Spenser did to the Irish. And I'll enjoy More even as I know he would
> have wanted me killed. And enjoy, for that matter, the music of Henry VIII
> who killed More. Sorry to natter on, but I really am discouraged. Anne
> Prescott
> > May I recommend a brief book that touches on many of the issues that
> > have been raised recently. It's by Father Owen Lee and its title is
> > Wagner: The Terrible Man and his Truthful Art. It's very brief, but
> > it's well worth reading.
> >
> > Incidentally, if we decided to eliminate from our reading lists any
> > works whose authors were in one way or another morally reprehensible,
> > we'd have plenty of time to engage in other pursuits. I don't mean that
> > to sound glib. It's a real problem for me.
> >
>
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