... aside.
A proportionately large number of the writers involved, or associated with,
the New Critical project were practicing poets.
Somehow, this domination of criticism by poets, which had mostly held in
England from Philip Sidney to Eliot, got blown-away sometime towards the end
of the sixties.
Partly with The Necessity for Footnotes but not unconnected, it seems to me,
with The Rise of Barthes and the blurring of a line, always more blurred on
the continent than here, between criticism and creation.
Perhaps not a bad thing, but then there's a difference -- dare one say
this? -- in quality between +Thus Spoke Zarathustra+ and "The Death of the
Author". Or even +1000 Plateaux+.
The =least= "poetic" of The Names was Foucault, and he's the only one,
possibly as a result, I've much time for.
(End of irrascible aside for the day.
<g>)
Robin
|