At 3:03 PM -0500 2/17/04, Beth Quitslund wrote:
>Studying Tolkien's writing for its own sake--for the kinds of
>reasons that many of us study Spenser, historicist, theoretical, and
>cultural studies apparatus notwithstanding--seems little different to me
>from studying *Star Wars* for its verbal genius. On the other hand,
>studying Tolkien's writing the way that critics of 20th-c. literature used
>to study Madonna might yield something.
This was pretty much Tolkien's own view about English literature
after Chaucer; people could read that sort of thing at home in the
bathtub without any special instruction and it was silly to make a
university subject out of it. In other words, he was a proponent of
the "lang" side in the lang vs. lit controversies of the Oxford
English department. It's ironic given his status as the god of faux
medievalism that he apparently didn't like Spenser because of the
faux Middle English.
But the wittiest thing I've ever heard on this topic is Anne
Prescott's comment (in I forget what context): "Spenser is the rich
man's Tolkien."
--
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
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"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
difficult than getting in."
Brad Leithauser
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