P.S> Still in great haste (M-J's birthday) -- do you really agree
with Dot S? Really really? I think her argument is full of you know
what. a) we advance like science; b) it get students excited. a) we
do NOT advance, "only a fool thinks of himself as at the head of
Time's procession"; b) students may get excited but it's a wrong,
wrong excitement -- they think the Elizabethans were just like them.
The rest of what you say is spot on -- but do you really agree with
DS? Kiss the other foot, O/B
>I agree with what Dot says about current study of Spenser with
>(post)modern techniques, and am truly grateful for it, but only up to a
>point. The tendency to make so many early modern writers (or indeed
>writers of most past centuries) do the perp-walk as sexists, racists, or
>elitists does raise awkward questions, such as why read such guys if they
>are so limited to their cultural context (no, the answer is not to say
>they were not of an age but for all time--my class on 17th c. poetry was
>reading Jonson yesterday and agreed that to be for "all time" is a problem
>if like Shakespeare you are born in 1564 and the world was born in c.
>14,000,000,000 BCE, and yes we were sort of kidding around). I cannot be
>the only professor to whom some grad students have complained that they
>have lost their initial liking for literature, if I may use the word. I
>*do* think that our increased awareness of gender, race, class, etc. etc.
>has refreshed the field, and I've been fascinated that when I spend time
>on issues involving sexuality, lesbians, etc. you could hear a pin drop,
>but we shouldn't forget the price. There's less fireside reading of
>Spenser than there once was (and of Tennyson, too, I imagine, and of
>Fielding and all sorts of wonderful writers) for all sorts of reasons, but
>I can't help thinking that the professionalization of literary studies,
>much as I am myself engaged with it, is one of them or that this is
>"progress"--a problematic word in all sorts of ways. But the real point of
>this posting is simply to pass on two details:
> First, the list might be amused to know that there was a clown in the
>greater NYC area a few years ago who called himself "Gandalf." He did
>kids' birthday parties etc. The Tolkien estate sued him, which I
>thought was pretty niggling (yes, that's a Tolkien allusion). He
>argued that Tolkien didn't make up the name and there was a court
>case. A local branch of Fox, I think it was, phoned me and there I
>was on live radio for about three minutes explaining that yes,
>"Gandalf the Clown" had a point. The station had given me a few hours
>to get ready, so I had a chance to locate Gandalf in some Edda or
>other and to read the bit, although the original Nordic Gandalf
>wasn't a wizard and the clown was, I think, straining a bit. I never
>did hear how the legal suit turned out.
> Second, long ago when I first read Tolkien in the English edition as
>a classmate got it from overseas and passed it around the dorm I was
>beyond entranced but sensed even then where the vulnerabilities were
>and didn't want want my other world shattered by academic analysis.
>I'm braver now. After Tolkien became an American cult classic I
>assumed he would fade away and so was disappointed but not surprised
>when my then colleague, Catherine Stimson, ended the somewhat
>disdainful pamphlet she did on him for a Columbia UP series on 20th
>c. writers by saying "Frodo lives--but on borrowed time." The "Frodo
>lives" is from buttons you used to see around campus in the late
>1960s. I bet they're valuable now. She may have been right in the
>long run, but reckoned without movies. She too thought Tolkien mere
>pseudo-medieval, but she forgot that "pseudo" is in the eye of the
>critic: Spenser, if you admire Spenser, has intertextuality and
>*imitatio*; Tolkien, if you don't admire him, is pastiche. Anne
>Prescott.
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