Thanks for the clarification, which is very helpful to me (and not
too scary) as I get ready to return once again to FQ this summer. My
mini-missile wasn't aimed in your direction, but any misfire that
touched off this nice account of Ch's and Sp's double awareness was
productive. -hb
>Oh, sorry, didn't mean to be excessively pithy. My point was that
>nostalgia is an inevitable human tendency. And it's always, to one
>extent or another been both the subject and the subject of irony in
>romance. Chaucer's Knight, for example, romanticizes ancient Greece
>as a place of originary honor and chivalry, but a closer look at his
>tale reveals that Chacuer makes us see the Knight projecting himself
>into the past (such as when he gives Arcite and Palamon Medieval
>armor and then apologizes for it). Such double awareness, of
>idealizing the past and also ironizing that idealization, is the
>warp and woof of romance. So I suppose my assumption was that part
>of the reason Spenser adopted archaic forms was to make visible this
>nostalgia (as Chaucer does at numerous points with the Knight, let
>alone with Sir Thopas). But then also to problematize it. Because
>the supposedly honorable characters disappoint our idealism in
>interesting ways.
>Now I suppose that it's possible that we are indeed currently on a
>real decline, and that education, integrity and standards have
>fallen from a real high point a few generations ago, but it's worth
>noting that almost every generation expresses such nostalgia and
>sense of decline. So I'm suspicious of such claims. I, for one,
>find theoretical developments to be quite fruitful often, and I'm
>pretty impressed with many of the essays I get. Likewise, I have
>also seen a number of articles in major journals dating from 30 or
>40 years ago which make me cringe in a variety of ways. So I
>suppose that my personal opinion is that there has not been, perhaps
>has never been, such a slide from previous greatness and clarity.
>There has, instead, been a rearrangement of modes of thought, of
>common genres, and of interpretive modes (not to mention *ways* of
>cheating). I guess I always took that to be one of the most
>exciting moves of the FQ. Not the idea of examining and ironizing
>the nostalgia of romance (and humanity), but the idea of doing it in
>that specific way.
>
>Michael
>
>Harry Berger, Jr. wrote:
>
>>>
>>>
>>> You gotta love this discussion list. The scary part is...I
>>>think I know what this means.
>>>
>>>MRS
>>>
>>
>>Well. O.K. Share it at us. I'm willing to be scared. But I think
>>there's been a lot of serious, thoughtful, and interesting
>>discussion on the topic of plagiarism, and I appreciate the
>>frankness, sensitivity, and intelligence of the discussants.
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