No offense taken -- my initial post was so pithy as to be cryptic.
Michael
Harry Berger, Jr. wrote:
> 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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