----- Original Message -----
From: "George P. Landow" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2005 7:35 PM
Subject: Re: [WDL] August Topic: Collaboration
> There is also the romantic emphasis upon the individual
yes, I think that emphasis is very much due to print technology, which
makes private reading and conceptions of a private, different self, so
easy.
I expressed myself badly, though this too is spot on; but I was meaning the
emphasis upon the individual maker - The Prelude e.g. and Coleridge's
criticism etc etc
initially that print effect would have been writing
it's mass production of the book + education that facilitates private
reading en masse
and I'm thinking of a man I knew who'd have been 102 now, reciting from
memory great chunks of Polish romantic poetry from the early 19th century -
he had the books but he also *knew the poems as part of communal experience;
and it seems to me that the printed books connected him to a world beyond
the privacy of his remembered place-depleted and friend-depleted world...
with the book he could think his way back to something lost
& in my youth, finding my aging cousin could recall reams of the local poet
of 19th century, which bound him to his community in one of the most remote
communities in the country and marked me out as the outsider
+ the popularity of poetry in the USSR perhaps as a revolt against the
boxing in of people
+ the reformation spread of the bible in print, a way of involving
print needn't be an isolating influence
writing itself alienated people before print
>not structuralism and post structuralism!
no
> Levi-Strauss says we do not
so much speak the language as language speaks us.
i know
>maybe, but the opening of Paradise Lost pretty selfconsciously and
aggressively combines reworkings of the invocation of earlier epics and
the old testament model for divine inspiration (he repeatedly cites
moses striking the rock, etc). His "things yet unattempted" involves an
attempt to create a Christian epic that surpasses pagan ones — and
Dante, a catholic poet, too. His problem was if Xty is divinely
inspired and thus superior to paganism, why don;t we Christians have
greater poetry, ie epics.
i do get that, yes
>But it's still a
form of collaboration.
At one level, all writing is. And it's still a desire to be original
> Nor is the reference to post structuralism sustainable
I disagree: poststructuralist and eighteenth-century attitudes towards
"creativity" — ie, production of new texts — coincide almost
completely, however much better written the earlier statements are.
>Why? because both are non-romantic.
I am worried by the anachronism
pope and milton worry me too
>and I'm afraid you see individuals entirely out of any intellectual,
technological, social contexts of work and collaborative work
well, that's fairly damning isn't it
i don't think it's true, but if you want a conversation stopper then I'll
L
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