I've usually found a fairly reliable *practical definition of "sentimal" is
whether you could substitute "self-indulgent".
But I'm expecting that quite a few of you won't like that one.
joanna
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 11:53 PM
Subject: Re: sentimentality & 'classism' Re: New at Sharp Sand
<snip>
I think the thing that is irksome about the ascription of the label
'sentimental' is the confidence with which it is done. I have a similar
problem with the concept of kitsch. There are a few things that I like that
other people describe as 'kitsch', and I'm damned if I'm going to come up
with 'ironic' ways of liking them. [PC]
<snip>
If the key is some sort of disparity between some sort of surface effect on
the one hand and some sort of underlying *authenticity* on the other, then
another family member might be *camp*.
*Sentimentality* and *irony* seem to me counterposed on both sides of
whatever the divide is between the audience and the work: where
sentimentality tends to warm what is emotionally relatively cold, irony does
the opposite. *Camp* and *kitsch* are slightly more problematic: whereas the
latter (through mass production, for example) is a sort of placeholder for
the genuine, the former seems to mark out (by deliberate accentuation, by
replacing what is understood as *real* with what is not) a _new_ sort of
genuineness; but there is, of course, some leakage between these two.
The irksomeness arises, I think, through the problem of how and whom to
trust. A bad reading of something emotionally powerful is often, for
example, the result of a misplaced sense of irony. And a misreading (ie a
gullible one) of something that's ironic is also often, in some sense, a
sentimental one.
As to who decides what's misreading (or bad writing), that's clearly a
matter of communities but also more than salons and refusés in any
simplistic sense.
I shall go and think about Bourdieu.
CW
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That which is the future here, when read from right to left, has
already happened. (Giorgio Manganelli)
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