you would be right if by reactionary i meant politically reactionary.
but what i mean is emotionally, sensitively reactionary, which is, rather
than not longing for or supporting a new world, not seeing and feeling new
things,
or i should better say, old things in a new way.
perhaps i shouldn't have used the word reactionary.
i should have said orthodox. a sonnet is indeed orthodox at least in much of
its metric, though we should not be formalistic to the point of not enjoying
a
good modern or contemporary sonnet, or of giving more value to it than to a
lesser unorthodox poem, or of seeing that a specific sonnet it can be
modern and contemporary in many ways, even if not in most of its metric.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Corelis" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, August 03, 2009 9:17 PM
Subject: Re: "incapacity"
>> if a form, however charming
>> and creative, is somewhat reactionary, the meaning it brings is, at least
>> in a great measure, also reactionary.
>
> I don't understand this. How can a literary form be reactionary? Is
> blank verse reactionary? Is a sonnet? Does that mean that it's
> impossible to write in those forms without validating aristocratic,
> conservative, or obsolete values? To turn it around, T. S. Eliot and
> Ezra Pound may fairly be said to be politically reactionary, yet
> though they wrote in traditional forms, they also were two of the
> major creators of modern free verse. So it seems that radical formal
> innovation is no guarantee of political progressiveness. In Italy, at
> least, leading-edge formal innovations such as Futurism were connected
> with fascism (Marinetti), and one of the major and most radically
> innovative of twentieth century French prose fiction was Celine. We
> could also on the other hand point to a strong strain in leftism
> against "decadent bourgeois" avant-gardism, as in Stalinist "social
> realism," which produced works the ethos of which seems to the
> unenlightened strangely similar to Nazi propaganda. In short, I don't
> see the historical justification for the equation "formally
> reactionary = politically reactionary/formally innovative =
> politically progressive."
>
> --
> ===============================================
>
> Jon Corelis http://jcorelis.googlepages.com/joncorelis
>
> ===============================================
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