Thanks for the ad hominem, though it misses the mark.
I recently had the experience of asking the propagator of a --poetics (I'm not going to reveal who, it's beside the point) to explain what he meant by the term, as in practice it didn't seem to be anything novel except in the trendy naming. He told me to read his complete works, so I asked for a layman's abstract. It was too complicated to summarize, I was told. Wow. One could work up an abstract for the theory of relativity in a paragraph--not, obviously, the math, I'm really talking about an abstract for the non-specialist. In fact he had answered my question. It's not a matter of needing an umbrella but of shredding the meaning of the word.
-----Original Message-----
>From: Jim Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Oct 23, 2011 1:38 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Better Books, for those who can recall...
>
>> So materialist in this sense can mean two not necessarily connected
>> things,
>
>Yes, at least two not necessarily connected things.
>
>> something like meaning nothing other than a marker in the game of academic
>> reputations.
>
>No, not necessarily.
>
>> The bigger problem with the term, however, may be "poetics," which seems
>> increasingly to be attached to almost anything and descriptive of almost
>> nothing.
>>
>> I'm not complaining about the practices grouped by one or another under
>> this or that rubric (hell, in this case I participate in a lot of them),
>> but about the violence done to the language in the quest for status.
>
>Well, I guess the further it gets away from what we recognize, the more
>likely we are to say such things. Poetry is shifting toward being like other
>types of art, such as 'visual art', where what passes for visual art is
>sufficiently diverse that there can indeed be widely divergent methods and
>approaches within it to sufficiently wide an umbrella of issues that the
>term 'poetics' is useful to group them together.
>
>ja
>http://vispo.com
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