Robin, etc.,
yeh. Not sure whose ignorance you're talking about in terms of the topics
I halfheartedly 'suggested'; I think you may have meant your own but if
mine it's a fair cop... I think I demonstrated pretty convincingly my
relative cluelessness about the names I aired. The original idea was to
try to divert the stream of conversation, playing god with mailbase groups
and that.
No, I think yr 'facetiousness' is a legitimate defence to some of the
woollier contributions here.
I'd like to repeat properly the idea I had ages ago about New Criticism
and Prynne Criticism, but unfortunately I've brain-damaged myself by
over-celebrating England's defeat by Romania last night in hundreds of
Edinburgh pubs. Very very briefly and through spongy lobes:
An initially very radical criticism, the kind that enabled A Various Art,
can slide into a very defensive one where the often personal and
biographical process of canonization, the role of the discursive
'knowledges' used, and the status of supposedly internal technical
qualities, all become blurred. Provocatively and at first not
very seriously, I drew a parallel with New Criticism - the defensive
creation of a Great Tradition by Leavisbased on an idea of literary
quality which always turns out to be unexaminable, as dodgy as Lawrence's
'Life', I.A. Richards's 'close reading' which valorizes poetic techniques
at the same time as finding them and so leaves a de facto canon in its
wake. I'm interested in talking about Prynne, no honest, but I think we
have to start from a position of actually laboriously describing what he
does with words, lines, layout, and why it's innovative and valuable. It
also strikes me that yeh, he usefully mixes up the discursive threads from
finance, science, etc., but how good is that knowledge? Has he grasped the
creative/ financial crossovers of the 'New Economy', for example, or is he
still on about the human value of surplus production - most of the
Prynneclones are, for sure. Besides this, for anyone who's studied
Scottish poetry - and I have only very recently - some Prynne criticism's
credulous acceptance of the place of 'knowledge' in his work bears a
sinister resemblance to that of MacDiarmid criticism between the wars,
another defensive, reductive, emotionally blackmailing critical movement
which buggered things up for Scottish poetry till at least the 60s.
Cheers
Michael Gardiner.
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