>Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 20:40:42 -0800
>To: [log in to unmask]
>From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: theurgic _thaumazein_ vs. the IMF
>In-Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]>
>
>Keston: I _am_ familiar with the work, and I have to say I don't know what
you're talking about. Is Maximus in your view rhapsodic start to finish? No
building thru oppositions? This is not a small misreading. I'd suggest you
take another look.
>
>At 03:16 PM 12/16/99 +1100, you wrote:
>>Keston wrote:
>>
>>>Alison -- not sure if it's moralism, perhaps so -- but in any case, a
>>>misunderstanding isn't any less negative simply because it's productive;
>>>it's the Hegelian catch-all clause, -positive untruth-; I don't argue that
>>>what he thought stopped him writing good poems, just that those poems (and
>>>the prose more conspicuously) were rhapsodic to a key fault: no dialectic.
>>>If we define myth as inherently dialectical, as we might, then by virtue
>>>of that definition Olson is a dialectician -- but by no other virtue, and
>>>at the cost of suppressing the evidence of his own manifest reflective
>>>tendencies and outright statements.
>>
>>Some of my - not accusation, but question - about moralism comes more
>>from private cogitations about the contemporary trammelling of art, than
>>from anything you said. The insistence that art be right, or more than
>>that, correct, and so to me a loss in joyous and _necessary_
>>irresponsibilities of making, exemplified magnificently in Shakespeare,
>>but elsewhere everywhere. Reading your questions, my first and insistent
>>thought was: why _should_ Olson think that? Why is he obliged? Who sez?
>>
>>What puzzles me most is your statement that he has no dialectic. I'm on
>>shaky ground here - I can't pretend at all to intimacy with his work. He
>>seems more polyvocal than that admits (and isn't there also, in the
>>rhapsodic, an implied dialectic of the reader/listener?) - but maybe
>>you're talking of something else, and I'm simply not understanding.
>>
>>Best
>>
>>Alison
>>
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>>
>>Alison Croggon
>>Editor
>>Masthead Literary Arts Magazine
>>PO Box 186
>>NEWPORT VIC 3015
>>
>>Masthead online: http://www.masthead.com.au
>>Home page: http:www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
>>
>>
>>
>>
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