Stephen,
Though you may well say I'm in no position to talk, I think your response
to Robin's mail was unnecessarily rebarbative.
>he finds that Prynne differs from the others because he is postmodernist and
>
>>works to skew or to minimise syntactical relations and reach an
>>irreducible objecthood of the word, as an equal counterpart to an
>>irreducible objecthood of the thing.
It seems pretty clear to me from Robin's mail that he ascribes this
skewing and minimising to Coolidge and McCaffrey rather than to Prynne.
>Wow. I am enlightened. If we take out "irreducible objecthood" which has no
>meaning, we have:
>
>works to skew minimise
>syntactical relations and reach
>the word as an equal counterpart
>to the thing
>
>word ---- thing
>
>I think I have it now. Word. Thing.
While this may not be marvellously clear on its own, read against his
characterisation of Prynne's lines as "intense and complexly punning", it
does make some considerable sense to me, though I'd like to see some more
detailed commentary on how the Prynne lines work. (I've not yet bought or
read the Kerridge book, and the sort of claim Robin makes is difficult to
recognize on the basis of so small a sample). I also find the contrast an
interesting and suggestive one, so far as Robin takes it in his brief
comment.
>Next we have Keston the Mystic referring to things that we don't
>know --because Prynne's texts "are ridiculously difficult to get hold of".
Okay, so it's a bit like trying to get into the Masons, but I appreciate
being supplied the particulars of important but generally inaccessible
texts. It's exactly what I perceived as the lack of this sort of
information, which facilitates approach, that I've been whinging about of
late. Here it is, and I'm glad of it.
>And then the piece de la resistance:
>
>Prynne attacks the notion of the reader's
>supposed freedom to create the meaning of a text as spurious and
>complicit with a free market ideology?
I understand (perhaps incorrectly) this to mean that Prynne, through a
dense interlocking of his verbal surfaces via controlled and deliberate
ambiguities, resists any attempt by the reader simply to free-associate
his/her own meaning onto his text. If I interpret correctly, then I find
this intriguing, while not entirely surprising, and would be very
interested to learn more about Prynne' s discussions of ways of reading.
The fact that his attitudes to formal issues in his poetry may parallel
his politics seems scarcely an occasion for contempt.
I hope this thread doesn't die out, especially now that we're approaching
specifics, and the discussion seems moving in the direction of
inclusiveness.
Cheers,
Trevor
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Sound Eye - Irish Poetry & the Universe of Writing
http://indigo.ie/~tjac/sound_eye_index.htm
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