As a stray response to John's post of yesterday - I think he's right
about the elegaic strain in Prynne et al. If the historic avant-garde
move was to clear away the aesthetic to reveal a politico-material
embedding, this remains a reductive move not without cost, and a
subtractive gesture which can then be haunted by supplementary ghosts.
I think Prynne's work has always been open to the cost of reduction
while in many ways upholding the austerity of that foundational pincer
and has kept on echo terms with the ghosts. This means his
"difficulty" is no longer purely strategic or instrumental.
On the broader matter of the differentiated phyla of epic and
elegy, doesn't that whole matter get complicated by the fate of genre
within romantic poetry. Is The Prelude epic or is it lyric/elegy?
That whole strain moved much more over to America that here, I always
think. The romantics were themselves haunted by America, and American
poets may have reimported some of the cultural scale that went with
romanticism, along with many mutations. But that you can mutate genre
had been given to them by The Prelude itself.
If John is suggesting that British culture has
remained retrospective and autumnal, perhaps a continuation of
the Decadence from a modernist perspective, this seems less the case
with the non-verbal arts. It really doesn't figure at all in British
Land Art (despite the successful drawing on a local tradition) and
can't be find either in the music of Michael Tippett. They may be
drawing on another thread (and that is in McSweeney too) ie a sort of
convolute numinous radiance which has an extraordinary sense of the
present.
Peter
Peter Larkin
Philosophy & Literature Librarian
University of Warwick Library
Coventry CV4 7AL UK
Tel: 01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211
Email: [log in to unmask]
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