Incidentally, I think that what we should really be focusing on is
terminology. Would a Tolkein scholar be a Tolkeinite, a Tolkeinian, a
Tolkeinologist, or a Tolkeinist? Also, some possible Paper titles:

"Hear No Evil, See No Evil: Tolkein's Representations of a Do-Nothing
West"; "If Looks Could Kill: Saren's (sp?) Evil Eye and Politics of
Totalitarianism"; "The Little Hobbit that Could: Size Doesn't Matter
When You're Right!"

more?

Jacob
On Wednesday, February 18, 2004, at 09:54 AM, Roger Kuin wrote:

> P.S> Still in great haste (M-J's birthday) --  do you really agree
> with Dot S? Really really? I think her argument is full of you know
> what. a) we advance like science; b) it get students excited. a) we
> do NOT advance, "only a fool thinks of himself as at the head of
> Time's procession"; b) students may get excited but it's a wrong,
> wrong excitement -- they think the Elizabethans were just like them.
> The rest of what you say is spot on -- but do you really agree with
> DS? Kiss the other foot, O/B
>
>> I agree with what Dot says about current study of Spenser with
>> (post)modern techniques, and am truly grateful for it, but only up to a
>> point. The tendency to make so many early modern writers (or indeed
>> writers of most past centuries) do the perp-walk as sexists, racists,
>> or
>> elitists does raise awkward questions, such as why read such guys if
>> they
>> are so limited to their cultural context (no, the answer is not to say
>> they were not of an age but for all time--my class on 17th c. poetry
>> was
>> reading Jonson yesterday and agreed that to be for "all time" is a
>> problem
>> if like Shakespeare you are born in 1564 and the world was born in c.
>> 14,000,000,000 BCE, and yes we were sort of kidding around). I cannot
>> be
>> the only professor to whom some grad students have complained that they
>> have lost their initial liking for literature, if I may use the word. I
>> *do* think that our increased awareness of gender, race, class, etc.
>> etc.
>> has refreshed the field, and I've been fascinated that when I spend
>> time
>> on issues involving sexuality, lesbians, etc. you could hear a pin
>> drop,
>> but we shouldn't forget the price. There's less fireside reading of
>> Spenser than there once was (and of Tennyson, too, I imagine, and of
>> Fielding and all sorts of wonderful writers) for all sorts of reasons,
>> but
>> I can't help thinking that the professionalization of literary studies,
>> much as I am myself engaged with it, is one of them or that this is
>> "progress"--a problematic word in all sorts of ways. But the real
>> point of
>> this posting is simply to pass on two details:
>>      First, the list might be amused to know that there was a clown in
>> the
>> greater NYC area a few years ago who called himself "Gandalf." He did
>> kids' birthday parties etc. The Tolkien estate sued him, which I
>> thought was pretty niggling (yes, that's a Tolkien allusion). He
>> argued that Tolkien didn't make up the name and there was a court
>> case. A local branch of Fox, I think it was, phoned me and there I
>> was on live radio for about three minutes explaining that yes,
>> "Gandalf the Clown" had a point. The station had given me a few hours
>> to get ready, so I had a chance to locate Gandalf in some Edda or
>> other and to read the bit, although the original Nordic Gandalf
>> wasn't a wizard and the clown was, I think, straining a bit. I never
>> did hear how the legal suit turned out.
>>      Second, long ago when I first read Tolkien in the English edition
>> as
>> a classmate got it from overseas and passed it around the dorm I was
>> beyond entranced but sensed even then where the vulnerabilities were
>> and didn't want want my other world shattered by academic analysis.
>> I'm braver now. After Tolkien became an American cult classic I
>> assumed he would fade away and so was disappointed but not surprised
>> when my then colleague, Catherine Stimson, ended the somewhat
>> disdainful pamphlet she did on him for a Columbia UP series on 20th
>> c. writers by saying "Frodo lives--but on borrowed time." The "Frodo
>> lives" is from buttons you used to see around campus in the late
>> 1960s. I bet they're valuable now. She may have been right in the
>> long run, but reckoned without movies. She too thought Tolkien mere
>> pseudo-medieval, but she forgot that "pseudo" is in the eye of the
>> critic: Spenser, if you admire Spenser, has intertextuality and
>> *imitatio*; Tolkien, if you don't admire him, is pastiche. Anne
>> Prescott.
>